I want to plug one of her lesser known books, Always Coming Home. It's set among a tribe of people living in the Bay Area way, way after some apocalypse has erased the memory of our civilization. Much of the book is reports from an anthropologist studying the people.<p>I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.
How timely. I just finished reading The Word for World is Forest last night.<p>Nobody likes a poo-pooer, but, holy moly, I thought it was unbelievable trash. Are her other books better? This one was "noble savages: the book". The Creechies can't even <i>conceive</i> of inter-species murder until Big Bad Comic Book Evil Guy (who just <i>loves</i> being evil) introduces it. The creechies don't know evil. They settle their disputes as all superior noble people would: through <i>art</i>.<p>I probably just got in my own way while reading. There was a lot of "wait.. they're sending _wood_ through interstellar space?". They have an ecology that can support a supply chain that produces food in excess to perform 40+ year round trips through space, but... they can't grow a tree? A tomato plant? Sure. A tree? Nah.<p>It might be a good kids book, if not for all the... raping.
Le Guin is a fantastic writer. The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Eye of the Heron are all excellent and thought provoking novels among Le Guin's other works.
One of the great tragedies of our time is that collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems. In the few hundred years before 1990, there was a lot of imagination of what could be, and many of those systems were attempted. But since then, it seems everywhere we are stuck.<p>Reading Ursula Le Guin's work is essential because she boldly tries to re-imagine. Not to say any of her fictional worlds should be made reality, but that we need to do serious intellectual work going forward. Surely, humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems.
I recently read A Wizard of Earthsea, and it took me a really long time to get through. Here's what I noted down after reading it:<p>I can see why (and how) this book is important and good, but it just took me so much active effort to keep reading it.
I read ULG's 'The Dispossessed' and while the writing is great, it more feels like social commentary with a mild flavour of sci-fi.<p>I suppose am struggling to articulate this better.<p>To give you a contrast, take Arthur C Clarke, a contemporary of hers. Consider his book 'A Fall of Moondust' (one of my favourites).<p>In ACC's book, there is some core peculiarity of the fundamental nature of the world that the story is entirely based on. The possibilities stemming from that one oddity is interesting from a scientific perspective.<p>Having said that, the characters in that book are nothing to write home about. They serve the necessary function for the plot but nothing too memorable.<p>ULG's plot on the other hand has no distinctive scientifically interesting peculiarity that it seems to be built on. It might as well have occurred on Earth just as it does in 'Anarres' or 'Urras'.<p>It feels like ULG's book is more about people/political theory/social commentary/human condition than any scientifically intriguing theory.<p>It's still a good read I guess, but it didn't scratch my sci-fi itch.
She is my favourite Sci-Fi writer! Her works like the Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness are true masterpieces! She wouldn’t like mw to call her Sci-Fi writer she called herself a speculative fiction writer. The fact that she was a woman gave a really new point of view to her writings.
Was just talking to a colleague about The Dispossessed. That book never did it for me. Left Of Hand Of Darkness on the other, erm, hand... wow. Fascinating premise. UKLG also did an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching that is worth a slow, contemplative readthrough.
In my opinion, Le Guin, Butler and more recently authors like Chambers all live in the same sphere of speculative fiction or "sci fi" if you like that is in complete opposition to Clark, Weir and others which have dominated the genre for a long time now. These stories are less about some interesting imaginary application of physics or the unknown in a vast mechanistic universe and more about how society and individuals relate and imagining the infinite ways these two forces can interact. Often the backdrop is secondary to the exploration of the characters and the society they live in. I think this type of story is really fundamental to our progress as a society and we should all talk more about these authors and the stories they told/tell. It makes me happy to see Le Guin talked about, critiqued and praised on HN today.<p>I think this is the talk where Le Guin talks about the continuity of this type of story telling and contrasts it with hard sci fi. Definitely worth a listen IMO.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PI1xwT2-74" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PI1xwT2-74</a>
How does Earthsea -trilogy compare to Harry Potter?<p>What I hate about Potter is that they play every day on Spectrum TV. Every day. And I'm paying for that.
The credentialism that permeates discussion in Bolshevik adjacent circles annoys me deeply.<p>Famous political authors that sold a lot of books don't bring any more credentials to an idea than if I said something in a 4chan post. Argue with the ideas you got from the author, don't keep using them like a religious figure!<p>So many comments here are just quoting things without pondering if it's bullshit. Sometimes it is!<p>For irony and fun here's a quote from PhD dropout Natalie Wynn:<p>There’s also a certain amount of genuine leftist bullshit passing itself off as scholarship. I was once in a comparative literature seminar that I foolishly took in the hopes of getting to read something written with a decent prose style, or at least something by an emotionally competent human being. Boy was I disappointed when on the first day the professor made two allusions to “my good friend Derrida.” Those are quotation marks around “my good friend” because he mentioned that Derrida was his friend every time it came up. Pass the cyanide, honey.<p>Anyway, the low point of this guy’s endless, beginningless, argument-free impromptu lectures came when he baldly asserted that the poetry of Milton had a direct influence on the workings of ISIS. Yes, this would be John Milton, the 17th century English poet, and ISIS, the contemporary Syrian terrorist organization. And what evidence did the professor adduce in support of this outrageous claim? None whatso-fucking-ever. And the other grad students in the room just sat there nodding knowingly, taking notes like a bunch of sycophants. No one raised their hand, no one said, “Excuse me professor, but what in Jesus’ name are you fucking talking about?” I didn’t even say anything. I had no spine!<p>The only explanation I can think of for this was that the professor had this reflexive hatred of himself, of English literature, of basically all of Western culture, and so he had to hallucinate that Islamic terrorism is in some way the outcome of over-zealously reading Paradise Lost.<p>I guess this is what being good friends with Derrida does to you.
The article gives a reading of Ursula Le Guin that falls from one merely political way to see the world (conquest) into another (global warming and human hubris) - plus a heavy dose of corresponding judgementality.<p>To me Ursula Le Guin's books are different still: I see them mostly as prompts for my emotion and as people living their life. One's life is only loosely tied to the political thought or environment around us. We are allowed to make our life one and the same in a political militant fashion but that is an option, a choice. We don't have to. In the books, we are presented worlds (often through the character growing up in it) and then we are presented the characters trajectories through them. Many sci-fi writers want to present political ideas through created worlds, of course. That is not Ursula Le Guin's dominion. And her worlds are certainly not reaching for "free from harm"! Where in the world does that one come from?!<p>What I read them for:<p>1) I love that many of her characters are paying attention. They are not simply surviving passively in the sense of always reacting and living past the current hardship. They are also not just as mindlessly choosing militant action or conquest.<p>2) I love above all the writing style. Immensely calm. And the language: poetic, smooth and emotion-prompting. Ursula Le Guin stands out for me in that direction. Perfect tone is rare, instilling emotion in me to this degree is very rare.<p>Just as The Magicians is written in a style that perfectly matches teen angst (as opposed to Harry Potter.)<p>And I note that Ursula Le Guin's teens usually don't have much angst - unrealistically so - and I'm fine with that - the rest makes up for it.<p>I highly recommend these books - but certainly not as the one major source of political creativity.
>Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic,<p>How many more years before the ideas of Freud are so removed from common usage that we no longer have to deal with their detritus.<p>I figure another 20-30.<p>on edit: maybe irritating me more than normal as I recently listened to a podcast where it was all about how, despite nobody believing Freud anymore, he was just so important and central that all ideas related to his incorrect ideas.