Free The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin Page A

opposition—to many readers seems so strange, even unnatural, that they can only dismiss her as a hypocrite. Fanny’s fault is not falsity, but an undue lack of self-confidence, hardly surprising given her upbringing. Her realism fails; she misjudges herself. All the same, she sticks to reality as best she can, with a stubborn transparency of purpose that is the exact opposite of hypocrisy. I find her a fascinating, endearing, and true heroine.
    It’s my impression that people respond positively to modesty, and resent arrogance and overweening, though they’ll endure a good deal of it without complaint, and are even impressed by it—probably because a great many people are, in fact, modest. They accept themselves as ordinary. They estimate their own worth without inflating it (or underestimating it, which leads to weakness and servility). They don’t assume they have nothing to learn, so they’re willing to listen. They lack the fatal conviction of innate superiority.
    Therefore all too often they’re willing to listen to people who pretend to superiority—the news commentators, the talk show shouters, the popes and priests and ayatollahs, the advertisers, the know-it-alls. Modesty’s weak point is that it may permit arrogance in others. Its strong point is that in the long run arrogance doesn’t fool it.
    I think a great many people still hold modesty to be a virtue and practice it, even if they don’t use the word. I’m thinking of everyday conversations—carpenters working together on a job, secretaries chatting during a break, people having a beer or dinner together and talking about whatever they’re interested in and know about. It appears to me that in these situations, modesty of demeanor is the norm. Overbearing garrulity about my sweet deal on the Honda, my trip to Oaxaca, my incredible sex life, my special relationship to Jesus, etc., is borne with, heard out more or less politely, especially by women listening to men. But at length the true conversation continues around it, reconnecting unbroken, as water flows around a boulder. The conversation of the modest is what holds ordinary people together. It is the opposite of advertisement. It is communion.

“A LOVELY ART”
URSULA K. LE GUIN INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
    What have you got against Amazon?
    Nothing, really, except profound moral disapproval of their aims and methods, and a simple loathing of corporate greed.
    Even though you occupy a pretty high perch in American Letters, you have never hesitated to describe yourself as a science fiction and fantasy author. Are you just being nice, or is there a plot behind this?
    I am nice.
    Also, the only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn’t SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well.
    Your first Earthsea novel (1968) features a school for wizards. Some critics claim that you used your SF powers improperly to travel thirty years into the future and swipe the idea from J. K. Rowling. Do you deny this?
    I plead the Fifth.
    You once described yourself as a “fast and careless reader.” I loved that! It reminded me of Dr. Johnson telling Boswell he rarely
finished
a book. Do you still regard this as an advantage?
    Of course. It means I can get through shoddy books in no time, and can reread good books over and over …
    One of the things I love about
The Wild Girls
is its economy. You create a complex and strange world with a few swift strokes. William Gibson does this with art direction. How would you describe your technique?
    As improved by age and practice.
    Should girls learn to sword fight?
    I got in on my big brothers’ fencing lessons when I was ten or twelve. It is a lovely art. I never planned to go out in the