it sounds as if it's not a case of LeGuin not wanting to be bothered to research, say, Czech history or Polish history or whatever, but rather, knowing them all fairly well and then creating this interstitial country that she wants her tales to take place in.
Yes, I think so: it may have started out as a Ruritania, but then she took it—and the countries it was drawing from—seriously. And that's a distinction which really makes a difference. The more I think about it, the more I have trouble with Jordan's claim that a historical setting would have distorted her initial inspiration. I feel like that grounding you mention could only have clarified it.
I've seen Tanith Lee get away with the kind of neither-here-nor-thereness that Jordan was trying for. I should have thought of her sooner: her novels tend to be more clear-cut, but many of her short stories take place in settings that are almost eighteenth-century France, or almost twentieth-century Shetland, or almost nineteenth-century Russia, without ever being explicitly anything else; everything is just slightly alternate and no one really has those names in our world. They don't leave me with the same feeling of vagueness and irritation, though. It might be that they're just far enough from reality to work.
that's how I felt for Pen Pal, so I tried, in my clumsy way, to do what it seems to me you're describing LeGuin as doing successfully.
Hey, it works in Pen Pal. Do not knock yourself down for not being Ursula K. Le Guin. Most people aren't!
Iseul's Lexicon," which uses, essentially, the time and more-or-less events of Japan's invasion, under Hideyoshi, of Korea--but in an alternate world, with alternate names, plus magic, plus creepy elder gods. It's working really really well for me.
Yes! That sort of thing I'm fine with! One of the things I love about Yoon's fiction is his ability to refract history through fantastic or science-fictional lenses without making it feel like either a facsimile or a foregone conclusion.
Congratulations on the poem! And I loved the fish and the Herodotus--both of which I reblogged (tagging Ann Leckie on the fish).
no subject
Yes, I think so: it may have started out as a Ruritania, but then she took it—and the countries it was drawing from—seriously. And that's a distinction which really makes a difference. The more I think about it, the more I have trouble with Jordan's claim that a historical setting would have distorted her initial inspiration. I feel like that grounding you mention could only have clarified it.
I've seen Tanith Lee get away with the kind of neither-here-nor-thereness that Jordan was trying for. I should have thought of her sooner: her novels tend to be more clear-cut, but many of her short stories take place in settings that are almost eighteenth-century France, or almost twentieth-century Shetland, or almost nineteenth-century Russia, without ever being explicitly anything else; everything is just slightly alternate and no one really has those names in our world. They don't leave me with the same feeling of vagueness and irritation, though. It might be that they're just far enough from reality to work.
that's how I felt for Pen Pal, so I tried, in my clumsy way, to do what it seems to me you're describing LeGuin as doing successfully.
Hey, it works in Pen Pal. Do not knock yourself down for not being Ursula K. Le Guin. Most people aren't!
Iseul's Lexicon," which uses, essentially, the time and more-or-less events of Japan's invasion, under Hideyoshi, of Korea--but in an alternate world, with alternate names, plus magic, plus creepy elder gods. It's working really really well for me.
Yes! That sort of thing I'm fine with! One of the things I love about Yoon's fiction is his ability to refract history through fantastic or science-fictional lenses without making it feel like either a facsimile or a foregone conclusion.
Congratulations on the poem! And I loved the fish and the Herodotus--both of which I reblogged (tagging Ann Leckie on the fish).
Thank you! I hope Ann Leckie likes the fish.