Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
I think “The word for world is forest” is criminally underrated.
Yes, true, that's also a great one. I should really re-read all of them.
I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, but my favourite of her works is Always Coming Home [1]. Such a rich and varied and humane book.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
I have a signed copy of 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and I will never let it go.
I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book is a masterpiece!
Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.
If you want some help then check out Mythgard Academy's course: https://mythgard.org/academy/dispossessed/
Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)
Lucky you! Make sure your heirs realize the significance...
I grew up reading Earthsea but later discovered Threshold/The Beginning Place. Some of her short stories are very good, too.
> ... 'The Left Hand of Darkness'
I read it last year. I found it to be quit boring and it also felt kinda "dated" in the sense that more recent SF is more space-y. However, the social constructs were well thought out.
Funnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
The social constructs were the entire point. The spacey stuff was just a vehicle to get a more relatable protagonist into the story.
In the foreward, she calls out to her, great SF is descriptive, not predictive. TLHOD is about sex, gender, friendships and culture in our world.
Also a huge number of spacey contemporary works like A Mote in God's Eye, Rendezvous with Rama, Dune, Ringworld...
She wrote a short essay on her blog about this: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
The TLDR is technology is how we cope with reality and for her it was more interesting to describe this reality and how it makes her subjects feel rather than describe the technology they use to address their problems.
what does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is? Or set in outer space?
If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the outdated space focused science fiction of the previous generations.
The Lathe of Heaven was the first I read and had a big impression on me. Much later, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas did.
The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.