Mrs. Brown you have a lovely daughter~

I did think the reading had some really excellent points. Chiefly the point that sci fi is not taken for literature, in other words "real writing" I get the point of Mrs. Brown and understand the idea behind her, but don't honestly know if Le Guin's theory of her is correct. (Although that last bit of the essay was hysterically funny) I also found it objectionable when she said American's don't/can't write novels of any kind, but that is another post.

Sci fi as a genre reminds me much of the so called "Horror" fiction genre. No one really takes horror seriously, most see it as schlock and mindless entertainment. Stephen King's work is a good example of this. Yes, some of his writing is schlock, but if you have read The Stand, or The Dark Tower series you know there is much more to King as a writer than people assume. (and you know what happens when you assume right?) If you only read for pleasure, or only read for education you miss out. King's work as well as some of the great writer's in Sci Fi have been vastly underrated in my estimation. To tell a story and to tell it well, to be able to spark someone's imagination and cause them to perhaps look at things differently, or understand something differently, is what being a writer is all about. ie: The fight between light and dark, left and right. To be able to have the balance of Yin and Yang in a work of art, speaks to the entire human experience. To show how those things are needed to balance each other is for me one of the best things about a good novel, whether it is Sci Fi, Horror, Fantasy or a plain old Auto Biography. It seems to me that it is the writer's goal to teach this to us, to show us both Yin and Yang, Left and Right, Shadow and Light. Mrs. Brown may not want to go to the stars, but I bet she wants to learn about them in clean little boots-