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Wagner, Jane. 2012. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Original edition, Original screenplay published in 1986. T here​ was a big gap between the first Earthsea trilogy (1968-73) and the final books: Tehanu (1990), Tales from Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001). During that period Le Guin thought about many things, including sexual politics. The Gandalf model of wizardly power – the idea, dumbly replicated by J.K. Rowling’s Dumbledore, that asexual male mages hold the world in balance – was never compatible with Le Guin’s deep unease about overt expressions of power. That incompatibility made her ask questions about the foundations of Earthsea. The wizards on the island of Roke have become blinkered bachelor dons, who treat all women like faculty wives: they simply refuse to hear them when they say things that are true. Meanwhile the Old Speech, with its direct equation between name, thing and power, begins to fade away. When Le Guin was asked in 2001 if she intended the later books to retract the earlier Earthsea series she gave a characteristically tart response: ‘If the second trilogy invalidated, or retracted, or revoked the first one, I wouldn’t have written it.’ Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing. The big book that came between the Earthsea of the 1970s and that of the 1990s was Always Coming Home (1985), which Le Guin described as ‘one of my most neglected and most central books’. Like many works in which an author invests too much, Always Coming Home reveals a lot about Le Guin without showing her at her best. It attempts to describe an imagined world as fully as possible while trying to do without plot. It’s set in a future, probably post-apocalyptic California, where there are multiple tribal cultures, whose dances and poems and myths and music, whose languages and sexual mores, are all described at length by an anthropological observer. Both Le Guin’s parents were anthropologists, and her mother wrote an immensely successful book about the last known member of the Native American Yahi people. In Always Coming Home, Le Guin is remaking the family trade as fiction. The Kesh are gently pastoral, while the Condor tribe is warlike. There are massive but not overtly hostile data hubs in the City which operate separately from the small ritualised communities in the Valley of the Kesh, but the novel doesn’t present this neo-pastoral world as the revenge of nature on crazy overreaching technology. But in truth, isn’t the best resolution to such a crisis not one based in conflict but one that relies on cooperation? See Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US in the 1930s. See the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War. See the foundation of the National Health Service in the postwar era. See the GI Bill. See the ingenuity and expertise of scientists collaborating in the creation of a vaccine. See the sacrifice and public-spiritedness of health workers and supermarket staff and community volunteers. These are not stories whose primary drive is conflict. These stories have a utopian impulse, and require kindness and openness and truth (and certainly not spin or lies). These stories require imagination.Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bowers, Chet A. 2015. An Ecological and Cultural Critique of the Common Core Curriculum. Vol. 471, Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. ’ (Haraway 2019:10) Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, International Library of Sociology. New York, NY: Routledge. Wagner, Jane. 1986. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer.

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I relate this to something Ocean Vuong says in a 2019 podcast, where he is critical of the dominance of conflict-driven plots in the conventions of creative writing: A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution– another take on this essay in Ploughshares; note how it particularly pays attention to an alternative cyclical view of time Reid, William A. 1981. “The Deliberative Approach to the Study of the Curriculum and Its Relation to Critical Pluralism.” In Rethinking Curriculum Studies: A Radical Approach, edited by Martin Lawn and Len Barton. New York, NY: Routledge. Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. 2012. “A Diffractive and Deleuzian Approach to Analysing Interview Data.” Feminist Theory 13(3): 265–281. doi: 10.1177/1464700112456001. Simondon, Gilbert. 1995. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble, France: Editions Jérôme Millon.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is an essay by Ursula Le Guin that explores some of these ideas in more detail. It has recently been republished in a bijou volume by Ignota Books. Le Guin posits that ‘the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story’, even if the hero has frequently taken it over. She critiques the linear ‘Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’ where fiction is embodied as ‘triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now)’. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. But sometimes we need more than goodies and baddies, or triumph and defeat – not least as in someone’s defeat lies resentment and the seeds of future conflict. Barad, Karen M. 2008. “Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 120–154. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Wizards, like the Taoist sage, have to observe the balance of the whole rather than make use of the power of naming to dominate their world. Just as light is the left hand of darkness, so lighting a candle creates a shadow. The wizards in Earthsea look after goats, live chastely, have power but do not deploy it and always seek to keep the world in balance. Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8. Paul, Anne Murphy. 2012. “Your Brain on Fiction.” The New York Times. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html. The final volume of the first trilogy, The Farthest Shore (1972), ends with Ged going deep into the world of the dead to seal up a hole through which the vitality of the living world is leaching away. The gap was made by an evil wizard called Cob, who had ‘an unmeasured desire for life’. He reduces the inhabitants of Earthsea to zombies by offering them eternal life. The atheist Le Guin saw the reluctance to accept death as the root of most evil. As her version of the Tao puts it, ‘To live till you die/is to live long enough.’ Ged expends all his power closing the gap in the underworld, and makes the world whole again through a massive and self-destructive orgasm of magical potency: ‘For a moment a spasm of dry sobbing shook him. “It is done,” he said, “it is all gone.”’ The world is healed but he loses all his power.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. We need life stories, as well as killer stories. We need truths. In storytelling, conflict is not enough. The advantage that children’s fiction has over other types of writing is its near irresistible appeal to the reader to identify directly with its characters. This gives it a kind of directive power which fiction for adults tends to avoid: the greatest children’s fiction can lead its readers into a dark hall with dim mirrors on the wall, which leave you wondering where or who you are. Even now, reading about Ged’s loss of power, provokes the same temptation I felt when I was ten – to see myself as him: surely there is nothing here a grumpy late-middle-aged man hasn’t felt, I think privately. You see the world change around you in ways you don’t quite get, you fight it, feel the power go, and then decide the only thing you can still do is look after the goats – at which Ged turns out to be pretty good. But always in Le Guin there is a sharp ironical turn against any reader who wants to be a hero. Ged without his powers is a self-pitying mess who doesn’t realise that he still knows what he knows, even if he can no longer control the winds with words. And anyway, Le Guin makes us ask, what’s wrong with looking after goats? Plenty of stories have conflict to the max. I love looking at the Hero’s Journey. And I love horror movies and westerns and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the tortured psychodramas of Tennessee Williams.Gough, Noel. 2010. “Performing Imaginative Inquiry: Narrative Experiments and Rhizosemiotic Play.” In Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision, edited by Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald, and Mark Fettes, 42–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haraway, Donna J. 2008a. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 157–187. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. It isn’t surprising that Le Guin made Earthsea change. What’s surprising is that it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their signifiers were united by intrinsic bonds. And a complex and multi-faceted feminism was foundational to her writing right from the start. In the later Earthsea books she doesn’t dismantle her earlier world, but allows it to change so that she can explore a heroism (more often displayed by women) of resilience. She also stripped away the Tolkien-style male mage model of children’s fiction, which has such a strong magic of its own it takes time to escape its spell. By going beyond it in the second Earthsea series Le Guin was able to direct a whole array of ‘what if?’ questions against some of the conventions of children’s fantasy. What if you don’t need heroic quests? What if keeping going and tending children through damage and disaster and getting home is the form of heroism that matters most? What if girls can be dragons? These questions led to the creation in the later Earthsea books of two perfectly realised female characters: Tehanu – a girl scorched by fire and maimed by men, whose dry whispering voice makes her Le Guin’s most vivid creation – and her protector Tenar, who takes over from Ged as the central figure of the later books, and who is one of the strongest representations in children’s literature of an ageing woman who doesn’t ‘do’ very much beyond hanging on in there, but who nonetheless becomes the pivot of an entire world.