Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

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.

do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

this has been on my facebook and it has annoyed me. the division between artistic impulse and creativity on the one hand and commercial pandering and venture on the other. art is in the business of inventing value everywhere, part of the entrepreneurial drive of late capitalism. urban gentrification, the collapse of work/life distinctions (through networking, pet projects, etc.) art invents for capital precisely by employing the ruse of divesting itself of the motives of capital or by operating via parties who partake of only a small share of such dividends. The moral purity of art, codified through a centuries old critical apparatus of "objectivity" and "disinterested looking," endures the various feminist/postcolonial/marxist critiques of the last century in order to reappear as this beacon of optimism. the trammelling of unfettered creativity by corporate interests seems far less of a problem than how art, and its pioneering self-mythologies of "freedom," operates as the vehicle of enterprise or its fig leaf.

Enjoyed this letter:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2015/10/gentlemen-i-just-dont-belong-here.html
https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/710/22174671979_459bfee57e_o.jpg

(thought there was a "women in SF" thread to put it on but didn't find it)

Hm!

http://io9.gizmodo.com/ursula-k-le-guin-s-scifi-classic-left-hand-of-darkness-1795163316

Potentially intrigued here -- in many ways, it IS the right time for this in terms of social awareness (if not acceptance/understanding) on sexual fluidity is at its highest point ever in American history at least. But I'll be wondering what/how changes they'll make as well.

It's gonna be lame as hell

This went up recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deuas-AuzbU&t=331s

there's no way this will be good

Just read first four earthsea in a few weeks, upthread otm re how generous she is with her ideas in the sparseness (sparcity?) of her writing, one sentence often doing the lifting of entire chapters from other writers

Carry on with earthsea to finish or start that other series? Am impatient to reach LHoD from testimonials above....must I have read the others first?

No

Left Hand of Darkness stands well alone, as does The Dispossessed, although I think they share a fictional universe with several of her other SF novels.

Xp

LHoD stands alone altho it is tangentially related to other novels (The Word for World is Forest, the Disposessed, etc)

yeah just go with LHoD and then Dispossessed IMO

Super

Thks all

recently got around to the western shore trilogy. more self-consciously YA than the earthsea books i think but v worthwhile.

Just read first four earthsea in a few weeks

How did you find the (to my mind) abrupt left turn or even reversal of the 4th book, handbrake applied, tyres smoking?

Hmmm

I thought the book was as good as the others, tho my fave maybe was the second one

I hadn't realised the big gap in time between writing, and even in the second one I think there's at least some shadowing that this was not a well-thought out rescue long-term, so given my reading through as quickly as I did I have to say it seemed to follow on quite fluidly.

I managed to get through the Dispossessed a couple of years ago, mostly off the back of Ilxor-based recommendations. I found it a total slog and it's put me off investigating UKLG further. That said, I appreciated her premise, and her world-building is strong, despite the heavy-handedness of the West/USSR/Third World analogy. I just didn't like the way it was written. I couldn't warm to the characters - a book where everyone is a dry, humourless vessel speaking in expository statements. I get that Shevek and his people came from an ascetic background, and their stolidness was part of their national characteristic, but there was no warmth, no reason for me to care for anyone in the story.

I liked The Disposessed but I did find the prose a bit drab and grey; the one Earthsea book was much more vivid in that regard.

Lhod too.

My thoughts on Tehanu are that she writes a series of books full of decent upstanding & all male wizards, with phrases like "weak as woman's magic, wicked as woman's magic". Then some years pass, she thinks "fuck that shit" and writes a bleak book about an abusive patriarchy where the main character from the previous ones is metaphorically emasculated.

Then more years pass, and everything changes again...

The Disposessed is plainly a novel of ideas rather than of character, so I don't think it's part of Le Guin's purpose to make us 'care' about Shevek (though in fact I rather like his stoic drabness). One of the novel's themes is that 'radical' ways of living are not necessarily glamorous or spectacular - building a just community is hard toil - so the writing style seems entirely appropriate.

Ward Fowler - I guess, yeah and I agree and I get it, but it just doesn't work for me as a novel. It's gotta work on more than one level or otherwise it's a piece of polemic hanging loosely off a fictional structure.
Attempts to fill-out the characters feel half-arsed. The various clerics and professors Shevek meets on Urras are interchangeable save fore their political views. Similarly, Sheveks friends and relations on Annares - one character is said to be putting on weight, another has 'a big open-mouthed laugh' (or words to that effect), but these descriptions feel very 'if I must', and have little-to-no resonance with the rest of the plot. It's as though LeGuinn felt obliged to throw these points in because 'that's what happens in novels'.

this is well worth watching. kinda got choked up at one point. love her voice so much. very inspirational!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Deuas-AuzbU

thx scott. she's a good egg. however her dream of sf escaping the ghetto library shelf and review column has not come to pass and i suspect it never will, & i'm ok with that.

I read tehanu again, stylistically yep it has her usual economical, elegant prose, but tonally i think it is leagues from the first three books. even at its calmest it is bucolic not fantastic. magic has been left behind in favour of goat herding and peach trees. evil, when it occurs, is not due to vengeful elder gods or power-mad mages - ok one power-mad mage, but also just bad men (definitely men) doing things depressingly right out of our world - child abuse, rape. it's an angry book, even if it finds moments of peace.

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