Making OddKin

The primary narrative in modern society is about a man, a hero who faces conflict and goes through a life changing transformation in his journey as he fights his demons, literal and figurative, to get to his goal. It’s a tale of action and everyone and everything else in the story exists to enable his transformation. They are either a prop, a background, an obstacle or a path to his goal.

Most of Ursula leGuin’s fantasy and science fiction challenges this narrative arc. In Conversations on Writing, 2018 she said, “If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you are limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is a conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue.”

In upholding these tropes not only do we perpetuate the idea that conflict is essential we also define our heroes in a certain way. These ways of thinking are especially unhelpful in the Anthropocene. A global policy on greenhouse gases might buy us some time but what we need is for us to be able to situate ourselves in the places and in the relationships with humans and nonhumans alike.

Donna Haraway suggests that what we need is to redefine family and have networks of care and responsibility beyond biological kin and also beyond human species. LGBTQ and many indigenous communities already do this. As individuals and as groups of individuals we are connected to others in specific ways and in order to continue on this planet we need to cultivate responsibility towards these specific others. To flourish we need a common liveable world and the idea of human exclusionism is taking us straight toward catastrophe.