Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds | Hacker News Reader

Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds

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199 pointssamclemens61 comments

Great eassy. I read a few of her novels last year (Left Hand of Darkness, the Dispossessed, and some of her Earthsea novels). What struck me is even with the amount of effort that goes into building her worlds, she turns her lens back on her characters near the end, with them either figuring out something about themselves or how they relate to other people.

The "fate of the world" gets evoked a lot in popular fantasy/scifi nowadays but I really appreciate the way she chose to make her protagonists the final focus of her narratives. Don't want to spoil anything ;) so I'd encourage anyone that's interested to seek her work out.

In "The Left Hand of Darkness" I really struggled with naming, maybe because they didn't have a latin-based structure. But I really appreciated on the other hand her effort to make sense of the language, toponomy and so on all together.

I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year. I found the names and place names quite tricky too, but it helped reinforce the alieness of the setting. Ursula's writing is so earnest and immersive. Rigorous world building coupled with veritably human characters made for a wholly engaging and pleasurable read.

Currently reading it for the first time, and agree that Ursula's writing style is immersive, and also I find her quite poetic (some of the fables she weaves into the story are marvelous). I feel just as lost and confused as the envoy so far, which seems appropriate.

Also the geek in me loves the Ansible ;-)

I read it last year too.

[SPOILER ALERT]

. . . . .

I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man.

Otherwise the whole book read more like a fantasy novel than sci-fi. I found it rather boring too.

I remember being caught off guard by the main character being black, or at least dark-skinned. It was a really nice off-hand comment that shakes you out of the default world-view you can acquire or project when reading by inserting onself (younger white male in my case) into the novel. The way it was clearly established but then also not dwelt upon really struck me at the time I was reading it, and the entire novel still sticks with me.

She did the same thing with Earthsea:

>The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.

> I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man.

Try "Too Like Lightning" by Ada Palmer :)

Uh... spoiler alert!

I'm a bit confused by OP here - I didn't at all have that impression. I thought it was fairly clear from the start what the gender of the main protagonist was. Perhaps I misread...

The name didn't sound female to me "Genly Ai"... I know Ai as from Japanese, meaning "love" and I know a girl called that.

The story starts from his first-person perspective, and he talks about how he feels insecure and about his fancy robes.

The protagonist in Left Hand of Darkness is 100% a human male (and a bit of a man's man to boot).

I know, I just didn't think this for the first few pages.

It's not a spoiler. Genly is male and there's no attempt to hide this or any plot mystery about it. The ambivalence is in the gender of the natives of the planet Gethen.

Sorry.

Out of curiosity, what names did you have trouble with? Would you say this was one of your first scifi novels? I ask because I'm a native Spanish speaker and had no trouble at all with Le Guin's naming in The Left Hand of Darkness. I remember they were standard scifi-sounding names, though better than the usual fare of names like "R'Lyeh", "Cthulhu", "R'hllor", "Klingon" and "Qo'noS" and such like :)

Have you read The Lord of the Rings, and did you have trouble with the made up non-Latin names? (you'd be in good company: I know plenty of people have trouble with Tolkien languages, which I also find puzzling, because I simply assume "these are foreign names" and go on with the plot)

Such a legend - for an easy intro definitely the short stories in Birthday of the World are worth a read

I always had that feeling, that while she was a few steps ahead, on the outset of the journey through one of her worlds- neither me nor her knew where this would end. This whole journey was never there to put me, the reader in any state, not a ride through emotions heading for a foregone conclusion. I loved the dispossesed. Sun is mine, and always will be.

Perhaps unrelated - is there anywhere a repository of fictional worlds that creators can use for their projects at cost of free of charge?

This would be great for many industries - computer game development, board game development, movie creators, writers, etc. :)

That's a really interesting idea. I know there are lots of generators out there for worldbuilding purposes and I have made my own on the go for things like conceptual art or short fiction. But to your question, you might ask at /r/worldbuilding on Reddit, which has some really neat stuff going on a lot of the time. /r/rpg might also be helpful.

I hope this doesn't end up opening a horrid can of worms. What are the implications if the worlds and concepts overlap ?

At a personal level, I would be be very interested in learning/finding out such things though. Even more so if it is possible to automate this "discovery"

Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-)

BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing.

Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means.

A lot of fun, working this up :-)

You should read the short story “Glacial” in “Galactic North” by Alastair Reynolds.

Thanks, I just skimmed the Wikipedia summary out of curiosity. It looks like an interesting and pretty intense story!

My own idea was that the planet I rolled up hosted a sort of cargo-cult experiment, where the beings that hosted the computing infrastructure were using it for really basic tasks that were easily perceptible to their sensing skills, not understanding what it was, really. Their technological skills included rudimentary large-mass manipulation, and after making a place for this equipment and securing it, they had long since died out, while their "data center" was still flourishing and had stored extremely valuable data.

Oooh that’s real nice. I use a lot of those themes in fiction I write / blueprint (probing the limits of understanding, the interpretation of legacy by the inadequate living, etc)

The RPG game "Traveller" [sic] has a method for creating fictional worlds using a variety of dice rolls. The original game was created in the early 80s, but the multiple editions since have created system of remarkable depth. One supplement even was able to generate biomes mapped to a dodecahedral sphere.

Size, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Population, Government, Law level, Technology, all would dictate the kind of goods available, the political structures, the economics.

It was so easy to generate systems that the game came up with an Atlas of the Imperium which featured thousands of stars. I can confirm that a sufficiently motivated nerd could rustle up a RPG subsector (with 20-40 planetary systems) in an hour.

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