Ursula LeGuin's The Telling

I’ve always loved Ursula LeGuin, not just for the sensuous detail of her imagined worlds, but for the rigor with which she works through the logic of her premises; she’s like Heinlein in that regard, as opposed to (another great American novelist) Philip K. Dick, whose logic can be a little… slapdash. But heck, at a nickel a word, who wouldn’t chop as little logic as possible?

Anyhow, I got LeGuin’s latest The Telling, a Hainish novel, and it’s all about a corporate worldstate, and religion as a mechanism of social control.

All well and good, but I thought science fiction was supposed to be about the future?

But I guess I’m going to have to go back and read all those books I skipped after there weren’t any more Earthsea novels—the ones about beans, and recipes, and so forth. Damn.