00:00Oh Lord, how's that? Is that okay? I seem to be a little shorter than most of these people.
00:15Thank you Neil. And to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart,
00:26my family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine,
00:37and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine.
00:45And I rejoice in accepting it for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from literature,
00:56for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination,
01:08who for the last 50 years has watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
01:18I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives
01:32to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies
01:44to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
01:54We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
02:06Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity
02:16and the practice of an art.
02:26Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit
02:33and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
02:48Thank you, brave applauders.
02:53Yet, I see sales departments given control over editorial.
02:58I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed,
03:06charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers.
03:17We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience,
03:23disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa.
03:31And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books,
03:40accepting this, letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant
03:46and tell us what to publish and what to write.
03:52Well, I love you, too, darling.
04:00Books, you know, they're not just commodities.
04:02The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.
04:09We live in capitalism.
04:14Its power seems inescapable.
04:18So did the divine right of kings.
04:26Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
04:33Resistance and change often begin in art.
04:39And very often in our art, the art of words.
04:46I have had a long career and a good one.
04:51In good company.
04:54Now here, at the end of it,
04:58I really don't want to watch American literature
05:03get sold down the river.
05:06We who live by writing and publishing
05:14want and should demand
05:18our fair share of the proceeds.
05:24But the name of our beautiful reward
05:27is not profit.
05:29Its name is freedom.
05:31Thank you.
05:41She did not rise out of the earth
05:43like an unearthly utopian phoenix.
05:45She just walked up to the podium like it was nothing.
05:48Unbelievable.
05:48I decided a couple weeks ago
05:54that I would go to my bookshelf
05:56and reread a little Ursula Le Guin
05:57to come up with something witty to say.
05:59And then the whole day slipped away from me
06:02and I'd reread the Lathe of Heaven
06:03for the 20th time.
06:04Ursula Le Guin.
06:05That's all I have to say.
06:06Thank you.
06:06Thank you.
06:07Thank you.
06:08Thank you.
06:08Thank you.
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