Where have you gone, Aristotle? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

The three short Le Guin novels in Worlds of Exile and Illusion were all well-crafted adventure stories. Rocannon's World and City of Illusions were both organized around a quest, and Planet of Exile was about a group of people mounting a defense against a siege by an enemy far superior in numbers. As stories, they're what we might call centripetal: they seek chiefly to be as true as they can to the setting and the characters, to tell what happened; any "larger" meaning, any commentary on contemporary society, any attempt to underline that this sort of thing is what generally happens, is secondary, at best.

The Word for World Is Forest started as a novella, written half a decade later (1972) than the trio in Worlds, for the second of Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies. The novella was nominated for a Nebula Award and gathered much general praise; in 1976 Le Guin expanded the novella into a novel, which is what I read. I've heard the title of the novel in connection with the profuse accusations of "rip-off" directed against James Cameron's Avatar. I think that allegedly pejorative term is nonsensical (generally, not just in this specific application); nevertheless, there are marked and definite similarities in the premise: Forest, like Avatar, is about humans who come to an alien world and try to exploit it to the point where the aliens, previously peaceful and harmonious, strike back. (The aliens, this being the same 'verse as that of the Worlds novels, aren't actually aliens in the strictest sense, but humans evolved to suit a new niche.)

To bring this around: unlike the novels in Worlds, there is a much stronger emphasis in Forest on the notion that what happens in the novel is just what happens; it's centrifugal, seeking to depict and comment on something in life, outside the story. The story is clearly suggested by the roughly contemporaneous conflict in Vietnam, and there's even an explicit reference to that war in the dialogue. The Worlds novels end with the protagonists achieving some more or less satisfactory (to them) state of affairs, whereas Forest is tragic: the aliens have learned to resolve conflicts through violence, and can never again regain their original peacefulness and innocence; and I would be remiss as a voracious reader of Northrop Frye if I didn't point out that tragedy is generally far more intent than comedy on making the "this is what happens" point. The temptation when reading these four novels in order of composition is to read them as describing an arc, a development in Le Guin's philosophies and narratorial skillz. So then: does this new emphasis represent an advance in Le Guin's skills, or a retreat?

It certainly seems as though the advance opinion is quite popular. Well, look: writing tragedies has been for quite some time now a much more respectable profession than writing comedies. I've heard it said that that's (perhaps) because only the portion of Aristotle's Poetics that deals with tragedy has survived, and so comedy is basically evaluated, by most critics, using tragedy's standards. Who's surprised when it fail to pass the exam? Don't get me wrong: I'm an ardent devotee of the tragedy genre myself, but still there's got to be a way of looking at the opposing genre other than "tragedy with a copout ending." Perhaps I myself have been a devotee of tragedy too long to find this new method (or to understand and embrace it when it's flat-out presented to me by someone like Northrop Frye), because I must admit that Forest was a swift, exciting read. Now, the Worlds novels were swift reads too, but in a way that felt lightweight, maybe even underdeveloped, like the stories weren't going to stick with me for very long. It can be so difficult to escape even such a small piece of cultural programming.

That said, the next two books I read certainly illustrate, in my opinion, the potential lightweightness and insignificance of tragedy. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident is an indictment of mob justice, framed as a Western, and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, a play, tells the story of the conflict between Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII over the latter's split from the Catholic Church over the issue of his divorce. Both are books I picked up at the library booksale. They're both terribly serious (see above for Ox-Bow, and as for Seasons, it ends [OMG TEH SPOILERS] with Sir Thomas More being executed for daring to take a principled stand), and neither is much good at all. Let me offer an example in support of that thesis statement. Bolt prefaces his play with a Dramatis Personae explaining who everyone is and what they're like. One major character, who in the body of the play will be persecuting Sir Thomas More, is summed up as "an intellectual bully." I wish this were Bolt insightfully cutting through the complexities of the character, but unfortunately the character as presented in the play really has no complexities to cut through. He rests on the level of the summing up: a bully, and that's it. The whole play is rather like that: simplistic; nor is Ox-Bow much better. Really they're more lugubrious than tragic. Yet apparently that's close enough: they both got a lot of love, back in their day: critical praise, awards, fame, Hollywood adaptations into Oscar-bait "films." Suffering is clearly just very prestigious.

Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft was my fourth booksale read. It's heavy on the memoir and fairly light on the writing advice, but I picked up a couple of things that interested the aspiring author part of myself. The first item is a corroboration of something I've been thinking for a while now. As a successful author, King's been asked a prodigious number of times, I'm sure, the ubiquitous question of where his ideas come from (as though it's the idea, and not the skill with which the idea is executed, that is responsible for the success of the resulting work). His answer is not devoid of the usual mystery, nor can I disagree that a certain amount of mystery belongs there, but he also points out (and this is what I have observed and believe) that an inextricable part of the process of formation is that a new idea is an amalgamation of two or more older ideas. Thank you, Stephen! I expect that's why ideas aren't property, legally (at least at present); and why they shouldn't be property, morally; as well as why they can't be property, practically. If ideas weren't in the public domain, regardless of their originator, how could imaginative writers, or for that matter anyone who participates in any form of public discourse, continue that participation? Earlier in the entry I wrote the following: "I've heard it said that that's (perhaps) because only the portion of Aristotle's Poetics that deals with tragedy has survived, and so comedy is basically evaluated, by most critics, using tragedy's standards." Just imagine if I had to pay someone to be able to write that sentence?

The other idea is an illustration of a mindset that I might do well to aspire to. King writes that he thinks of a story as something like a fossil: existing before he commits it to paper, before he works out all the details, really before he's thought up the initial idea. The writer's job is to get as much of the fossil out of the ground of the imaginative subsconscious as possible (never all of it) while doing as little damage as possible. I like that. I don't know if it's something I can use.

Next I returned to the library books. Not long ago, the Library of America published two volumes of sci-fi novels from the fifties. I read the first two novels in the first volume late last year but then had to return the book (it was recalled). But then whoever recalled it returned it in their turn, and I borrowed it again. Now I have completed the first volume. The novels I read last year were The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth and More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon; I was intrigued but not astonished. The back half of the volume were Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow and Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I was astonished per se, nevertheless they're two very solid offerings.

People, people, people: let me tell you whom we're dealing with here. Leigh Brackett's name is on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, and she also worked with the director Howard Hawks on the scripts for Rio Bravo and The Big Sleep, the latter alongside the great William Faulkner; while Richard Matheson (only recently deceased) wrote a bunch of novels that Hollywood has historically been extremely eager to adapt (The Shrinking Man itself as an example, but another is I Am Legend [adapted so far thrice!]), a buttload of classic Twilight Zone episodes (up to and including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," that one where William Shatner tries to convince a planeload of people that there's a gremlin on the wing), and also a little TV-movie called Duel that attracted enough attention to launch its director, this one young guy named Steve Spielberg, into theatrical films.

Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is set in a post-nuclear war America. The radioactive consequences of such a war are elided with a curious silence, but otherwise it's very good. The war having wrecked the entirety of the infrastructure of American society, most of the population has joined the segment of that society most suited to survival without the modern conveniences: the Amish and Mennonite commmunities. Almost a hundred years after the war, Americans live in such small, relatively isolated communities, and the establishment of a city, which is to say any community above a certain, very limited size, is forbidden by a Constitutional Amendment. Two young scions of such a community, however, yearn for something more: for forbidden knowledge. Following rumors of a hidden town that still possesses all the conveniences and scientific knowledge of the past, the two eventually make it to the hidden town, where they can live happily ever after, watching TV while sitting on their modern plumbing implement. The End... or is it? No, it's not. Yes, another writer might have ended the story at the point where the knowledge-hungry protagonist and his like-minded (more or less) cousin achieve, or appear to achieve, their objective, but Brackett isn't out of ideas yet: she keeps writing, examining whether the protagonist is actually happy with the objective, once achieved, whether it fulfills and satisfies his desires and expectations. Brackett explores how the cause of knowledge-seeking can breed, as does the life in Mennonite hamlets and villages, its own fanaticism on the one hand, and instill its own disillusion and dissatisfaction on the other.

Matheson's The Shrinking Man depicts the plight of a man who starts shrinking 1/7th of an inch every day, alternating between flashback recountings of his procession from full-size to midget to posable action figure, and harrowing present-time depictions of his struggle for survival, less than an inch in size and still shrinking, in the cellar of his house: securing food and water and doing battle with a monstrous black-widow spider. After all, what's the point, really, of telling the story of a miniaturized man unless you devote substantial attention to his miniaturized adventures? Supposedly, the cellar the Shrinking Man is trapped in, is Richard Matheson's cellar as far as layout; he sat in his cellar every day while composing the novel, looked at his surroundings, and wrote the day's text on whatever his eyes fell upon. The novel reminded me of nothing so much as a swashbuckling version of The Death of Ivan Ilych (I suspect I may be referencing that story for a while). The Shrinking Man feels separated, increasingly, from his old life, his family, all his former concerns.

Both The Long Tomorrow and The Shrinking Man (and for that matter The Space Merchants and More than Human) find happy, or at least promising, endings for their protagonists, of varying quality. I would have trouble, however, defining either novel as a comedy. Definitely not in the laughter sense; but even in the happy-ending sense, the novels both seem not so much classically comic as tragic with an eleventh-hour distribution of compensations. SPOILERS FO' REALS. The Shrinking Man is convinced that he will cease to exist the day after he reaches the size of one-seventh of an inch, but when that day comes he is granted a sort of reprieve: though continuing to shrink, he continues to exist, and sets out boldly in search of new domains of knowledge and experience. This ending seemed a touch on the naive side to me: the Shrinking Man wonders what his future will bring, but his wondering is optimistic; he never seems to wonder if it'll bring more spiders or deadly amoebae or hostile protons or what have you. The Long Tomorrow seems more balanced: having passed through a stage of doubting the secret town's aims, to the extent even of escaping from said town, the protagonist figures out his spiritual-intellectual crisis and makes a decision, this time with a far cannier and wiser mind, to return to the town and participate in its mission.

The next book I plan to read is that classic happy-ending tale, The Odyssey of Homer. I read The Iliad last November in the George Chapman translation, which is the translation that got John Keats hot and bothered enough to write a really famous poem of praise about. Now it's time to move on to Chapman's version of Homer's cash-in sequel.