Ursula Le Guin Books
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This books explains so many different sides of humanity.
On a more personal note: After reading it a dozen times there are still parts I need to cry. Just thinking about the strong emotions in parts of the book waters my eyes right now.
I tried "the left hand of darkness" and didn't like it. Somehow it read more like mediocre fantasy than scifi.
I guess that could be either fantasy or science fiction, but since it has spaceships it must be the latter.
I look forward to the day when spaceships become as mundane as trains and helicopters, so that their presence alone will not make a novel "science fiction".
Le Guin never identified her books as science fiction. Sadly the world can't seem to look at a book without shoving it into the bounds of a familiar genre. This doesn't help readers, either, as GP was apparently given the wrong expectations by these labels.
Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" spoke more to me, and it's also more cultural exploration than science.
IMO Le Guin and someone like Heinlein were two sides of the same strand of SF. They're both moralists rather than technical speculators, and in their own way they have a didactic streak where the morality is confidently presented but rather heavy-handed.
Although The Dispossessed is politically ambiguous, it's not ambiguous in an unfathomable, mysterious, or unconfident way. Neither is something like Dune, or the Culture novels. Or even Asimov's Foundation.
Part of the appeal of these authors is that they seem quite sure of their political and anthropological sophistication. While their characters may struggle, there's never a sense the authors feel they could be completely blindsided by human or alien anthropology, or steamrollered by non-human influences which are incomprehensible and impossible to deal with.
My observation is that most sci-fi is set in a world mostly similar to ours, except for one aspect/tech that's dialed to 11. Fantasy has a much looser attachment to our world, and sometimes the weirder, the better. Also, each has its own genre-tropes that can be used (or subverted) but barely translate to the other - I'm yet to see a fantasy story that is grounded in egalitarianism.
I don't remember where I read it but what you just described is one of the best strategies for writing scifi that many of the most well known authors used. I'd wager it is the defining quality of science fiction from a historical perspective: it's a form of fiction that split the difference between vanilla fiction and fantasy that just happened to grow popular in the 20th century's golden era of scientific research. This was the era of boundless optimism with flying cars and the World Fair's Futurama so a fuzzy genre that took our world and changed one abstract thing or dialed it up to 11 (alien invasion! total surveillance! AI! galaxy far far away!) became science fiction because authors chose convenient plot points based on the cultural zeitgeist of the time.
On the surface the difference between science fiction and fantasy isn't all that big ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") but I think fundamentally they're different approaches to imagining a literary universe. The former is based in reality but the "science fiction" part is a plot device to implement the one aspect of the universe the author wants to change, whereas in fantasy it's supposed to be a new universe whose rules/laws are only vaguely related to our own because the author just happens to also be human.
Edit five minutes later: Found it! Philip K Dick wrote in a letter (from The Collected Short Stories Volume 1):
> I will define science fiction, first, by saying what sf is not. It cannot be defined as "a story (or novel or play) set in the future," since there exists such a thing as space adventure, which is set in the future but is not sf: it is just that: adventures, fights and wars in the future in space involving super-advanced technology. Why, then, is it not science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate world story or novel. So if we separate sf from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what then do we have that can be called sf?
> This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society -- or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one -- this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author's mind,
> Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances.
> Thus "good science fiction" is a value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.
This is what I explained to my high school teacher when she talked sf down because I wanted to write about Alastor by Vance.
It looked like an odd system where presumably you were free but conditions were so hars and social pressure so strong that you did what was required. Sweden in space desert.
Actual anarchists are generally interested in how to design a society that can function at a high level without leaders. This usually involves some mix of process and committees, with some serious thought about how to handle delegation of decision making without concentrating power in too few hands.
One of the benefits of hierarchy is that decision comes with personal responsibility (skin in the game?). Diluting all responsibility onto the whole population mean no accountability and shadow power structures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
"social pressure so strong"
Wasn't that one of the points of the book?
I decided I'd start reading her scifi novels in near chronological order and began with The Left Hand of Darkness which I found devastatingly good. This is the one mentioned in the interview where Genly Ai the observer is embedded on a planet where the humanoid species are in the main genderless and only become male or female during a period of "kemmer" to reproduce. I can't do it justice here but I couldn't put the book down.
Next up were the three previous novels; Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions. These are contained in a handy single volume published under the S.F. Masterworks imprint. All of these are also excellent novels, if a little short.
I've just started The Dispossessed and thus far it's holding my attention.
I think if you've never considered reading Le Guin's scifi then I can definitely recommend from the limited sampling I gotten through so far. Some folks might be put off by how old these novels are, but Le Guin cleverly shy's away from using technology as a plot driver (perhaps with the exception of the "ansible") so they don't feel dated. Her writing and story telling is as fresh today as it probably was back in the 60's and 70's.
Also, and I almost forgot, Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" which is quite disturbing and thought provoking.
I've been reading a lot of books from Project Gutenberg over the last couple of decades. Most of their collection ends in the 1920's, so Le Guin seems pretty modern to me by comparison.
People who consider something from the 1960's or 70's to be "too old" are really missing out on so much amazing literature.
To me, newer stuff tends to be much worse than the old.
Maybe, but it seems more like an application Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap). The filter of history is fantastic for leaving a lot of the poor quality stuff behind. Contemporary writing (novels, short stories) haven't been filtered for us yet. This leads me to usually favor older writing (even just 2-3 years old) over truly new stuff unless I'm a fan of the author or have received a recommendation from friends who are more voracious fiction readers than me and who I have similar taste to.
This year there are 8 novels that appear on either list (http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2021-hugo-awards/, https://nebulas.sfwa.org/sfwa-announces-the-56th-annual-nebu...). I've read three (Piranesi, The City We Became, The Midnight Bargain). Piranesi isn't speculative at all, just pretty and thought provoking and foreign in a way that's difficult to describe. The City We Became and the Midnight Bargain are both interesting. I found TMB to be at points a bit heavy handed with the metaphor, but still thoroughly enjoyable and interesting. Both it and The City We Became are very openly political, in the case of The City We Became, very openly so in a very contemporary way.
That said, it's also a good way to find authors. Polk, Jemisin, and Moreno-Garcia have other books that I've read or will soon read that are all critically acclaimed and IMO very good, thought provoking, sci fi, in the way that adventure books like Sanderson's aren't (though those are still great to read). I should note that I haven't had the chance to get to Le Guin yet (except for Omelas, which is great, and I see influence of in, for example, Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy). She's on my list, but I want to finish up basically everything by Jemsin first. Hopefully this year!
I completely agree. Personally I read fairly widely in a temporal sense, as long as the story engages me I'll run with it. I think the point I was trying to make is that a lot of folks can be put off by scifi thinking it's a genre brim full of space lasers, FTL space craft and nasty aliens and not much else; when in fact it's much much more than that. This part of the interview stood out as evidence of that:
> This was when she got the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters in 2014; in her speech she not only thanked the committee for giving her the award, but said it was high time that speculative fiction writers were recognised as participants in the culture of literature, instead of being sort of segregated to a ghetto—she called them “realists of a larger reality.” And she reminded everyone how important science fiction is because the genre is about “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.”
But sadly it's been a long time, if ever (I haven't checked), since we saw any speculative fiction making it onto shortlists or winning prizes on say the Booker Prize[0], because it's not "literary" enough (bloody snobs).
Finally I should also say that I also enjoy a good rip-roaring interstellar and galactic scale space opera as much as I enjoy more nuanced writing.
Yeah, snobbishness is a huge problem in literature, visual art, and music... in all culture, probably.
Some people want desperately to be the gatekeepers of taste, and unfortunately the rest of society lets them get away with it.
On the other extreme, there's a lot of trashy cultural production ("kitsch") which I find problematic myself, because it tends to be so trite and superficial.. but as a cultural relativist I have a hard time mounting any kind of serious argument against it.
I guess if someone likes something, that should be enough, and there's really not much anyone can say against it that doesn't amount to anything more than "I don't like it".
That conclusion doesn't sit very easy with me, but I can't think of a way around it.
Twenty or thirty years ago it was different, because the channels for discovery and discussion were so impoverished for anything remotely niche, but that hasn't been the case for a while now.
And fans of whatever the scifi equivalent is of the trashiest of romance novels might never get to seriously give Ursula Le Guin a chance.
I think that's a pity.
People are getting balkanized and locked in to their favorite echo chambers. In one sense its good, because you're not getting your tastes and preferences dictated to from the ivory tower by some gatekeeper elites, but on the other hand I think a lot of people are missing out on discovering some amazing art, music, and literature because they're so enclosed in their little bubble from which many never dare to or even think of escaping.
I love the /idea/ of Foundation - both the 'science of history' idea, and the idea of making every chapter a different set of characters, tracing the arc of history. But found it to be pretty terrible as an actual book when I went back to re-read it a year or two back. It's 1/3 good idea, 1/3 engineer's disease on galactic scale, and 1/3 creepy male lens. (like, seriously, if an author treats women as nothing more than background furnishings, useful for occasional groping, I start doubting their ability to say interesting+useful things about human society real quick. And 60's sci fi has a TON of this perspective.)
Le Guin is literally exceptional. A fantastic author, who I've loved since I was a kid and can always go back to.
Part of the function of time is to filter out the timeless from the merely timely...
This is such a beautiful observation.
As a kid, I wasn't into "old" fantasy and scifi, but recently have started reading them. And I must say, there are a lot of authors with some beautiful foresight, especially Le Guinn: the entire Earthsea Cycle talks about some deep psychological introspection, about how power dynamics can affect different sects of society differently, about the notion of "inherent evil". This stuff is as timeless as human society.
But you're right in some respects, thus far for me, Le Guin has been totally captivating and obviously a far better writer than Asimov. But remember she also started her writing in different times.
Also, I don't quite remember any "groping" in Foundation. I know there's some stories about Asimov having wandering hands, but I don't remember that in the books.
The Lathe of Heaven is about a man whose dreams change reality—rewriting the past so everything fits—but his therapist is trying to use that power for his own gain and to create a utopia. Things don't exactly go as planned though.
I couldn't get into The Dispossessed. I will try again, though.
I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was a teen and loved it, struggled with the second book (Tombs of Atuan) at the time, then returned to it 30 years later and now consider it a truly fine work as a story and an examination of religion, tradition, and belief.
Immediately after completing Atuan, moved on to the third book in the series (and liked it) but couldn't get into #4.
I've also enjoyed her short stories, including some of her later collections from the 1990s and 2000s.
A book that is seldom on her "best of" lists but I think should be there IMHO: The Beginning Place. I first read it in the U.K. (with an alternate title, Threshold) but returned to it recently and it holds up in terms of the story and the scope of the strange world it describes. Not to mention the beauty of science fiction or literature or prose or whatever you want to call it in the hands of a master:
The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea. His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.
I strongly recommend #5 (Tales from Earthsea) though, it integrates the new ideas of #4 but more in tune with the original atmosphere of the world. And the plot doesn't depend on having read any of the previous books.
Reading different translations of it is like looking at a diamond through its many facets.
Outside of the Hainish Cycle The Lathe of Heaven is also worth checking out.
Those who haven't seen it should be prepared for a very low-budget film which definitely feels like a 1980 period piece, but I personally enjoyed it anyway.. and conceptually it's way better than a lot of much higher budget, newer movies.
It's for people who prefer to watch something that makes them think, instead of the usual scifi fare of effects, explosions, fights, and people running around in skin-tight outfits.
The way it examines what a genderless society might look like and the differences is incredibly intelligent, yet is just the setting - there's a thoroughly interesting plot over the top.
And the feminist bent (among other things) makes it feel incredibly modern - I remember being impressed it was written in 1969.
Artists, musicians, and writers are often on the cutting edge of cultural phenomena, and that probably goes double for those scifi writers who spend their lives imagining truly different future societies. It usually takes a while for mainstream culture (which tends to be far more conservative) to catch up... if they ever do.
I've been kind of out of touch with the current state of sci for decades now, and wonder what new visions of humanity I've been missing out on.
Would any informed scifi fans care to give a quick summary of recent developments?
Sure, it's a collection of blog posts and not a novel. But what an incredible insight into intricate, carefully observed lens through which she views the world.
I've never wanted to just keep reading someone talk about their new cat more.
It pioneered the wizarding school trope, later popularized by Harry Potter, as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon.
A Wizard of Earthsea is my all time favorite book.
First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people, although I recall some TV/film adaptions were not particularly faithful to that much to Le Guin's disappointment.
The other is a phrase that I still use to this day: "tired is stupid". Particularly when I've been debugging something for many hours, late into the evening, I find that some rest and coming back to it later is almost always the solution to my problem. Turns out PEBKAC does not just apply to lusers.
The book is really not about race, and racial issues are pretty much non-existent in the book.
She's always been very vocal about this aspect, and how the diversity in her work was very deliberate and "snuck past" publishers and readers defences (at the time first published) by first mentioning it a bit in, and how publishers and cover artists at various point tried making the characters white:
> My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
[1] https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv...
I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11, and didn't even notice the race of the characters. I don't think much of it is made in the book. It's just a passing description.
Much, much later, as an adult I heard someone mention it, and I went back and checked and sure enough they were right. But the characters' race had absolutely nothing to do with why I loved the book.
The characters could have been blue, or purple, or glowing orange for all I cared. The book was not about that.
Er... also was a pretty important influence on one of the most important cyberpunk works of all time...
I absolutely hated LotR and everything else from Tolkien that I've read.
To me The Wizard of Earthsea is infinitely better, and Tolkien is not even in the same league as Le Guin.
The hobbits were also annoying for their one-dimensional, unimaginative, middle-class goodness.
Yes, I know that one of the reason Tolkien's work seems so cliche today is that so much has been influenced by it. Maybe if I'd read it in the 40's or 50's I would have been more impressed, but as I read it in the 80's, by then it already seemed way too generic.
By the way, I am a fan of much older literature than Tolkien, and consider the works that Tolkien himself was probably inspired by to be much more lively, authentic, imaginative, and well written than anything Tolkien himself ever wrote.
Things like, say, Apulius' The Golden Ass, a Roman fantasy written in 1 AD.
Or virtually any of ETA Hoffmann's work -- written in the 1700's.
Or Poe (1800's), or Blackwood (early 1900's), or the French Decadents (1890's), etc..
Or the Mahabarate (400 BC or even earlier).
Or The Count of Monte Cristo (1800's).
Etc, etc, etc..
These works were all far more complex, three-dimensional, interesting, and insightful than the "good guys team up to defeat the big baddie" that LoTR brought.. not that that in itself had to doom Tolkien's work, if he had any profound insight in to the world or the human condition, or maybe had some interesting characters, but he had none.
To me Tolkien has always just seemed as nothing more than a mediocre writer who'd have been long forgotten if there was any justice in world of literature, but instead he's gotten massively overrated.
tl;dr she's making a feminist argument that a lot of our stories (Joseph Campbell, monomyth, etc) involve this phallic potency of going out into the world with our pointy sticks and poking wooly mammoths or whatever. she thinks maybe instead of pointy sticks we could think about this carrier bag model. but I can't figure out what she really means in practice, because surely she wants her politically-oriented work to be...potent? if her stories aren't effectively pointy sticks then what should they be? anyway I haven't even read Earthsea so I should probably shut up and go do that, but if anybody figures this paradox out lmk.
Re potency, I think she’s saying it is more common, if less glamorous, to receive and collect than to fight and conquer. Perhaps she chooses to collect and share stories and questions rather than tell you what to do. That is why her tales can seem slow to some - there is a lot under the surface, a lot of meaning nameless or unsaid.
I think of her stories more as questions than answers.
Now I'm wondering what is the story of the Heroine with a Thousand Faces?
Where is the other half of human (pre)history?
EDIT: I was mistaken! It's not an Earthsea book; it was just mentioned in the same paragraph
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_of_Atuan
The others put me to sleep, honestly
I recently picked up the omnibus collection and hope to read it soon. Since I haven’t read the post trilogy stories.
I absolutely loved and treasured The Wizard of Earthsea, which I've read and reread many times over my life (something I almost never do with any books).
The other two books in the trilogy: The Tombs of Atuan and The Furthest Shore were pretty disappointing to me, so I stopped reading Le Guin after that.
- Part 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwDAn0aBqcc
- Part 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YFgSFvMN7M
- Part 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTTZ4fEFgFA
Harry Potter just seemed so trite, superficial, and generic by comparison.. but since I never actually read them I can't say if my impression of them from the outside was accurate.
Would any other Wizard of Earthsea fans who've actually read Harry Potter be so kind as to compare and contrast the two?
Is Harry Potter really as atrocious as I'm dreading it is?
Ignoring wizardry and fantasy for a moment, Harry Potter is also a “school adventure”, which is a staple of British children’s literature, including works such as Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers.
Anyway — there’s so much good children’s literature out there. Read (or procure for the kids in your life) what you want!
To be honest, you could knock off the first volume of HP in a day or so, so the easiest thing is just to try it.
The Harry Potter books are amazing, I don't think they're related to Earthsea in any significant way though. There's a reason that they're so popular, and it's not that everyone has bad taste.
However I did not give enough weight to the strengths of J.K. Rowling, which are in character and plotting.
LeGuin in my estimation had the full package, but you can't discount Rowling's abilities either.
https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/rea...
It amazed me when I found out that Ursula Le Guin was the Krober's daughter.
I've always felt that quote summed up what Ursula Le Guin had to say.
How good good literature can be