She read a New York Times interview with Kazuo Ishiguro about his forthcoming novel, The Buried Giant, which takes place in a non-historic just-post-Arthurian England, in which the author frets that his audience will say that it is fantasy. (To be fair, it contains. among other things, a dragon.) And she was moved to speak.
I’ve said this here before, and I’ll say it again: One of the things I respect most greatly about Le Guin is her steadfast refusal to disavow the genre. More than one author, upon attaining literary respectability, has stashed their propeller beanie and their Spock ears in the far back of the closet . . . all honor, then, to the ones who don’t.
JAMES D. MACDONALD 