Reading more Ursula Le Guin (2019)
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
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.
I also think in some important ways it is not as narratively strong as her best works, a necessary tradeoff for what it does accomplish. It's very interesting to consider her being raised by an anthropologist, and her exceptional childhood exposure to Ishi, whom her father had known and her mother and brother separately wrote books about.
A thread running through all of her books is a deep human interest in the ways of peoples, and how their stories about themselves shape who they are and their relationship to a changing world. Always Coming Home is the book of her that is most, almost exclusively, focused on these concerns.
For a shorter story (~50 pages), I'd highly recommend Paradises Lost by her. Many people have written stories about generation ships, but this one is absolutely stunning and truly marvelous.
Some 30 years after I read it, I still use "heya" as my default greeting.
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 conceive of inter-species murder until Big Bad Comic Book Evil Guy (who just loves being evil) introduces it. The creechies don't know evil. They settle their disputes as all superior noble people would: through art.
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.
It might be a good kids book, if not for all the... raping.
My main problems with the story were: - The setting was almost unspeakably brutal, but there seemed to be almost no one interested in fighting those brutal systems. I could understand 1-2 characters being brainwashed to go along with the brutality, or even most, but no one seems to even attempt to go against the system. This made the setting feel unbelievable to me.
- There are two big twists at the end of the book. I won't spoil them, but they didn't feel like well-foreshadowed twists. The timelines for the different chapters weren't clear, which made it hard to guess the first, and the 'clues' felt like bad writing mistakes. For the second, the only clue is what words people don't say.
The plot also hinges on a misunderstanding of how tsunamis work, but that's forgivable to me.
Generally i liked the fifth season, but i think people think its a bit deeper than it actually is. I find le guin to be a bit more nuanced and leave you thinking a bit more. The fifth season felt a bit more: evil people are obviously evil. The other side is i think jemisin has better developed characters than le guin. A lot of le guin (much like a lot of older scifi) feel very much like idea books where character development & plotting came second.
If you like those two authors, i would really reccomend Octavia Butler, who i think is a bit similar but better than both (lets see if i start a flamewar ;)
> I feel like in real life, that's how things work. People mostly accept the brutality of the society they find themselves in, because its normal.
For something like modern day police brutality, sure, most people aren't active advocates.
However, I think that really understates the level of brutality in The Fifth Season. The main characters are the oppressed people, like Jewish people during the Holocaust or Black people under Southern-slavery levels of oppressed. Yet there appears to be absolutely 0 mention of resistance fighters or an underground railroad. There appears to be 0 active resistance anywhere, even beyond the main characters. No protests, no riots, no terrorist attacks, no one even suggesting that maybe outright eugenics and genocide is a bad idea and then getting disappeared. It doesn't have to be the main characters getting involved, just a rumor that someone somewhere is doing something. If someone punched me in the face, I wouldn't let them get away with it and then punch myself a couple extra times for good measure.
Often times books turn abuse into the catalyst for a noble struggle and cathartic improvement, when in fact that often isn't the case. There's large swathes of human history where oppressive regimes were powerful enough to quickly and brutually suppress rebellions. When violence and abuse are normalized in a culture, it can take a long time and a lot of failed struggles to truly unwind the violence.
I think Jemisin is actively trying to explore that mentality, which is pretty brave because it does make the characters off putting. As the reader you want so badly for them to rise out of the muck and take on a noble struggle, but they're caught up in the cycle of violence.
I say this with respect for your viewpoint, I think you're being very fair about expressing your response, and I completely see where you're coming from.
Meanwhile Octavia Butler is absolutely one of my favorite authors regardless of genre. Her work stuck with me for quite a while, as has le Guin's (specifically, Left Hand of Darkness, I've actually had trouble getting into some of her other works, though I mean to try again). Butler to me is a visionary alongside my other favorites in the sci fi canon.
2. The biggest offense, of course, is the word "science" in her being labelled a "science fiction" author. A 4th grade understanding of the first chapter of a geology book that is immediately violated is not "science fiction".
Of course, I am mainly upset about the destruction of the Nebula Awards by the inclusion of the Fifth Season in the list among authors who actually understand science, computer science, served in the military, and overall have, and further, an understanding of how things work. Jemisin might be on par with that guy who wrote about magic balls catching lightning (Sanderson) in the Stormlight Archive, but neither of them belong on a good science fiction list.
On your second point: The Nebula Awards specifically target "science fiction" and "fantasy" genres. I'm quite widely read in science fiction. I took a look at the list of novels that have won or been finalists for the Nebula Awards. It turns out I've read quite a few of them, scattered over the decades the Nebulas have existed. The Fifth Season is far from the only set of books with fantastical elements to have won, and the ones I've read that have won have plenty of world building elements that would be incorrect by a fourth grade textbook (FTL? Reincarnation? Fire breathing dragons?). Yes, the Game of Thrones novels (a Song of Ice and Fire), though quite excellent, are quite firmly in the realm of fantasy, and they were often Nebula finalists! By your criteria, the Nebula Awards were "destroyed" a long time ago. Several books, including some from the very early years of the Nebula Awards, are now called "science fantasy", i.e. science fiction that leans into fantastical elements. The Fifth Season is actually typically labeled as "science fantasy".
If the Fifth Season "destroyed" the Nebula Awards, then you would see more recent winners being almost exclusively science fantasy. I haven't read as many of the newer winners as I have older winners, but two of my favorite novels of recent years won or were finalists: Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is pretty much a core science fiction novel, and Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, which is even more fantastical than the Broken Earth.
One of my favorite recent-years science fiction novels, Children of Time, surprisingly didn't get a Nebula, but it did get a Hugo. Looking at its publishing year though, 2015, I see why! Three Body Problem was nominated, and Annihilation, which I absolutely adore (but can't spell), won that year.
You brought up Martin - he has a passing understanding of history, combat, and was a veteran (aka is somewhat grounded in reality while writing fantasy), which is why Gemisin and Brandenson should not be used in the same sentence with him, and definitely not with Tolkien.
I read the first novel of her trilogy. I didn't like it. I have #2 and #3 but I've not bothered. I may never do so.
Frankly, hero worshipping an author isnt great. Everyone has highs and lows in their creative output. And the cultural milieu that the author is working in plays a part too (how many books about trees being cool, man, got published between 1967 and 1972?)
Dont let TWfWiF put you off LeGuin. She had a lot to say that is worthwhile to read.
It's also not at all hard sf. That doesn't impugn its value, but does mean that you're not going to get anything out of it if you try to read it like you would The Martian.
I like and respect Le Guin, but maybe not this one so much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1bpxs0c/the_word_for...
I read it as a teen and really liked it, but you do a great job of poo-pooing it haha.
There is TWFWIF, and there's also Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" which has the core idea of teleoperator somehow transferring his consciousness into the remote android, and there's some of Pocahontas for the resource-extraction themes – which is also why some called Avatar "Dances with Smurfs" for its references to "Dances with Wolves".
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The pun here being that "mélange" is both the French for a "mix" or "blend" and also the life- and consciousness-extending drug in Frank Herbert's Dune, which itself is a melange of a SF novel and also a roman à clef of the Great Powers-backed takeover of Arabia by the House of Ibn Saud, in which melange represents oil. Oil is the magical substance plentiful in desert Arabia which enabled long-distance movement for the Great Powers of the West, as melange enabled inter-stellar travel for the Empire in Dune.
It ended up getting copied by fern gully and then james camerons avatar. But this was the very very first of the trope.
But I agree when I read it, it wasn't good at all.
I recommend "Worlds of exile and illusion" It's really good. The book is one epic story told through the lens of three smaller stories.
It's the dryness, for me. She evokes the setting so clearly and in so few words, it took me by surprise. Also my first exposure to thoughtful anarchist ideas, which has been fun.
That and Wizard of Earthsea. Which is as spare, poetic, and strange as any YA magic fiction book wishes it could be.
That set my expectations for the book and I was able to enjoy it for what it was. It probably also helped that I knew that writing style wasn't typical for her given that I'd read at least seven other books by her before The Word for World is Forest.
I find her novels tend to be either great or terrible (e.g i loved the disposed, left hand of darkness, the beginning place, but hated always coming home and city of illusions).
So if you didn't like one novel its definitely possible you might like others. Of course maybe you just don't like her style.
Yes. The Word for World is Forest is one of her weakest books.
Maybe it was just me not trying hard enough at the time (a decade+ ago); I wanted to read LHoD but couldn't get my hands on it. I know it's now available as an ebook more easily, but I remain a bit peeved about how it was the one thing I couldn't buy legitimately at the time.
That combined with not enjoying Earthsea (I read two or three books?), makes me biased to keep reading any online recommendations but Le Guin.
It's currently available in paperback.
On the other hand I was very disappointed from 'A Wizard Of Heartsea'.
It's not perfect, but I think where the other books are interesting but simple stories for children, Tehanu feels like it was written for those children as they've grown up - it's basically (without spoiling too much) the retirement and twilight years of characters from the rest of the series. And as a result, it feels like a more applicable or relevant story.
I didn't like the first Earthsea novel and haven't read any others. I suspect it's a book that tends to work better for young readers, or older readers nostalgic for things they read in their youth.
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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-gu...
Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems) , but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives.
Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?)
There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple doesn't seem to me to be the act of someone who is in favour of combining spiritual with temporal power, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_1st_centur... looks like a muddle from here.
Also Matthew 16:18, where Jesus declares Peter as "the rock" upon which his church shall be built, is well known. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_Peter
Although personally I would claim the modern church owes more to Paul (for better or worse) than Peter.
There are also other conceptions of God beyond the coercive demiurge. Again I think we should be careful when throwing around words like God as though we all agree on the meaning.
«
“All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus—that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.”
»
(Ibid.)
Indeed it does: It's what the first "C" in my user id stands for.
And being my given name is the only way it applies to me.
This is also termed "anarcho-communism" within the academic literature and grassroots movements, just FYI (A common misconception of anarchism is that it is a 'lack of law and order' -- it is merely the lack of centralization). The Bolshevik implementation of Communism was called State-Capitalism for a long time by Lenin himself, and many Communist thinkers (I'm thinking of Tony Cliff, who was exceptionally progressive for his time) disagree with the Bolshevik implementation of Communism.
for which, see Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (appearing in [Orwell49])
> "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." —EAB
That sounds about right. Any system that concentrates power seems to go the same way in a generation or two.
Thank you
Anarchism is not chaos
But neither is it a recipe
These days, with anarchist ideas deeply ingrained in many places, anarchism is a way of thinking
Death squads, Banana Republics, indefinite US embargo and coup attempts, Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, risking the US military invading you in order to avoid the Domino Effect.
> Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism.
Distributism as described in that article is socialism modeled on the ideal of the small-time craftsman or whatever of that time. That would probably be called naive by normal socialists (certainly by communists like Leninists) but it has some similarities with socialism. On the other hand it seems to outright reject anything like the modern capitalism that we are dealing with in the present.
> Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
Riffs on socialism, an idea which is over two-hundred years old and has adherents all over the globe.
Fought against and repressed is not the same as niche.
I think you may be splitting hairs with regards to terminology. I said niche as in unpopular and not well known. I think it and many other systems match that description and are interesting to talk about.
Freedom to form death squads, Banana Republics, establish indefinite [US] embargo and coup attempts, help out Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, freedom to invade countries just because they are communist.
Second of all, where is the symmetry? The common thread here is that some countries wanted to self-determine and use their resources for themselves. But then America/American corporations didn’t want that because they wanted those things for the corporations. National-level socialist ambitions thwarted by corporations. Is then the supposedly (hypothetical) evil of a Soviet Union thwarting upstart capitalist corporation in its backyard? Hmm, if that makes sense to you, whatever.
EDIT: I realize now that this is another commenter. But the same applies.
(It should also be noted that whether "feudalism" is even a thing that can be meaningfully defined is contentious, and many modern historians consider it a largely nonsensical retroactive attempt to fit very diverse systems and patterns into a single category.)
In general, look up "libertarian socialism" - it is an umbrella term for left anarchists of various stripes as well as more moderate socialists who don't shy away from some degree of centralization but still place a lot of emphasis on avoiding any kind of authoritarianism as crucial to success of any such political system. I would particularly draw attention to Murray Bookchin and his "libertarian municipalism", not the least because Le Guin herself did in later prefaces to her books.
For real-world examples, something along these lines (but less, shall we say, theoretically pure - which shouldn't come as a surprise!) has been practiced for a while in the Chiapas in EZLN-affiliated communities, and more recently also in AANES (Rojava). As you rightly note, the real question there is how well it all would scale to a modern industrialized society - Chiapas are pretty rural, Rojava somewhat less so but still hardly comparable to what first-worlders are generally used to. It's also interesting to note that the Rojava take on it is a milder version where e.g. cooperatives are encouraged but there are still plenty of privately owned businesses.
You'll find a lot of this pre-1914, but also pre-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#:~:text=Ac....
0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed - https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire...
We've had communism in my country, never again.
After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
* Danke, Gorbi!
You have to kill all humans to end capitalism.
What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.
Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.
Programming languages are often reduced to a blurb along the lines of "everything is a ${foo}"; what do socio-economic-political systems reduce to?
my attempts:
tribalism - everything works like an extended family
feudalism - everything works like animals in a barnyard
capitalism - everything works like marketplaces in a port
communism - everything is haunted by the spectre of class warfare
democracy - everything is the electorate's fault
aristocracy - everything is the selectorate's fault
monarchy - everything is the prime minister's party's fault
anarchy - everything is voluntary
warlordism - everything is either voluntary, or subject to ultima ratio regum
Great game that:
Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
“See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,” Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.
»
The nameplate on the Reason railgun:
-----
REASON
version 1.0B7
Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system
Ng Security Industries, Inc.
PRERELEASE VERSION—NOT FOR FIELD USE
DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA
— ULTIMA RATIO REGUM —
...right that's why it never stops being salient on social media like an undead beaten horse and you're talking about it right now.
Maybe one problem is that imagination qua alternatives tends to stop rather short, and idealists too often consider the details and consequences to be an afterthought (everything just gets sorted if only you're rid of Capitalism). Or disregard history in some cases.
It's comforting that the suggested approach by those who aren't fond of State Socialism (e.g. ancoms) is some variation on "do anarchism/syndicalism until communism happens", which seems harmless. They can get the worker-owned coffee shop out of their system.
* 1961. sometime I need to watch it with subtitles to check how it scores on the Bechdel Test. Cameo by Sputnik.
I'm afraid you know the point you were making but I'm still completely clueless as to what it may have been?
I mean, it's not like these books were ever taken very seriously as political works either...
(for that matter, it may be worth pursuing other entries in "Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography From 1516 to the Present" https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ )
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.
Trouble with Lichen is about the discovery of a genuine anti-ageing compound, but we don't see anyone super old or the social consequences. We see the people who discover it and what they choose to do next.
The Outward Urge is a family with several generations of spacemen in it. Nothing really happens, we see a few snapshots of their lives through the decades as human activity out in the solar system increases.
The Midwitch Cuckoos is perhaps the most unexcitingly told story of its kind (no spoilers) but not worse for it.
Web is a nice weaving of ancient curse and modern (1950s) civilisation into an imminent end of the world.
> He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.
> He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"
> "When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"
> He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."
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> "I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."
> "Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"
> "With the annihilation of space."
---
How can you not want to read more!? I remember this, such a moving scene, from reading it many years ago. The entire story is rife with tension, in my view. How will the destinies of all these many billions of people unfold from the actions taken in these few moments by these few people?
The degree to which people find it engaging or boring varies a lot from person to person.
I think you'll find the pacing much improved.
It may be that it hit me at a particular time in my life: I read it in my early teens and the way gender was expressed in the novel, the sort of tidal shift between masculine and feminine based on circumstance, really spoke to me at a time I was figuring all that out in my own psyche. I wonder if a lot of the gender exploration in the book may seem more trite and typical now.
I will say that I enjoyed her short stories a lot more! They are fairly deep but entertaining, with great twists and surprises
The Wind's Twelve Quarters is a good anthology -- in that one, I liked The Rule of Names, Semley's Necklace and The Word of Unbinding. In another anthology (I think), Direction of the Road -- phenomenal. Most of these can be found standalone online
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas I enjoyed less, but it's a short read and fairly important culturally. NK Jemisin, who wrote the Broken Earth trilogy (highly recommend it), wrote a sort of tongue-in-cheek short-story in response to it called The Ones Who Stay and Fight -- also worth reading.
My favourite collection is "The Birthday of the World", especially the stories "Solitude" and "Paradises Lost". (Maybe skip "Old Music and the Slave Women". It builds on other books and is incomprehensible without them; or at least it was to me.)
Not saying there's anything wrong with your experience (certainly it's taken me active effort to read some highly recommended books, and sometimes I've quit), just that this is likely a YMMV thing.
I suppose am struggling to articulate this better.
To give you a contrast, take Arthur C Clarke, a contemporary of hers. Consider his book 'A Fall of Moondust' (one of my favourites).
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.
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.
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'.
It feels like ULG's book is more about people/political theory/social commentary/human condition than any scientifically intriguing theory.
It's still a good read I guess, but it didn't scratch my sci-fi itch.
Agreed that on the spectrum of politics/society to scientific theory/gizmo, Le Guin leans heavily towards politics/society.
Whether that is one's cup of tea is a different matter. It sometimes is for me, and sometimes not; depends on the mood. For an author who was also into societal issues, I prefer James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), because she injected more of the alienness/weirdness I tend to seek when reading scifi.
I do like Ursula, don't get me wrong! I'm just not always in the mood for reading her, while I'm almost always in the mood to read more James Tiptree Jr!
(On that note, I just realized back in 2019 they renamed the "James Tiptree Jr Award" to "Otherwise", for disappointing reasons. Oh, well)
It’s a pity about the award, that’s how I first found out about her. And for the stupidest reason, too.
Those commenting on LeGuin's heavy-handed The Word for World is Forest might like Brightness Falls From the Air, when they get to the end. (Tiptree herself did have at least one Forest-grade cringy polemic short story, Morality Meat, paired against Phillip K Dick's The Pre-Persons. Maybe writers can't help themselves, but editors should know better.)
(In the notes for this story, PKD claims Joanna Russ offered to "beat him up" as a reaction, which in itself is an overreaction!)
That said, there's plenty of sci-fi (and by that I mean books that have been categorized as such for so long, it's generally considered undisputed - like, say, pretty much all of Bradbury and most of Simak) that are much softer.
Le guin does it with social issues. Someone like Greg Egan does it with laws of physics. The formula is both oddly similar yet totally different.
P.s. i'm not sure i would consider Clarke exactly a contemporary of Le Guin. They certainly heavily overlap, but i think Clarke kind of belongs to the previous generation - at least stylistically wise.
How bizarre.
My reading -- and I was a kid, it was so long ago -- is this:
Communism is inherently flawed because if resources can be accumulated then some will rise in wealth and power. If that country lacks the resources, then there are other countries from which they can be taken.
But in the Disposessed this cannot happen. It is a thought experiment: how could one set up a communist society that would be stable and work?
If you have a whole planet that has few resources, but it's colonized by another which has many.
But planets are far apart. So instead, it's a moon. Moons are relatively close. Earth humans got there in the 1960s, almost without computers, without microprocessors.
But why?
OK, we have a big rich parent planet with lots of resources, but a troublesome political minority who aren't happy with the distribution of resources. That's certainly plausible.
So they ship them offworld to the marginally-habitable moon. It needs help to get going but it's so bleak nobody wants it. (So no territory need be taken from anyone.) There can be no acquisition of external resources; it's too far away. There can be no emigration back to a better life, unless they build spacecraft. They're stuck there, but they wanted to be, to show that their system could work. (Though the children have no choice.)
So they do.
It's a beautiful carefully and minutely calculated model of how communism could be made to work, and it couldn't hang together unless it were a habitable moon of a more-habitable planet.
It's perfect. It's flawless. It has to be how it is. It couldn't happen here or anywhere else.
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.
MINOR SPOILER
It describes an AI / algorithmic form of government that probably would never work but is interesting to think about and makes for great fiction
Unknown technologies or applications of the future will likely cause further evolution and possibly revolution in how we structure our economic and social structures and I think its both fascinating and important to think and talk about these things!
My pet favorite is the anarchic utopia of the Culture from Ian M Banks' Culture novels. Obviously impossible without the near infinite processing, energy and matter resources enabled by the Minds and the Ships they control but still fun to think about (and even aspire to value-wise in many cases IMO)
Also as I mentioned elsewhere I love Ian M Banks' Culture series.
I would love to find other authors like Becky Chambers shes got great prose and is a great antidote to the pessimism of lots of other fiction I read.
What I hate about Potter is that they play every day on Spectrum TV. Every day. And I'm paying for that.
Potter is a goofy lightning speed read. Much of it doesn't even make sense (see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for a take on that.)
Some people claim here that Earthsea is aimed at young adults. It's readable by young adults but it's far too slow and calm to be of much interest to most young adults. And there is much more to be found in there by older readers.
No, Earthsea's 6 books plus short stories are a peaceful but sometimes intense, slow, poetic and extremely emotion inducing view of the life of the main wizard character. From young wizard seeking his education in A Wizard of Earthsea, through questing, failing magic, retirement and return of the ex-wizard - and a few tales of other wizards in the same world; plus the old wizard and settling accounts. Magic in Earthsea is not used lightly (at least not by the main character). It is largely about knowing the true name of things. The hero sees the many problems of the world but does not rush to wand them away. Magic is not day to day housekeeping spells and conveniences and practical jokes - but can be applied to influence things that matter.
Earthsea as a whole is a masterpiece.
For a third direction to magic, I always include The Magicians (the book trilogy although the first couple TV seasons are also good) where we have magic as a highly unstable and poorly controlled field of ... physics or something - being taught to angst-ridden but also very sure of themselves teens by instructors who know that this stuff will kill you if you half glance away. And it does. But that same unstable high-power stuff is also the literal gate to entire other worlds - equally irresistible to our, ermmmm, heroes? Just as the language for Earthsea is spot-on, so is the writing style for The Magicians fitting for these completely different characters and genre of magic.
The Magicians is a masterpiece.
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!
So many comments here are just quoting things without pondering if it's bullshit. Sometimes it is!
For irony and fun here's a quote from PhD dropout Natalie Wynn:
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.
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!
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.
I guess this is what being good friends with Derrida does to you.
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?!
What I read them for:
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.
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.
Just as The Magicians is written in a style that perfectly matches teen angst (as opposed to Harry Potter.)
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.
I highly recommend these books - but certainly not as the one major source of political creativity.
Yes. But certainly as one major source of political creativity.
Sympathetic criticism of anarchist thinking (The Disposesd) was most welcome
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.
I figure another 20-30.
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.
Wholesale trash thought. Man, even a mildly intelligent teenager has surpassed this level of free-association. But the age of the concept and its Barnum effect explanatory behaviour makes it the home of every mediocre mind. The only risk, I suppose, is that if we end this obvious sign, we remove a clear signal of sophomoric thought.
Freud was fashionable beyond the reality of his importance, they said.
Then the "Freud as misinderstood" revisionists ruled, for a while.
Then it was fashionable to discredit and mock Freud. He became the epitome of all that's "unscientific".
Then the neo-Freudians came along and was fashionable to denounce the rigid, autistic positivists who so loudly mocked Freud.
And so it goes.
Meanwhile his nephew Edward Bernays totally transformed Western culture into what we see today... a fantasy driven garden of individual Utopian projects.
And if you bracket the crazy penis-envy unconscious analysis stuff aside, then "Civilisation and Its Discontents" remains one of the most prescient discourses on our current condition ever written [0].
There's one great test that a thinker is not irrelevant... that people are still talking about them 100 years later.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/11000-year-old-statu...
I remember one that I read when I was a teen - intro to soft science book supposed that rockets were phallic in shape because man wished to rape outer space.
So every now and then I'm thinking finally done with that codswallop and suddenly it jumps out at you from an unexpected place.
We should all be reading more Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand is neither a good writer nor a good ideologue.