9 ms·

Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds

199 points by samclemens 8y ago

MordodeMaru 8y ago
In "The Left Hand of Darkness" I really struggled with naming, maybe because they didn't have a latin-based structure. But I really appreciated on the other hand her effort to make sense of the language, toponomy and so on all together.
- tigerlily 8y ago
  I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year. I found the names and place names quite tricky too, but it helped reinforce the alieness of the setting. Ursula's writing is so earnest and immersive. Rigorous world building coupled with veritably human characters made for a wholly engaging and pleasurable read.
  - k__ 8y ago
    I read it last year too. [SPOILER ALERT] . . . . . I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man. Otherwise the whole book read more like a fantasy novel than sci-fi. I found it rather boring too.
    - yeahitslikethat 8y ago
      Uh... spoiler alert!
      - detritus 8y ago
        I'm a bit confused by OP here - I didn't at all have that impression. I thought it was fairly clear from the start what the gender of the main protagonist was. Perhaps I misread...
        k__ 8y ago
        The name didn't sound female to me "Genly Ai"... I know Ai as from Japanese, meaning "love" and I know a girl called that. The story starts from his first-person perspective, and he talks about how he feels insecure and about his fancy robes.
        RosanaAnaDana 8y ago
        The protagonist in Left Hand of Darkness is 100% a human male (and a bit of a man's man to boot).
        k__ 8y ago
        I know, I just didn't think this for the first few pages.
      - k__ 8y ago
        Sorry.
      - the_af 8y ago
        It's not a spoiler. Genly is male and there's no attempt to hide this or any plot mystery about it. The ambivalence is in the gender of the natives of the planet Gethen.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      > I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man. Try "Too Like Lightning" by Ada Palmer :)
    - jgon 8y ago
      I remember being caught off guard by the main character being black, or at least dark-skinned. It was a really nice off-hand comment that shakes you out of the default world-view you can acquire or project when reading by inserting onself (younger white male in my case) into the novel. The way it was clearly established but then also not dwelt upon really struck me at the time I was reading it, and the entire novel still sticks with me.
      - kej 8y ago
        She did the same thing with Earthsea: >The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.
  - alphadevx 8y ago
    Currently reading it for the first time, and agree that Ursula's writing style is immersive, and also I find her quite poetic (some of the fables she weaves into the story are marvelous). I feel just as lost and confused as the envoy so far, which seems appropriate. Also the geek in me loves the Ansible ;-)
- the_af 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what names did you have trouble with? Would you say this was one of your first scifi novels? I ask because I'm a native Spanish speaker and had no trouble at all with Le Guin's naming in The Left Hand of Darkness. I remember they were standard scifi-sounding names, though better than the usual fare of names like "R'Lyeh", "Cthulhu", "R'hllor", "Klingon" and "Qo'noS" and such like :) Have you read The Lord of the Rings, and did you have trouble with the made up non-Latin names? (you'd be in good company: I know plenty of people have trouble with Tolkien languages, which I also find puzzling, because I simply assume "these are foreign names" and go on with the plot)
kkarakk 8y ago
Left out of this conversation is the reason ursula is lionized nowadays - more for being a particular gender than for her ability(which is great). she's a talking point on all the sjw blog "news" sites and her rating is boosted artificially. don't expect to like her if you never sought her out before based on your reading habits. There's also a directed thrust currently in the scifi community to push women/trans authors to the forefront(at the expense of male authors for better or worse) and ursula gets brought up in those talking points as well. just offering up some things that came up in my "why is ursula mentioned so much suddenly when she was pretty much forgotten outside of sci-fi readers for a long time" research after i got influenced into binging her books by these selfsame articles...i think this should be mentioned. ursula is great but she isn't "must read" if you like reading in general. a lot of her stuff is very genre/niche oriented.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  This “she’s only popular because she’s a black woman” stance without any specific critique of her work is unwarranted and quite nearly racist.
  - dayofthedaleks 8y ago
    Are you perhaps thinking of Octavia Butler, here? Le Guin was white.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    she wasn't black though?
- icebraining 8y ago
  What facts made you come to the conclusion that her popularity and ratings are boosted "more for being a particular gender than for her ability"? The specific claim that "she was pretty much forgotten outside of sci-fi readers for a long time" seems suspicious, considering she won a National Book Award in '73, was a finalist for a Pulizer in '97, and was declared a Library of Congress Living Legend in 2000. When was this period of forgetfulness?
thedaniel 8y ago
Such a legend - for an easy intro definitely the short stories in Birthday of the World are worth a read
tildedave 8y ago
Great eassy. I read a few of her novels last year (Left Hand of Darkness, the Dispossessed, and some of her Earthsea novels). What struck me is even with the amount of effort that goes into building her worlds, she turns her lens back on her characters near the end, with them either figuring out something about themselves or how they relate to other people. The "fate of the world" gets evoked a lot in popular fantasy/scifi nowadays but I really appreciate the way she chose to make her protagonists the final focus of her narratives. Don't want to spoil anything ;) so I'd encourage anyone that's interested to seek her work out.
jmickey 8y ago
Perhaps unrelated - is there anywhere a repository of fictional worlds that creators can use for their projects at cost of free of charge? This would be great for many industries - computer game development, board game development, movie creators, writers, etc. :)
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  That's a really interesting idea. I know there are lots of generators out there for worldbuilding purposes and I have made my own on the go for things like conceptual art or short fiction. But to your question, you might ask at /r/worldbuilding on Reddit, which has some really neat stuff going on a lot of the time. /r/rpg might also be helpful.
  - stillworks 8y ago
    I hope this doesn't end up opening a horrid can of worms. What are the implications if the worlds and concepts overlap ? At a personal level, I would be be very interested in learning/finding out such things though. Even more so if it is possible to automate this "discovery"
    - themodelplumber 8y ago
      Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-) BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing. Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means. A lot of fun, working this up :-)
LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
I always had that feeling, that while she was a few steps ahead, on the outset of the journey through one of her worlds- neither me nor her knew where this would end. This whole journey was never there to put me, the reader in any state, not a ride through emotions heading for a foregone conclusion. I loved the dispossesed. Sun is mine, and always will be.

199 points by samclemens 8y ago

In "The Left Hand of Darkness" I really struggled with naming, maybe because they didn't have a latin-based structure. But I really appreciated on the other hand her effort to make sense of the language, toponomy and so on all together.

tigerlily 8y ago
I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year. I found the names and place names quite tricky too, but it helped reinforce the alieness of the setting. Ursula's writing is so earnest and immersive. Rigorous world building coupled with veritably human characters made for a wholly engaging and pleasurable read.
- k__ 8y ago
  I read it last year too. [SPOILER ALERT] . . . . . I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man. Otherwise the whole book read more like a fantasy novel than sci-fi. I found it rather boring too.
  - yeahitslikethat 8y ago
    Uh... spoiler alert!
    - detritus 8y ago
      I'm a bit confused by OP here - I didn't at all have that impression. I thought it was fairly clear from the start what the gender of the main protagonist was. Perhaps I misread...
      - k__ 8y ago
        The name didn't sound female to me "Genly Ai"... I know Ai as from Japanese, meaning "love" and I know a girl called that. The story starts from his first-person perspective, and he talks about how he feels insecure and about his fancy robes.
        RosanaAnaDana 8y ago
        The protagonist in Left Hand of Darkness is 100% a human male (and a bit of a man's man to boot).
        k__ 8y ago
        I know, I just didn't think this for the first few pages.
    - k__ 8y ago
      Sorry.
    - the_af 8y ago
      It's not a spoiler. Genly is male and there's no attempt to hide this or any plot mystery about it. The ambivalence is in the gender of the natives of the planet Gethen.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    > I liked that she convinced me that the main character was a women in the beginning, but later revealing it's actually a man. Try "Too Like Lightning" by Ada Palmer :)
  - jgon 8y ago
    I remember being caught off guard by the main character being black, or at least dark-skinned. It was a really nice off-hand comment that shakes you out of the default world-view you can acquire or project when reading by inserting onself (younger white male in my case) into the novel. The way it was clearly established but then also not dwelt upon really struck me at the time I was reading it, and the entire novel still sticks with me.
    - kej 8y ago
      She did the same thing with Earthsea: >The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one.
- alphadevx 8y ago
  Currently reading it for the first time, and agree that Ursula's writing style is immersive, and also I find her quite poetic (some of the fables she weaves into the story are marvelous). I feel just as lost and confused as the envoy so far, which seems appropriate. Also the geek in me loves the Ansible ;-)
the_af 8y ago
Out of curiosity, what names did you have trouble with? Would you say this was one of your first scifi novels? I ask because I'm a native Spanish speaker and had no trouble at all with Le Guin's naming in The Left Hand of Darkness. I remember they were standard scifi-sounding names, though better than the usual fare of names like "R'Lyeh", "Cthulhu", "R'hllor", "Klingon" and "Qo'noS" and such like :) Have you read The Lord of the Rings, and did you have trouble with the made up non-Latin names? (you'd be in good company: I know plenty of people have trouble with Tolkien languages, which I also find puzzling, because I simply assume "these are foreign names" and go on with the plot)

kkarakk 8y ago

Left out of this conversation is the reason ursula is lionized nowadays - more for being a particular gender than for her ability(which is great). she's a talking point on all the sjw blog "news" sites and her rating is boosted artificially. don't expect to like her if you never sought her out before based on your reading habits. There's also a directed thrust currently in the scifi community to push women/trans authors to the forefront(at the expense of male authors for better or worse) and ursula gets brought up in those talking points as well. just offering up some things that came up in my "why is ursula mentioned so much suddenly when she was pretty much forgotten outside of sci-fi readers for a long time" research after i got influenced into binging her books by these selfsame articles...i think this should be mentioned. ursula is great but she isn't "must read" if you like reading in general. a lot of her stuff is very genre/niche oriented.

djtriptych 8y ago
This “she’s only popular because she’s a black woman” stance without any specific critique of her work is unwarranted and quite nearly racist.
- dayofthedaleks 8y ago
  Are you perhaps thinking of Octavia Butler, here? Le Guin was white.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  she wasn't black though?
icebraining 8y ago
What facts made you come to the conclusion that her popularity and ratings are boosted "more for being a particular gender than for her ability"? The specific claim that "she was pretty much forgotten outside of sci-fi readers for a long time" seems suspicious, considering she won a National Book Award in '73, was a finalist for a Pulizer in '97, and was declared a Library of Congress Living Legend in 2000. When was this period of forgetfulness?

thedaniel 8y ago

Such a legend - for an easy intro definitely the short stories in Birthday of the World are worth a read

tildedave 8y ago

Great eassy. I read a few of her novels last year (Left Hand of Darkness, the Dispossessed, and some of her Earthsea novels). What struck me is even with the amount of effort that goes into building her worlds, she turns her lens back on her characters near the end, with them either figuring out something about themselves or how they relate to other people. The "fate of the world" gets evoked a lot in popular fantasy/scifi nowadays but I really appreciate the way she chose to make her protagonists the final focus of her narratives. Don't want to spoil anything ;) so I'd encourage anyone that's interested to seek her work out.

jmickey 8y ago

Perhaps unrelated - is there anywhere a repository of fictional worlds that creators can use for their projects at cost of free of charge? This would be great for many industries - computer game development, board game development, movie creators, writers, etc. :)

themodelplumber 8y ago
That's a really interesting idea. I know there are lots of generators out there for worldbuilding purposes and I have made my own on the go for things like conceptual art or short fiction. But to your question, you might ask at /r/worldbuilding on Reddit, which has some really neat stuff going on a lot of the time. /r/rpg might also be helpful.
- stillworks 8y ago
  I hope this doesn't end up opening a horrid can of worms. What are the implications if the worlds and concepts overlap ? At a personal level, I would be be very interested in learning/finding out such things though. Even more so if it is possible to automate this "discovery"
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-) BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing. Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means. A lot of fun, working this up :-)

LifeLiverTransp 8y ago

I always had that feeling, that while she was a few steps ahead, on the outset of the journey through one of her worlds- neither me nor her knew where this would end. This whole journey was never there to put me, the reader in any state, not a ride through emotions heading for a foregone conclusion. I loved the dispossesed. Sun is mine, and always will be.