Academia Lunare – ojcade.com

I have a new paper out! “Environmental Change as a Catalyst for Worldbuilding in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home” has just been published. You can find it in Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Francesca T. Barbini for Luna Press Publishing.

I have to admit, Always Coming Home is not my favourite Le Guin book. It’s actually quite far from my favourite. (That will forever be The Tombs of Atuan.) And if I’m being absolutely, perfectly honest, I find Always Coming Home to be over-detailed for my tastes. However, it is an absolutely excellent example of worldbuilding, and one that stems from cataclysmic environmental change. It’s part purported history, part thought experiment, part possible future, and what I find compelling amidst all that welter of detail is just how far the worldbuilding spreads. I mean, I know that in some corners of speculative fiction, writers will rabbit on forever and fucking ever about extraneous bits of encyclopaedia that are only marginally masked as story, but rarely is the focus so broad. Environmental change, in Le Guin, changes everything. Economics, family life, art, science… it’s all affected.

As an academic, that fascinates me. I’m interested in how speculative fiction deals with environmental change, and Always Coming Home is a deeply considered example of it written by someone much cleverer than me. Now, if only it had that creepy labyrinth…

I’ve a new academic chapter out! My paper “Spring Again: The Problem of Evil and the End of Winter in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia” is out in A Shadow Within: Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Francesca T. Barbini from Luna Press Publishing.

My love of fantasy began with Narnia. The first book I ever really remember reading was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which my parents gave to me on the Christmas following my fourth birthday. I spent Christmas morning tucked in a chair and enraptured, while Mum vacuumed up tinsel around me. I’d finished by lunch, and my parents (untrusting souls that they were) were so disbelieving they actually quizzed me on the contents of the book. I passed, though for the life of me I couldn’t remember that the witch’s knife was made of stone.

As an adult I still enjoy Narnia, problematic though it sometimes is. (The Last Battle, I must admit, is one of my most hated books of all time.) So when I saw the Luna Press call for papers, I thought I’d write about evil in Narnia. Here’s the abstract:

In The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, evil is perceived as directly resulting from personal choice. Each individual is solely responsible for their own moral decisions, and these decisions both impact the continuing ethical development of the self and influence how the individual addresses the problem of evil. This is particularly well illustrated in the case of Edmund Pevensie, and this paper argues that it is his willingness to accept and atone for the evil within himself that directly leads to the end of the enchanted winter imposed on Narnia. In this sense, evil is not only present within the individual, but is externalised in the land that that individual inhabits.

Basically, it sums up as “prophecies are always dodgy”. The Beavers have no logic, poor things.