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.