December 16, 2004
Science Fiction Honkies
I was initially a little distraught at missing the recent airing of the Earthsea miniseries on the SciFi channel. As a teenager I'd really enjoyed the books on which this series is based and I'd hoped that it could live up to my expectations. According to Ursula K. LeGuin, the author of the books, it's probably a good thing that I missed it.
In a Slate article, LeGuin bemoans the "whitewashing" of her characters, which she had originally created in reaction to the trend where "everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill." She also rails at the producer's interpretation of her books, claiming that the miniseries gets her world's cosmology entirely backwards.
There's a little bit of the Intentional Fallacy going on here and possibly some sour grapes, but her broader point is more condemning. The producers seem to have simply borrowed the characters and setting of the Earthsea trilogy to set up their own little adventure/romance story, shunning the deeper meaning that made her Earthsea books special.
Is that really the intentional fallacy? I consider it less when the author says "that's what I meant" and more the response of readers who say "well, if that's what she said she meant, that must be what it means."
Posted by: Hillary at December 17, 2004 08:38 AMWell, I originally had more stuff in this post where I was the reader saying, "If that's what she meant...etc."
But isn't it still kind of the same thing anyway? I thought the idea behind Intentional Fallacy was to divorce the author's intent from the text. When an author says, "This is what I meant," they are just offering their own personal reading.
Interpretations aside, it seems like the miniseries folks took substantial liberties with the text itself, so maybe I was wrong to bring up the Intentional Fallacy thing in the first place...
Posted by: ken at December 17, 2004 09:50 AMBasically, I just don't think it's that relevant here. It sounds like what they changed were a lot of factual elements. So, it's not like she's going, "I meant for them to be people of color." It's more like, "they _are_ people of color."
Posted by: Hillary at December 17, 2004 10:06 AMRight. I agree, except for this on her website:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html
Where she starts talking about how her books were about yin and yang, not about two belief systems merging and this is the same division that causes conflict such as in Iraq and cetera. This is the bit I removed from my original post because, well, meh.
Which oops! her site looks like it's been slashdotted:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/157205&tid=214&tid=97&tid=129
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