The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

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by

Paperback

Published Nov. 4, 2019 by Ignota Books.

5 stars (6 reviews)

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.

1 edition

reviewed The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review of 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

"That's right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero."

"Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in his bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato."

"If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. 'Technology', or 'modern science' (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the 'hard' sciences and high technology founded upon continuous growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, …

reviewed The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review of 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A short essay that gave me a few more nails to put in the Joseph Campbell coffin. Sometimes you just gotta kill your early heroes. Sometimes you gotta replace the ultimately selfish "follow your bliss" crap with something closer to following your usefulness, like a bag. This essay also clarifies Le Guin's understanding of her own craft. After all, her craft is "full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible."

It's online. I found it at the anarchist library. Just search the title.

reviewed The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Mindblowing

5 stars

I've read the original edition from The Anarchist Library (hence no Donna Haraway introduction or Lee Bull illustrations).

However, that's more than what you need to realise how the patriarchy (or whatever you want to identify as the main issue) has infected literally anything. Also the way we see, use and absorb storytelling.

Like, I've possibly thought about all of those issues listed in this tiny book already, but the way Le Guin just put them altogether while also offering a constructive alternative is enlightening.

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