SOURCE: Barr, Marleen. “Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand as a Pathway toward New Directions in Feminist Science Fiction: Or, Who's Afraid of Connecting Ursula Le Guin to Virginia Woolf?” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, no. 60 (spring 1994): 58-67.

In the following essay, Barr cites the apparent strategies for marketing Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand as “mainstream literature,” and asserts that the book “explores new directions for feminist science fiction which point the way toward ending the sharp distinction between denigrated feminist science fiction and exalted mainstream literature.”

She was eating the color, devouring it, she craved it, even while she was thinking that they would call such a craving soft, fanciful, unreal … They don't know what people live on! she thought … [T]hey were the givers of wrong names.

(Le Guin, p. 108)

We have the same name, I said.

(Le Guin, p. 190)

As Ursula Le Guin points out in “Why...