Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Harryhausen, Stan Lee to receive Eaton Lifetime Achievement Awards

To quote from the news release:

"Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin, special effects creator Raymond F. Harryhausen and Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee will be recognized with the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside’s Eaton Science Fiction Conference April 11-14, 2013.

The conference will be held at the Riverside Marriott Hotel and will examine science fiction in multiple media. Conference registration opens Aug. 1 and may be completed online. Registration for students is $95; early-bird registration, $150 (ending Feb. 1, 2013); general registration (after Feb. 1, 2013), $170; and single-day registration, $95.

Le Guin, who will receive the Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award for 2012, has written 20 science fiction and fantasy novels, among them “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,” each of which won Hugo and Nebula awards. She is the author of many short stories, six volumes of poetry, 13 books for children, as well as criticisms, collections of essays and screenplays.

“Ursula Le Guin is probably the most significant American writer of science fiction and fantasy to have emerged in the past 50 years,” said Rob Latham, professor of English and conference co-organizer. “Her work has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of serious ethical and political engagement with these popular genres.”

Conference organizers decided to present two awards for 2013 “to honor both science fiction film culture and science fiction comic book culture, which we felt deserved to be recognized separately,” said Melissa Conway, head of Special Collections and Archives of the UCR Libraries.

Harryhausen, who created a type of stop-motion model animation known as Dynamation, will receive the award for his groundbreaking contributions to science fiction film. Among his best-known productions are “Mighty Joe Young,” for which the ARKO team won an Oscar for special effects in 1949; “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”; and “Jason and the Argonauts,” which included a swordfight against skeleton warriors.

Lee, former president of Marvel Comics, also will be recognized with the award for 2013 for his various contributions in the realm of comic books. Lee, who began as a comic-book writer at age 19, moved on to become editor, producer, publisher, and president and chairman of Marvel Comics.  The co-creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor and other superheroes is also being recognized for his successful challenge to the Comics Code Authority.

Previous recipients of the Eaton lifetime achievement award are Ray Bradbury (2008), Frederik Pohl (2009), Samuel R. Delany (2010) and Harlan Ellison (2011).

The 2013 conference theme, “Science Fiction Media,” reflects the increasingly diverse forms of expression of science fiction.

The science-fiction writing competition for full-time undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the UC system will continue in 2013. First prize is $500 and second prize is $250. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 7, 2013. Further details, including instructions for submitting entries, and length and format requirements will be posted at eatonconference.ucr.edu.

The conference will also feature the fourth Science Fiction Studies Symposium on the topic of “SF Media(tions)”  on April 11, 2013, at the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa. Admission is free.

Symposium speakers will be Mark Bould, reader in film and literature at the University of the West of England and co-editor of the journal  Science Fiction Film and Television;  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., professor of Engish at DePauw University and author of “the Seven Beauties of Science Fiction” (Wesleyan University Press, 2008);  and Vivian Sobchack, professor emeritus of film, television and digital media at UCLA and the 2012 recipient of the Society for Cinema Studies’ Distinguished Career Award.

The conference is sponsored by the University of California, Riverside Libraries and the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. In 2013 the conference will partner  with the Science Fiction Research Association, the largest and most prestigious scholarly organization in the field.

UCR is the home of the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the largest publicly accessible collection of its kind in the world. The collection embraces every branch of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian/dystopian fiction."

Related links:
The full Eaton Conference news release
Eaton Conference registration

PM Press Outspoken Authors Series

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike, 123 pages, PM Press 2009
Eleanor Arnason, Mammoths of the Great Plains, 145 pages, PM Press 2010
Michael Moorcock, Modern Times 2.0, 123 pages, PM Press 2011
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wild Girls, 102 pages, PM Press 2011

I would like to call attention to PM Press and the Outspoken Authors series. I’ve purchased four of these so far.  They are slightly larger than mass market paperbacks and are superior as physical objects as well as for their content. Each volume contains one or two pieces of short fiction, an essay by the author, an interview conducted by Terry Bisson, and a bibliography. The fiction selections are strong. The interviews are surprisingly good. The Eleanor Arnason has a long novella making its original appearance. Arnason is an important author who hasn’t reached as large an audience as she should. I recommend seeking out this series.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Related link:

PM Press Outspoken Authors

Links to thinks

Neil Gaiman writes about Gene Wolfe
"... Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He's just turned 80, looks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slips between genres. ... He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest." Read the article.

SF Signal Mind Meld: Which challenging SF/F stories are worth the effort to read?
Some wonderful recommendations, including works by Gene Wolfe, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Neal Stephenson, Cordwainer Smith. As Cat Rambo writes in the comments, add Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, John Crowley, Justina Robson, and Peter Watts. Who would you add? Read the article.

Ursula K. LeGuin reviews Embassytown by China Miéville
"If Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvelous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he's outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished. In Embassytown, his metaphor ... works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigor and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being." Read the article.

Rob Latham on J.G. Ballard
"I believe that, with the possible exception of Philip K. Dick, postwar SF has produced no finer writer, and certainly none more attuned to the perplexities and pitfalls of the modern technoscientific world." Read the article. (Edited: link updated.)

Lavinia Revisited

Here at the Strangelove for Science Fiction blog we reviewed Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin not too long ago and we found it to be particularly wonderful, a standout book from a distinguished author. As a resource, here is a roundup of interesting reviews and discussions regarding LeGuin's Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008):

Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle puts it succintly: "The single best SFF novel of the year, I'd say." (Roberts' short item.) At Strange Horizons Roberts wrote a full-length review: " ... there is a pervasively numinous quality to LeGuin's imagined world; finely rendered and completely believable, it makes for a brilliantly compelling textual universe." Yes, and yes again.


Roberts also participated in a discussion that spread across several blogs:
Introduction -- Torque Control
Lyric and Narrative -- Punkaddidle.
Fantasy -- Asking the Wrong Questions
History -- Eve's Alexandria


Laura Miller at Salon.com wrote:

Lavinia is an old writer's book -- Le Guin is 79 -- in the best sense of the word; it is ripe with that half-remembered virtue, wisdom. This, Le Guin seems to be saying, is what it feels like to be the personification of your land and your people, to speak the words and perform the rites of "the old, local, earth-deep religion," to be the sacred guardian of harmony and plenty for a handful of rustic villages and farms, and to carry their past and future in your body.

I could go on quoting other reviews, but I think the point has been made. This is a book worth your time.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

Having read quite a few books by Ursula K. LeGuin, I thought I knew what to expect from a new LeGuin novel, but I did not. No. It seems odd to speak of a breakthrough book for an author who has recently turned 80 and has a long and accomplished career. If there were such a thing as a canon of science fiction and fantasy literature LeGuin already would have three books on the list, possibly four. This book, Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008), is among her best, if not the best, and it achieves success in interesting ways.

LeGuin has embraced, like never before, a story entwined with important and prickly topics: leadership, family, war, marriage, religion, poetry and prophecy. Parts of story may be familiar to some readers, based as it is on a minor character in Vergil’s Aeneid.

“Why must there be war?”
(Vergil replies:) “Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.”
(p. 87)

The war between the Latins and Aeneas’s Trojans is unnecessary, springing from hubris. Turnus undercuts King Latinus’s leadership by finding a narrative for war that has popular appeal. If this sounds like an Iraq War reading of the story, with Turnus as a combination of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Blair, so be it. (Witness the spectacle of Tony Blair, only a few days ago, saying with a straight face that he doesn’t regret the decision to go to war and that he would do it again. Turnus is alive among us.) All unnecessary wars have similarities, among them the disingenuousness of the leaders who promote such wars.

Turnus is motivated by his wounded pride, his suit for Lavinia’s hand having been rejected by Latinus and Lavinia, and by his selfishness and lust for power. By expelling the Trojan foreigners, Turnus seeks to win Lavinia and secure the title of King of the Latins. By making Aeneas his enemy, Turnus wages a war that he will lose. It has, after all, already been written, as Lavinia learns.

Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, is trained as a leader of the pagan religion of her people and more than this, both she and her father receive visions and are skilled in interpreting those visions.

“We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the kings who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit and eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house.” (pages 205-206)

When she is 12 years old, Latinus introduces Lavinia to the sacred forest and sulfur springs of Albunea and the visions to be had there. Her eyes are opened, metaphorically, on her first visit and on subsequent visits she meets the poet, Vergil, the creator of her world. The poet asks her if she has any suitors. She lists them and says that she favors none of them, which leads to this exchange (p. 42):

(Vergil, thinking of Aeneas:) “If a man came—if a man came to marry you who was a man in a thousand—a warrior, a hero, a handsome man—”
“Turnus is all that.”
“Has he piety?”
“No.”

Lavinia has already defined piety: “responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe” (p. 22), an interweaving of family, community, and religion, all in one not-so-simple word. Turnus’s hubris is in opposition to piety.

Over several vision-meetings the poet tells Lavinia some of what her future holds and some of the centuries-distant future of Rome as well.

Some of Turnus’s sense of entitlement comes from Lavinia’s unstable mother, Amata, who has encouraged his ambitions and his pursuit of Lavinia. Amata would like to have her daughter under her thumb, which Lavinia resists as best as she is able. As the story develops it becomes clear that Amata is mentally ill and she becomes more demanding and erratic in her behavior, kidnapping Lavinia in an effort to prevent her marriage to the foreigner, Aeneas, and plotting instead to unite her with Turnus.

Vergil, himself near death, enumerates the names of those who will be slaughtered, some of whom Lavinia knows well. “How do you like my poem now, Lavinia?” (p. 89).

The situation accelerates toward war, as foretold by Latinus, and resolves with the deaths of some important characters (who will remain unnamed on the chance that readers would prefer to discover for themselves) and Aeneas victorious. Vergil’s Aeneid stops there, LeGuin’s Lavinia continues. Vergil’s intent, in part, is to codify a heroic legend of the founding of Rome. LeGuin has a tighter focus: the life of Lavinia, and a large topic: womanhood and its interplay with family, war, marriage, and religion.

Lavinia’s difficult family life, living in the women’s side of the royal family home with a mentally unbalanced mother, is later echoed in her uneasy relationship with a willful stepson, Ascanius, who becomes her king. In his insecure competitiveness, fighting skirmishes with neighboring kingdoms and needlessly antagonizing them, Ascanius recalls the selfish Turnus.

The marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia is central, as it brings lasting peace between the Latins and the Trojans. Together these people, or their descendents, will found the Roman Empire, according to Vergil. Leading to “the great age ... maybe ... or so I once thought,” muses the poet. Aeneas proves to be a model husband and a wise peacetime ruler. He honors and performs the religious rites. His one fault as a father, if it is a fault, is his lack of success in helping Ascanius find the way to the measured exercise of power.

The narrative, while told in uncomplicated language, skips around in time, especially in the first half. It ranges from Lavinia’s girlhood, to her married life with Aeneas, forward to Vergil’s subjective time, and back again. It flows smoothly, but I wonder how readers unfamiliar with writers who take similar liberties would react. Then, there are the meta-realities of the story. It is LeGuin’s story overlayed on Vergil’s story, which is overlayed on legend. LeGuin gives credit to Vergil as the creator of this reality, honoring the creative force of his poetry.

I will stop here, though I feel that I have only scratched the surface of the many things this novel brings to mind.

Related post: Lavinia Revisited