Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

I thought the no knowledge of swimming or boatbuilding in 'Things' was a bit of a stretch, but overall I liked the semi-mystical tone, and the ambiguity of the ending and hence possible interpretations. Earthsea is the only other stuff of hers I've read - Tombs of Atuan is my fave - I mean to try some more but the library's got nuthin; time for another trawl of the second hand shops.

I think Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness are in print as part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series.

thought this was brilliant again tracer, do you offer a talking-book service? enjoyed mark and katie's discussion also

don't suppose you can read "things" online?

wow, thanks cozz-own d.h. i don't know what you mean by a "talking-book service", but it sounds old-fashioned, like a seltzer man or something that mr. burns would be familiar with.

no, you can't read "things" online, which is one of the inspirations for the show, actually - to make these stories more accessible for an illiterate online age

by talking book service I meant will you come round mine and read some of my long-festering books into a dictaphone for me : )

cool; will def. be hitting the bookstore today then to grab some ursula

New Le Guin feature/interview via the LA Times, prompted in part by her Nebula win two weeks back for Powers.

I finally read one of her books recently (thanks SF book club!), and really liked it. It was the one about the flipflop ambisexual aliens. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed it, as I had somehow picked up the idea that Le Guin's work is a bit serious and full of makes-you-think moments. Instead I got a book with loads of exciting political intrigue and stuff about human societies. Deadly.

just been on an earthsea binge. tombs of atuan > a wizard > tehanu > other wind > farthest shore imo, but they're all remarkably solid. tehanu is in some way the most interesting, in examining the earthsea male dominated power structure she's obviously questioning some of her earlier decisions as the author and creator of the world.

farthest shore freaked me out as a kid. so did tehanu, actually. i was probably easily freaked out.

i just read The Beginning Place/Threshold, and what impressed me was the fact that the novel was fairly short and sweet. cuz it was definitely the kind of story that someone else would have milked for ten volumes. this is true of her short stories too. the ideas are so good that other writers could dine out on them forever. but she herself just moves on to the next thing.

um, with the exception of her two long-ass series.

Brief but accurate:

http://io9.com/5924893/ursula-k-le-guins-great-unsung-masterpiece

I never got further than about 10 pages into this, and always felt vaguely guilty about the fact.

You should. (Trust me, it's very, very worth it.)

Ugh that other list of books linked in the article. So much boring.

^^^ list is terrible

I have been wondering if Starmaker is worth reading for awhile now tho...

like really people can't make it through Cryptomicon or 1984 wtf

Starmaker is superb, amazing scope, encompassing the whole universe and the end of time. Haven't read Last and First Men, but it's on the list. As is Always Coming Home - think I'll order it tomorrow in fact.

I don't most people have even heard of that Leigh Brackett book let alone pretended to read it.

Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren are definitely books that are more pretended to be read than actually read, but I wouldn't recommend reading either so...

^^^ has not been able to finish either book in all honesty.

Or Finnegan's Wake for that matter.

I've never heard of that Brackett book myself. agree about Dhalgren. never bothered with Gravity's Rainbow, not interested in its subject matter really

SF Public Library does not have a copy of the Long Tomorrow so yeah basically no one has read that book.

You people. (Have fully read and loved both the Pynchon and Delany books.)

Actually if I hadn't've read Dhalgren and wrote a paper on it in college, I wouldn't've been accepted to grad school and given a full fellowship, whole life story changed etc. So there ya go.

I like some Pynchon (primarily Crying of Lot 49, but V and Vineland were both enjoyable too). absolutely hate Delany.

I like plenty of Delany, but Dhalgren is overlong and irritatingly written. Basically feel the same about GV as well, but I'm not a big fan of any Pynchon really.

Here's where I admit I've never read Dune either.

I read (most of) Dune in high school, couldn't finish it. love the Lynch film tho

I have been wondering if Starmaker is worth reading for awhile now tho...

Maybe the most extraordinary SF novel I've read.

wait infinite jest is a sci-fi novel? maybe i shouldn't have avoided it all these years.

No you should have.

yeah it's not very high up on my list. the le guin book in the original article sounds amazing though. the only books i've read on the list are gravity's rainbow (awesome, worthwhile), 1984 (eh - read in high school), dune (duhh). i really fucking hate neal stephenson.

That i09 list makes no fuckin' sense half the time. People pretend to have read Dune? Really? Dhalgren and Pynchon though, sure.

I've read some Leigh Brackett and want to read a lot more; never heard of that post-nuke one though. Sounds awesome!

i read first & last men and found it hilariously entertaining

Leigh Brackett's Long Tomorrow in free ebook form here: http://arthursbookshelf.com/sci-fi/brackett/brackett.html - possibly not fully legal

Sad to say I did not enjoy Always Coming Home overmuch, it just seemed so joyless. I'm sure there is going to have been joy in their lives but it didn't come across in these stories of struggle. And they might have escaped our headlong rush to destruction and be living in glorious harmony with their surroundings, but their lives seemed no less circumscribed than ours, by work, by their own peculiar prejudices, by their strange lack of curiosity. None of the poetry appealed to me. And I think she's wrong about snowmobiles.

halfway through left hand of darkness. loving it.

i just finished it yesterday, and was tempted to revive this thread! it gets even better as it goes. i generally enjoyed it much more than the dispossessed. the concepts and settings driving both stories are both fantastic, but the left hand of darkness has the benefit of having a human (or terran-based, i guess) protagonist capable of more emotion. and even when they switch to estraven as the narrator, he's 100x more emotive than most of the characters in the dispossessed. not trying to diss the dispossessed - i liked it! - but after that one i thought "well i guess i'll try out another one" whereas immediately after the left hand of darkness i ordered the entire earthsea trilogy and have been searching out articles about le guin.

huh, cool co-inks.

love the dispossessed too!

i guess i should read earthsea over the holidays at my parents' cottage huh??

Earthsea is more Young Adult-ish, but totally great. I love how spare the writing is -- she gives you as much a fully imagined world as Tolkien or Frank Herbert or anyone else, but in a quarter of the words.

for a quarter of the price? i'm IN!

I was pretty happy about finding a 1970s edition of it in a slipcase for $20!

TLHOD = one of the eeriest, most erotic novels I've ever read.

It took me a good 1/3 of the book to properly connect with TLHoD, but once that happened I adored it; the whole run from the Voluntary Farm and then the icy trek was some of the purest reading pleasure I've had in a long time. I read Iain M Banks' The Player of Games a couple of months back and was struck by what a debt he owed to Le Guin in that one.

I think Earthsea is as remarkable for the journey of Le Guin herself as it is for anything that happens in the books. She creates in the first three books a wonderful, rich, compelling, and mature world, albeit a male dominated one. Then twenty years later she revisits it, questioning some of her original choices, and writes a very bleak book that basically turns its back on the world (she subtitles it "The Last Book of Earthsea"). Then another ten years later she comes back again and in another two books deconstructs many aspects of the world, only to rebuild them into something even more glorious than before. That for me is a genuine wonder of world literature.

Good timing, this revive:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_12_019664.php

nice.

coming to the end of left hand. i just adore it.

For a fucker whose favorite fantasists are Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe I have been unforgivably neglectful of ULG. That's it, reading Left Hand this winter.

Awesome.

We are delighted to announce that the 33rd stamp in the US Postal Service Literary Arts series honors Ursula. Stamp release will be later this year, date TBD. From then on, all our letters will be three ounces! Thank you @USPS for this distinction. https://t.co/jGboi8i5LU pic.twitter.com/8H3UOGafPv

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) January 15, 2021

Gorgeous

And as I've been muttering elsewhere -- while I'm not positive this is the first US stamp to feature a nonbinary figure, that background scene is obv Left Hand of Darkness and thus features Estraven, so.

Yes, I was just admiring that illustration of Ai and Estraven. Really nice work.

so cool

I’m reading Tombs of Atuan with my son right now and that book is a god damn masterpiece.

You spend almost half the book just living in Arha’s rhythms, feeling the texture of her world and understanding what structures it it: the boundaries of fear and ritual. You have the sensation of a society living on just the husk of an unremembered time. The living drama of humanity has moved on from this place yet we are centred on it. (It’s like the US Senate!) What scriptwriters call “the inciting incident” comes a good third of the book’s length too late, by today’s standards, but what you gain is a recognition of its gravity. Plus it’s goth as shit. It really is astounding. Once the motor of the story picks up its pace all the weight of that long opening gives an inertial force to events that is just awesome. Honestly - the first book - Wizard of Earthsea - is very good, but it follows a fairly traditional structure. And the elements are not very surprising. It’s told masterfully of course, but you know, you’ve got a wizard’s school and some dragons and a hot-headed protagonist. This though - this is really something else. The intensity of it is frankly almost overwhelming.

There’s so much in there about freedom and breaking free of stultifying tradition and whether it’s possible to cast off beliefs you were inculcated with, and how morality intersects with these questions, and how you sometimes need to take the biggest risk you can take, and how an act of kindness - even made without really realising it - can open up your whole heart and change your whole life

booming and otm

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Atuan has been my favourite of the Earthsea books for a long time. It was one of the first books I used inter-library loan for as a kid and it was so unlike anything else I'd ever read at that age.
I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I haven’t read Tehanu yet Ned but why do you think it’s more impressive than Tombs of Atuan? Is it possible to explain without giving anything away?

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Yeah, as I said upthread, it's amazing that the series' turn from epic to intimate feels so liberating.

I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I did this in 2020 (actually was my first readthrough of books 4-6) and cannot recommend enough.

I'm curious about her translation of the Tao Te Ching as well, but I think I might want something more traditional there.

literally bought this based on yr rec, th

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

The UKL TTC is U&K.

Sean Guynes concluded his excellent Le Guin reread with a post on why Tehanu is Le Guin's best book:
https://www.tor.com/2021/02/24/tehanu-le-guins-return-to-earthsea-and-her-best-novel

the 1st time i read it i did it with wrong expectations (and probably at a wrong age).
it'll likely speak more to me now that i'm older, lol.

Psyched

I also found Tombs of Atuan much more immersive and approachable and generally meaningful than Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is very much a figure of legend, running around fighting monsters (even if they're of his own making), and there's something correspondingly chilly and distancing about the narration. With Tombs of Atuan, you're plunged into the emotional world of someone who can't go anywhere or have adventures or even have a name; she's just a kernel of humanity hidden away in the dark, being somehow herself in spite of everything. I guess it's the difference between a traditionally masculine story and a traditionally feminine story, but Le Guin has turned the contrast way, way up.

I'm in the minority, I guess, as I don't think Tehanu works as well as Tombs of Atuan. Tehanu feels to me like Le Guin very consciously trying to write a feminist Earthsea book, in a way that comes across as forced to me.

That post feels very incoherent, sorry. I think I meant "the difference between a traditionally male story and a traditionally female story" - the kind of story imposed from without by traditional gender roles, but exaggerated to the most extreme point, so that the man can literally go anywhere and do anything but has an emotional life/interiority that's almost entirely inaccessible to us, while the woman is literally stuck in a freaking cave and we are immersed so fully in her POV that it's dizzying. Like the difference between, idk, Tom Jones and Persuasion, but side by side in the same series, and the characters are able to sort of step outside of the lines that have been drawn for them and meet and communicate, and somehow both of them seem more human through each other's eyes - idk where I'm going with this but I think it's cool.

Anyway, great posts, Tracer.

See whereas I loved Tehanu because I felt like "oh finally, this stops being about male magic and male energy and turns the dial to matters more rooted and more intimate". It resonated.

I actually didnt like Tombs much because all the scenes down in said tombs felt weird and claustrophobic to me.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I liked what she was trying to do in Tehanu but I just felt like I could see her trying, and it distracted me. But I do like it, and I get why a lot of people love it.

Had the thought recently that the Jedi are basically orgasm denial wizards which is probably what makes them so fucked up as “good guys”

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

I keep thinking of that story these days because of QAnon, the way they watch this religion spring up from absolutely nothing and then take firm enough root to potentially derail everything, and then the oh-so-important vote where sanity just barely prevails, it all feels very familiar.

yes, nice parallel!

Tombs and Tehanu are tied for my favourite, I didn't read the latter till I was much older and found it incredibly powerful, like she was taking the traditional patriarchal structure of the first books and burning it with fire. Wizard/Tombs/Farthest Shore = thesis, Tehanu = antithesis; Tales & The Other Wind = synthesis!

I reread The Farthest Shore recently and liked it much better than I remembered. I had it lumped together in my mind with A Wizard of Earthsea, but it's much darker and more adult - and more personal as well, even though you still don't get much of a sense of who Ged is. This central idea of a world where something has gone deeply, inexplicably wrong everywhere, all the joy and sense of purpose running out of everything, all these people walking around feeling like they've lost something, and they can't even remember what - it all felt, honestly, like a really disturbing reflection of the world as it is now. And I'm not usually a big fan of world-building for its own sake, but the imagery she invents for the land of the dead just feels so right: the wall of stones, the dry river with its dry source, the mountains of pain, all feel like they're part of some vast collective unconscious, like they've always been there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/21/realists-of-a-larger-reality-wanted-ursula-k-le-guin-prize-for-fiction-to-launch-in-2022