Where are we?

Adrift today, in some kind of sea change; maybe it's the horse latitudes of the season, a sargasso weedy patch. Minds aren't breeding tiny monsters, or really much of anything. Onward, through the white north.
Interesting bit from another Le Guin essay:
"Above the level of the merely commercial, in the realm of art, whether it's called mainstream or genre fiction, we can fulfill our expectations only by learning which authors disappoint and which authors offer the true nourishment for the soul. We find out who the good writers are, and then we look or wait for their next book. Such writers - living or dead, whatever genre they write in, critically fashionable or not, academically approved or not - are those who not only meet our expectations but surpass them. That is the gift the great storytellers have. They tell the same stories over and over (how many stories are there?), but when they tell them they are new, they are news, they renew us, they show us the world made new."