Groonkly Bits

Since I?m still in Huntsville, I may as well get my two-cents out there. I watched the ?SciFi event? Legend of Earthsea last week and was basically unimpressed, which is why I didn?t bother to mention it here. Now I see that the author of the Earthsea books, Ursula K. Le Guin , is greatly upset by what SciFi did to her universe.

Even while watching the miniseries I had an idea there was a much deeper universe involved. The producers (I call them out because they are the ones who have the money and therefore call the shots) used the basic fantasy plot-by-numbers scheme, which is poor form anyway you look at it.

As I watched the blandness parade in front of me, a thought raced across my mind, ?SciFi spent two…count them… two fucking weeks on a story about goddamn aliens snatching up yokels(Taken), yet they couldn?t spend more than two damn days on an obviously loved and long lived fantasy epic(Legends of Earthsea)?? I guess having Spielberg back your Fox Mulder wet-dream makes all the difference in TVland.

Some of her words that struck home for me:

Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They’re mixed; they’re rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is “based on,” everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.

My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now?why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

Just that bit alone makes the story far more interesting. I haven?t read any of Le Guin?s books, but after reading her protests over the farce SciFi released, I?m more than willing to shell out the bucks and delve into her worlds.

In: Too Many Thoughts | | #