I don’t normally read science fiction, but I always take FFP’s monthly book discussions as a challenge when I’m not comfortable with the assigned genre or author. Because our book club grants the moderator the power over the monthly assignment, I’ve been challenged a fair deal in past discussions, as some of the book assignments are far from my comfort zone.
I think, though, that Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the book assignments I’ve dreaded the most — I’m just not into unpronounceable names and anything that needs a map! Le Guin’s introductory section, where she explains what science fiction is about (not merely “extrapolation,” but a “metaphor”), is actually helpful. I also like her statement (cautionary warning, perhaps?) on novels:
“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
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