The Child and the Shadow (1975) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Child and the Shadow (1975) [pdf]

johnirons.com

78 pointslolinder20 comments

> The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious – symbol and archetype.

The bookend narration of 2011 film Sucker Punch mentions such a thing.

> Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.

I appreciated music more after someone pointed out that music is the most evocative art form. Paintings can look realistic, movies can be based on real stories, video games can feel immersive, but music is almost never _like_ anything. I like that.

Related,

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

ought to be mandatory reading for every adult in the Western world.

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

I've already used it as an example when talking to some people about our technology choices.

Sometimes - to be able to live in the societies we do, we have to accept that there's very little choice. But if you live in full awareness that every choice you make to participate in it, there is a cost and effect that someone else has to experience.

One is example is Social Media moderators - for us to not see the worst of humanity, they have to experience it for us and make a decision that literally can manipulate people's opinions and preferences

Except it is about colonization and social classes.

It's not about any one thing. It's a thought experiment about the moral compromises societies make, and the emotional responses people have toward such compromises.

Not very good. The writing is okay, but walking away isn't better than deluding yourself with justification. Yes I get it's all metaphor, but that doesn't make it better.

If you actually read the thing, within the literal story it never says there's actually anywhere better, or any better place could exist.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a decent spiritual successor to the ideas in Omelas.

It also plays on the comforts of differently structured societies like Le Guin does in The Dispossessed.

If you have access to JSTOR, the essay (with better formatting) is available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29781619

I was shocked after listening to this story by her, probably the best psycho horror I know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5637siSxu-E

SPOILER: Most commentaries seem to cast this as a story about the evil of utilitarianism, and that sort of us true if you take the narrator at his word, but I think the genius of the story is that at the end you start to realise how delusional the narrator is. It there in the title and at the final sentence, "it is the ones that walked away" that the narrator does not understand while you as the reader fully sympathise with them.

Is this included in:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798061-the-language-o...

Yes.

Ursula’s work was one of my favorite reads in my teenage years. Earthsea opened me to the world of fantasy novels. The Left Hand of Darkness was a difficult read at the time, but I greatly appreciated it in the later years. I wished she had written more.

I remembered liking them when I was a kid, but I just tried reading A Wizard of Earthsea again and it was just "Ged went here" "Ged learned that" "These people didn't like Ged" etc. Does it get better later?

This right after mixing up Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K Le Guin and finding out that the Pern series was just fetish dragon smut.

Ursula was one book wonder, methinks.

And so was Gardner Dozois, whose "Strangers" was eerily similar to "Left Hand of Darkness".

For a person whose oeuvre includes _A Wizard of Earthsea_, _The Left Hand of Darkness_, and _The Lathe of Heaven_, I would gainsay that.

She is one of the great American novelists. She’s won 8 Hugo’s. There’s the Dispossessed, a great novel.

I forgot the Dispossessed. So Ursula is now two book wonder.

Downvoting team seems to disagree. Maybe she truly is only one-book wonder.

She said she purposefully wrote in a simplistic style to mimic the traditional epics she was familiar with, like Beowulf. The books were supposed to have a wide appeal, and evoke that sense of the archetypal struggle between good and evil.

I personally love the style, even as an adult - it's a very easy read, but the world of earthsea, true names, and it's daoist philosophy is very appealing to me. It was the first of its kind, and really established the idea of "balance" in the fantasy genre.

The books definitely do get more sophisticated, though, both thematically and stylistically. But ultimately it's going to be a purely subjective experience, as these things always are.

I didn't realize it was intentional! Though, I think Beowulf is notable to a significant degree for its historic context...

I think the mention of daoist philosophy is interesting. Those works are very direct too, but I think (from a Western perspective) there's a huge amount "between the lines", both due to missing cultural context and refinement over generations of tradition, which means that while the writing is simple the meaning and implications are vast and complex.

Aside from the name thing though, I'm not sure I got that from the first book. Especially since most of the actions listed in it are very concrete.

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