When times are tough, I escape into books, especially science fiction and fantasy. But sometimes I dip into nonfiction as well. This month I read The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy, a collection of Ursula K Le Guin’s thoughts on feminism in science fiction, the writer’s duty (and the reader’s), and why science fiction should be held to the same standard (and appreciated at the same level) as the literary classics.
Le Guin revised Language of the Night in 1989 (mostly making the pronouns less sexist), and it was reprinted in 2024 with a brilliant introduction by Ken Liu. Most of these essays were written in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and they should be read with the historical context in mind. But history repeats itself, and sitting in my comfy reading chair in January of the Year of Our Fascist Overlords 2026, I wasn’t that surprised to find most of it still relevant. It’s even more interesting when you consider these essays in the context of the biggest crisis facing literature at the moment: Generative AI.
You could probably structure an entire year’s worth of university lectures on this book (someone should!), and that’s much too much for a single blog post. So for now, I’m just going to slap down my thoughts while reading on what she might have said about Generative AI.
TL;DR: I think she would have said “Do better.”
Is imitation the best form of flattery?
Anyone who’s an expert at anything, who has tried asking GenAI about it, will have found that GenAI is a mediocrity generator. That goes for writing as well: GenAI analyzes patterns in the corpus of all the books that have been stolen to train it, and when you ask it to help you write something, it offers you slapdash collages of those patterns.
Imitating the greats is not a sin; it’s a valid method of learning a craft, with a long history. In fact, many science fiction writers get their start in fanfiction, copying the worlds and characters created by authors they love, and creating new stories for them. Some are able to translate popular fanfiction into new worlds so they can sell them under their own name. Good for them! The key thing is that these writers add something new, a piece of themselves, in response to what came before. GenAI can’t do that.
When writers then turn to creating their own stuff, they’re told it won’t sell unless they write to market: analyze trends, pack in the tropes, and give the clamoring hordes what they want.
You must either fit a category or have a name to publish a book in America.
—Le Guin
When she was starting out, Le Guin faced the same barriers, so she squished her imagination down to fit into that category and sold some books that even she describes as “kind of amiable, but not very good, not serious, essentially slick” and “trivial.” Their saving grace was her background in poetry and what she describes as psychologically realistic fiction.
Pushing the limits of genre
Once she had a foothold, she was able to push the boundaries of the box she’d squeezed into, adding her strength to that of other authors who burst it open so that we can enjoy much more interesting stories today than, say, Robert E. Howard’s “Shadows in the Moonlight.”
‘Let me go,’ begged the [reader], tears of despair staining her face. ‘Have I not suffered enough? Is there any humiliation, pain or degradation you have not heaped on me? How long must my torment last?’
—Robert E Howard
If we rely on GenAI to inspire, outline, or even write our novels for us, we are just climbing back into that box and pulling the tattered lid closed after us. Thank you, my little box is nice and cozy; no, I don’t need any air, water, or light.
GenAI can’t even have a spontaneous conversation with itself; how could you ever expect it to create something new and compelling enough to be worth selling, or worth reading? Don’t we have a responsibility to the reader not to shower them in slop?
After all, writing is not only an originative act, it is a responsive one. The lack of genuine response, and therefore the lack of the sense of responsibility, is painfully clear in those writers who simply go on and on imitating themselves—or others.
—Le Guin
The writer’s and reader’s duty
But it’s not only the writer’s duty not to write shoddy books (or get robots to write shoddy books for us); Le Guin emphasizes the reader’s role as gatekeeper.
On the one hand, she describes the market as an invisible kind of censorship, where readers decide what kinds of books they want or don’t want to buy, directing the flow of demand, and publishers accept more manuscripts based on that demand. This can create a closed loop, making it difficult for something different to break in. And we end up with a decade of Sarah J Maas copycats. Le Guin isn’t very enthusiastic about that sort of limitation on the imagination.
On the other hand, she does think readers should be more discerning:
I believe the reader has a responsibility; if we love the stuff we read, we have a duty toward it. That duty is to refuse to be fooled; to refuse to permit commercial exploitation of the holy ground of Myth; to reject shoddy work, and to save our praise for the real thing.
—Le Guin
So maybe there is hope for us. Maybe we’ll get good enough at spotting GenAI slop, and hopefully we’ll get there faster than GenAI can improve at disguising it.
Reading is active, not passive
In the meantime, perhaps the best thing we can continue to do for the real, human authors who write the books we love is to shout our praise from the rooftops. Write in response to their work (reviews, articles, books of literary criticism, fanfiction, creative responses, reimaginings or reinterpretations).
Yes, comfort yourself with cozy, familiar escapism. And, choose more books that challenge your thinking and push the boundaries of what fiction can do. Read outside your race or culture, read works in translation, uncover brilliant authors who’ve been shoved to the back shelf by the overhyped bestsellers. Dig through dusty stacks at secondhand bookshops; become archaeologists specializing in your library’s back catalog. Be erratic in your reading; don’t let the algorithm dictate your TBR list. And get even louder in warning each other away from slop.
After all, as Le Guin says, reading is not a passive reaction but an action involving the mind, the emotions and the will.
To accept trashy books because they are “bestsellers” is the same thing as accepting adulterated food, ill-made machines, corrupt government, and military and corporative tyranny, and praising them, and calling them the American Way of Life or the American Dream. It is a betrayal of reality. Every betrayal, every lie accepted, leads to the next betrayal and the next lie.
—Le Guin
And if we continue to accept the lie of GenAI (it is regurgitating not generating, and it’s far from intelligent), or the betrayal of someone using it to vomit out a series of sentences in a certain order and calling it a book or themselves a writer, we’re just setting ourselves up to accept more lies.
