Such questions are, I feel, often more interesting and sustaining than asking who’s fighting who, or demanding an inner conflict. Warfare is soooo 20 th century, after all, and don’t we have enough neurosis already – do we really need to add more?! Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8. Instead, Le Guin proposes a different object to represent the novel, and opens a space to discuss a different type of story: the life story.

Wagner, Jane. 1986. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row.Haraway, Donna J. 2008a. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 157–187. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. I jest – but only a little. Conflicts and inner turmoil are the substance of many of our stories. I’m just inclined to think they are often not enough, and that we emphasise conflict at the expense of other things and at the risk of creating further conflict in the world. Steering the Craft– my own review of the book on writing fiction that I recommend most frequently to writers.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11(2–3): 163–184. doi: 10.3366/ccs.2014.0122.Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer. It isn’t surprising that Le Guin made Earthsea change. What’s surprising is that it took her so long to do it. She had a PhD in French literature and was married to a historian of France. She must have heard the wave of post-structuralist theory gathering force well before it hit the West Coast in the early 1970s and washed away any residue of the magical belief that things and their signifiers were united by intrinsic bonds. And a complex and multi-faceted feminism was foundational to her writing right from the start. In the later Earthsea books she doesn’t dismantle her earlier world, but allows it to change so that she can explore a heroism (more often displayed by women) of resilience. She also stripped away the Tolkien-style male mage model of children’s fiction, which has such a strong magic of its own it takes time to escape its spell. By going beyond it in the second Earthsea series Le Guin was able to direct a whole array of ‘what if?’ questions against some of the conventions of children’s fantasy. What if you don’t need heroic quests? What if keeping going and tending children through damage and disaster and getting home is the form of heroism that matters most? What if girls can be dragons? These questions led to the creation in the later Earthsea books of two perfectly realised female characters: Tehanu – a girl scorched by fire and maimed by men, whose dry whispering voice makes her Le Guin’s most vivid creation – and her protector Tenar, who takes over from Ged as the central figure of the later books, and who is one of the strongest representations in children’s literature of an ageing woman who doesn’t ‘do’ very much beyond hanging on in there, but who nonetheless becomes the pivot of an entire world.