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

streets of Berkeley with my button foil looking for Bad Guys, however.
    Your newest novel,
Lavinia,
retells Virgil’s
Aeneid
from a woman’s point of view. Aeneas still plays the major role, though, and you seem rather fond of the dude. Do you like him better than Ulysses? Or Achilles?
    Ulysses is way too complicated to just like or dislike, but Achilles really turns me off. Sulky little egocentric squit. As if a lot of other guys on both sides didn’t have to die young. I bet he went around with beard-stubble all over his face like all the sulky sullen half-baked heart-throb actors do.
    Robert Louis Stevenson once said that our chronological age is like a scout, sent ahead of our “real” age which runs ten or fifteen years behind. What would you report back from your eightieth birthday?
    I would like to be all cheer and bounce and lifewas-neverbetter as old people—excuse me for bad language: older people—are expected to be. Unfortunately I find that at eighty I don’t feel seventy let alone sixty-five. I feel eighty.
    It isn’t easy, but it’s interesting.
    You say you are not a “plotter.” Do you start with an idea, or a character, or a situation? Or are they all the same thing?
    Erm. Things come. People, landscapes, relationships among the people/landscapes. Situations begin to arise. I follow, watching and listening.
    One criticism of the movie
Avatar
was that there is no explanation for the convergent evolution. Is there one in your Ekumen books (I may have missed it)? Why not?
    Why not did you miss it? Why did you miss it not? Sir, I know not.
    I provided a specious explanation of why everybody is more or less human: because everywhere local was settled by the Hainish. But that leaves out the indissoluble network of genetic relationship of
all
life on a planet. Such is the sleight of hand SF often has to play in order to get a story going. All we ask is the willing suspension of disbelief, which can and should return in full force when the novel is over.
    You have generously mentored and promoted many emerging writers. Did anyone do the same for you?
    I know everybody else remembers the early days of SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] as huge ego-competitions between X and Y and Z; but (maybe it was my practice at being a younger sister, or something?) I remember my early days in the SF world as being full of encouraging editors and fellow writers. Hey, what a neat bunch of people!
    Seems to me it’s easier to get published these days but harder to get noticed. How do you think you would fare starting out today?
    If I hadn’t connected with [literary agent] Virginia Kidd when I did, I might very well have had a much more constricted career and less visibility as a writer. Virginia was ready and able to sell anything I wrote—any length, any genre, to any editor.
    I don’t think it’s easy to get published these days, though. Not published so as it matters. Put stuff up on the Net, sure. Then what?
    Have you ever been attacked by lions?
    Three separate dogs have bitten me, many separate cats have bitten me, and recently my ankles underwent a terrifying siege by a bantam rooster at whom I had to kick dirt until he backed off and stood there all puffed up and shouting bad language like a Republican on Fox TV.
    Who needs lions?
    Many authors (including myself) have imitated your shape-shifting dream-altered world in
The Lathe of Heaven
. Was this idea original to you or did you swipe it from someone else?
    A lot of stuff in
Lathe
is (obviously) influenced by and homage to Phil Dick. But the idea of dreams that alter reality seems to me a worldwide commonplace of magical thinking. Am I wrong? Did I make it up? Doctor, am I all right?
    What’s an ansible? Is it like a Kindle? Where can I get one?
    Anarres.
    You didn’t seem too enthusiastic about the TV series based on your
Earthsea
novels. Why not?
    It wasn’t a series, and it wasn’t Earthsea, and can I go have a drink now?
    You once described