SOURCE: "Feeling the Hot Breath of Civilization," in The New York Times Book Review, October 29, 1989, pp. 1, 49-50.

An American novelist and critic, Le Guin is considered one of the most important authors in contemporary science fiction and fantasy literature. Her works have been especially praised for their style, rich inventiveness, and deep humanism. In the following excerpt, she praises The Storyteller, contending that Vargas Llosa's imaginative rendering of a preserved ancient culture provokes much-needed self-examination by modern society.

We human beings long to get the world under our control and to make other people act just like us. In the last few centuries, some of us—variously described as the White Man, the West, the Colonial Powers, Industrial Civilization, the March of Progress—found out how to do it. The result is that now many of us all over the world are eating hamburgers at McDonald's. Since other...