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Ursula K. Le Guin, “the emissary from Orsinia,” challenges expectations
- jcoffland 10y agoOne of my favorite authors. The Dispossessed is also a fantastic read which goes far beyond the simple classification of SiFi.
- Animats 10y ago"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is perhaps her most biting short story. It's not one of the Orsinian tales, although it could have been set in that world. Anyone who writes fantasy should read her essays in "The Language of the Night". (Also Poul Anderson's "On Thud and Blunder".)
- thom 10y agoWhile Omelas deserves to stand the test of time, it is also an excruciatingly bad piece of writing. Every few years when I revisit the story, I'm stunned by how clumsy the narrative device is.
- jessaustin 10y agoSome things that are fine in exceedingly short stories wouldn't work at all in a novel. Other SF authors have really short stories like that: Asimov, Wolfe, etc. When the story is less than four pages long one can afford to re-read the awkward parts.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoI thought it was ridiculously ham-handed and obvious until I realized that a lot of people still didn't get it.
- lsiebert 10y agoIs it? I don't know what other device she could use that would draw people in as easily. Remember that before it became the story we talk about, it had to be the story we read. And it's not a story you want to read. If you told it with characters more clearly drawn, it would be about their reaction to the central premise. If you told it less poetically, it wouldn't have the mythic magical realism that keeps you from thinking about the logic, instead of the question.
- bmer 10y agoFor someone who was/is excited by reading the Orsinia tales: can you share why, besides just telling me repeatedly that you were excited by it? I am someone who has been often disappointed by vaunted authors of the past (Vonnegut, Clarke, etc.), because their work suffers from the "it's not novel (anymore)" feeling one often has when watching old movies. I get that these were ground breaking when they first came out, but they don't seem to shine anymore, because I was first exposed to works that have iterated upon them...no nostalgia factor to sweeten the deal for me. Put another way: I totally get that muskets were ground-breaking for the time, but gosh-darnit, I have seen nuclear submarines. When reading the linked article, I felt a lot of the same: a lot of the "amazing" things I have come across in other novels, and they feel like par for the course for a good book. Also the whole spiel about Ursula wanting to change the world, and needing a lever and a place to stand...well, she didn't change the world, in hindsight. Did she? ------------------ A really bothersome quote from the article: "By speaking from Orsinia, as its only authorized emissary, Le Guin reminds us of everything we take for granted and everything we have neglected." What the heck does that sentence mean? I can't imagine everything I have taken for granted and neglected as a single meaningful thought or concept. In fact, if I tried to imagine everything I have taken for granted and neglected, it becomes a thought stretched so thin, that it loses all meaning. It becomes nothing because its too many things. So am I fair in discounting this sentence (and most of the article) as fan gibberish?
- throwaway_java 10y agoNo. It's not gibberish, but you need to read more broadly because that paragraph itself doesn't explain. Read some of the surrounding text. Le Guin sort of writes social/political commentary through the vehicle of fiction. Just read more. You'll get it eventually.
- bmer 10y agoOkay, let me pull out some post-2005 fiction that does the same thing: James S. A. Corey writes beautiful socio-political commentary in The Expanse series. Max Brooks' World War Z was biting in its own special way, more (admittedly positive) social than political commentary. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice shows us a world where the only pronoun is "she", and what it might mean for a ship to love her crew. There are lots of people who write social and political commentary through the vehicle of fiction. It has kind of been one of the defining features of fiction for all of its existence, no? > Just read more. You'll get it eventually. This is reasonable. I get that some things can't be communicated too well, and a lot of my favourites I could recommend only in the same way. Why didn't the article simply begin and end with those two phrases?
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- sctb 10y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12378011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12378011 and marked it off-topic.