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The Child and the Shadow (1975) [pdf]
- WillAdams 2y agoIs this included in: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798061-the-language-of-the-night https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798061-the-language-o...
- Jtsummers 2y agoYes.
- yarnover 2y agoIf you have access to JSTOR, the essay (with better formatting) is available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29781619 https://www.jstor.org/stable/29781619
- andrei_says_ 2y agoRelated, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ought to be mandatory reading for every adult in the Western world. https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
- tanepiper 2y agoI've already used it as an example when talking to some people about our technology choices. Sometimes - to be able to live in the societies we do, we have to accept that there's very little choice. But if you live in full awareness that every choice you make to participate in it, there is a cost and effect that someone else has to experience. One is example is Social Media moderators - for us to not see the worst of humanity, they have to experience it for us and make a decision that literally can manipulate people's opinions and preferences
- asdffdasy 2y agoExcept it is about colonization and social classes.
- mandmandam 2y agoIt's not about any one thing. It's a thought experiment about the moral compromises societies make, and the emotional responses people have toward such compromises.
- Vecr 2y agoNot very good. The writing is okay, but walking away isn't better than deluding yourself with justification. Yes I get it's all metaphor, but that doesn't make it better. If you actually read the thing, within the literal story it never says there's actually anywhere better, or any better place could exist.
- thenobsta 2y agoWalkaway by Cory Doctorow is a decent spiritual successor to the ideas in Omelas. It also plays on the comforts of differently structured societies like Le Guin does in The Dispossessed.
- ww520 2y agoUrsula’s work was one of my favorite reads in my teenage years. Earthsea opened me to the world of fantasy novels. The Left Hand of Darkness was a difficult read at the time, but I greatly appreciated it in the later years. I wished she had written more.
- rendaw 2y agoI remembered liking them when I was a kid, but I just tried reading A Wizard of Earthsea again and it was just "Ged went here" "Ged learned that" "These people didn't like Ged" etc. Does it get better later? This right after mixing up Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K Le Guin and finding out that the Pern series was just fetish dragon smut.
- timonoko 2y agoUrsula was one book wonder, methinks. And so was Gardner Dozois, whose "Strangers" was eerily similar to "Left Hand of Darkness".
- FjordWarden 2y agoI was shocked after listening to this story by her, probably the best psycho horror I know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5637siSxu-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5637siSxu-E SPOILER: Most commentaries seem to cast this as a story about the evil of utilitarianism, and that sort of us true if you take the narrator at his word, but I think the genius of the story is that at the end you start to realise how delusional the narrator is. It there in the title and at the final sentence, "it is the ones that walked away" that the narrator does not understand while you as the reader fully sympathise with them.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago> The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious – symbol and archetype. The bookend narration of 2011 film Sucker Punch mentions such a thing. > Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter. I appreciated music more after someone pointed out that music is the most evocative art form. Paintings can look realistic, movies can be based on real stories, video games can feel immersive, but music is almost never _like_ anything. I like that.