Not really a meme, I know, but I thought this was amazing and worth sharing and I didn’t know where else to share it on Lemmy.
Ursula LeGuin was an incredible person and, although she did live a long life, her death was still a huge loss.
Not really a meme, I know, but I thought this was amazing and worth sharing and I didn’t know where else to share it on Lemmy.
Ursula LeGuin was an incredible person and, although she did live a long life, her death was still a huge loss.
What a badass
She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts “I am a man.” It is not about her gender identity, it’s just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
I also cannot recommend her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It’s an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.
The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.
Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965…
Her older stuff is good, but I’ve always been of the opinion she got progressively better and better as she got older. Birthday of the World, a short story compilation, is a masterpiece.
Her overall style is particularly well-suited to the short story format, as it allows her to hyper-focus on just a few themes, letting her stay almost uncomfortably tight. She’s already the kind of author that can leave you thinking for an hour with a single paragraph, and short stories almost let her condense a work into a higher percentage of just those paragraphs.
I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.
It was my introduction to her writing, and wow what a fucking book. I read it in two days, I couldn’t put it down.
I admit I haven’t read it in many years, so thanks for correcting me on the details. The way she goes in depth exploring the societies and beings she imagines while still maintaining a plausible plot and believable characters you can empathize with is really incredible. It’s something other writers rarely achieve. Iain M. Banks had similar literary skills.
Well that description got me to place a hold on it at my library. I have a hard time getting into new authors and have wanted to try her work for some time
I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.
I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.
Cannot recommend? Or cannot recommend enough? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s exactly the sort of brain typo that I would make, giving my audience exactly the opposite claim to what I’d intended, and based on context, I think the latter is what you were going for?
I’ve heard of Earthsea, but had no idea what it was about. Now I may need to pick it up. I rather enjoyed a more recent story with a similar plot, written by an author with, shall we say, less progressive opinions.
Whoops. The latter.
Sounds very similar to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, one of my favorite books.
Instead, Earth had colonized the moon, and is doing the normal routine of extracting all possible value at all costs. They are shipping ungodly amounts or ice water from the moon’s ice caps down to earth, which has left the lunar denizens with little water, and few crops. So they stage a revolution to avoid the impending collapse of their society.
They go into the actual war strategies a moon might take upon a parent planet, and it is fascinating, I highly recommend it.
A bit, but I felt like Heinlein’s book was much more ‘hit you over the head with the message’ than her books ever are. I still really like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much more heavy-handed in terms of messaging. LeGuin lets you mostly figure it out for yourself. You can certainly read her books and not learn a thing if you don’t want to (many people, especially her male critics over the years, do so), but if you open your mind to what she’s saying…
I’ll have to take your word for it on the strength of messaging, as I haven’t read LeGuin yet. But it’s definitely been added to my reading list.
I like politics/religion/etc as topics well enough, but usually never enough to read about on their own as a book. It just doesn’t sit well with me.
But add a bit of science fiction to it? That god damn I’m on board. It’s like taking meds with a bit of honey for me. So when I find authors that explore things and have some fun with it, I jump at the chance.