Comments on: Lavinia http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/343 History fetish? What history fetish? Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:54:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: bsc14121 http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/343/comment-page-1#comment-28175 bsc14121 Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:33:19 +0000 http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/343#comment-28175 Still waiting for the promised book report on LeGuin's Lavinia. It's very clever... the heroine finds out that she is, at best, a minor literary figure... but carries on, noble pre-Roman matron that she is; and doesn't let it bother her. The ghost of Virgil is a minor character in HER story. I don't recall anybody since Dante trying THAT. By this point I consider LeGuin the sole LITERARY science fiction writer... although, I admit, I haven't bothered to search very hard for others. There's too much else to study. She writes a sort of anthropological science fiction, not particularly concerned with engineering or physics (although she did invent the ansible, a faster-than-light radio, eagerly adopted by other writers). She wrote another non-SF novel before Lavinia, Malafrena, which revolves about the 1848 revolutions (in an nonexistent European country... a brilliant conceit). Nicely executed, too. Still waiting for the promised book report on LeGuin’s Lavinia. It’s very clever… the heroine finds out that she is, at best, a minor literary figure… but carries on, noble pre-Roman matron that she is; and doesn’t let it bother her. The ghost of Virgil is a minor character in HER story. I don’t recall anybody since Dante trying THAT.

By this point I consider LeGuin the sole LITERARY science fiction writer… although, I admit, I haven’t bothered to search very hard for others. There’s too much else to study. She writes a sort of anthropological science fiction, not particularly concerned with engineering or physics (although she did invent the ansible, a faster-than-light radio, eagerly adopted by other writers).

She wrote another non-SF novel before Lavinia, Malafrena, which revolves about the 1848 revolutions (in an nonexistent European country… a brilliant conceit). Nicely executed, too.

]]>