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Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin
- jacquesm 9mo agoEverybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
- PretzelPirate 9mo agoI have a signed copy of 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and I will never let it go. I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book is a masterpiece!
- dtgriscom 9mo agoAlthough I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.
- eternauta3k 9mo agoIf you want some help then check out Mythgard Academy's course: https://mythgard.org/academy/dispossessed/ https://mythgard.org/academy/dispossessed/
- dtgriscom 9mo agoThanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)
- scarecrowbob 9mo agoI eventually dropped out of a PhD Lit program, but damn the AP English syllabus did everything it could do to dissuade me from enjoying literature. I feel you on not wanting to read stuff that can't be read without footnotes.
- scarecrowbob 9mo agoAs a person actively organizing with anarchists and who has had a lot of long, fraught relationships leading to my late 40s, I found the Dispossessed to be relatable is ways I wouldn't have if I'd read it earlier in life. I don't know if it's a difficult book, but I can see how it might land differently for me in different situations.
- jacquesm 9mo agoLucky you! Make sure your heirs realize the significance...
- Phelinofist 9mo ago> ... 'The Left Hand of Darkness' I read it last year. I found it to be quit boring and it also felt kinda "dated" in the sense that more recent SF is more space-y. However, the social constructs were well thought out.
- opto 9mo agoReplying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
- jackyinger 9mo agoThe social constructs were the entire point. The spacey stuff was just a vehicle to get a more relatable protagonist into the story.
- mbb70 9mo agoIn the foreward, she calls out to her, great SF is descriptive, not predictive. TLHOD is about sex, gender, friendships and culture in our world. Also a huge number of spacey contemporary works like A Mote in God's Eye, Rendezvous with Rama, Dune, Ringworld...
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agowhat does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is? Or set in outer space? If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the outdated space focused science fiction of the previous generations.
- sonofhans 9mo agoFunnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
- jibal 9mo agoThe Lathe of Heaven was the first I read and had a big impression on me. Much later, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas did.
- dtgriscom 9mo agoThe WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.
- jibal 9mo agoI've seen it a couple of times (it's on YouTube, IIRC) and it was well done but I much preferred the book.
- roughly 9mo agoI think “The word for world is forest” is criminally underrated.
- jacquesm 9mo agoYes, true, that's also a great one. I should really re-read all of them.
- celsius1414 9mo ago2026 is the 60th anniversary of Rocannon’s World, the first novel of her Hainish Cycle SF books. I’m rereading all of them over the course of the year to celebrate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainish_Cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainish_Cycle She is one of my writer-heroes.
- andyjohnson0 9mo agoI enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, but my favourite of her works is Always Coming Home [1]. Such a rich and varied and humane book. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
- lproven 9mo agoI read _Always Coming Home_ about 30 years ago now, and ever since, "heya" has been my default greeting. I could count how many people recognised it on my fingers, but that doesn't matter.
- ilamont 9mo agoI grew up reading Earthsea but later discovered Threshold/The Beginning Place. Some of her short stories are very good, too.
- 7402 9mo agoMine is 'City of Illusions.' I liked the Patterning Frame, which appears in it; I made one. https://7402.org/blog/2021/patterning-frame.html https://7402.org/blog/2021/patterning-frame.html
- mark_l_watson 9mo agoInteresting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most often go back to Le Guin’s audio book reading of ‘Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching’ with short musical interludes and small sound effects. 100% satisfying to listen to.
- dtgriscom 9mo agoThanks for the tip. My local library has it; I'll grab it tomorrow.
- nubg 9mo ago[flagged]
- Telemakhos 9mo ago“Ineffable” means “too great to be spoken in words,” so I’m wondering what you found sexualized about that.
- magnusmundus 9mo agoAnother meaning the word "effable" acquired in the last couple decades is a spelled out form of "f-able", as in fuckable. OP must've been unaware of the word's prior existence.
- jacquesm 9mo agoYou'd have to deliberately misunderstand it, clearly if that's the first thing that pops up into your head when you read about someone putting together a memorial show for their mom that isn't the appropriate reading.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoA coworker made a sort of cartoon, pompous jerk says "Who dares disturb the ineffable blah blah blah" Cleaning lady: "Sorry I had no idea you wasn't effable, I'll come back later" that is to say since effable as a slang term for some someone that one might like to have sex with exists, it is a reasonable pun to make with ineffable as being, well, not effable. However one should probably be able to realize the ineffable in question is not a pun on the slang term and figure things out. Somewhat embarrassing really. on edit: added in disturb, must have missed it because very tired.
- codeduck 9mo agoLe Guin's characterisation of magic and the power of Names remains one of my favourite treatments of the themes in modern fantasy. Earthsea remains one of my pleasures.
- csense 9mo agoI could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned about the racial aspect of it. If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes. LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over Earthsea. (Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting opinions are welcome!)
- jenniferCrawdad 9mo agoplease do not feed the troll everybody
- lovich 9mo agoI can’t tell because of my age whether everyone forgot this lesson or that the younger crowd is now online and never learned it.
- zanellato19 9mo ago> f you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes. Maybe for people that don't subscribe to this, something a bit less... Action-y makes it more interesting.
- leejoramo 9mo agoI remember Le Guin speaking at my university around 1990. She was amazingly open about her writing process. While she did not directly answer questions about the “meaning” of her writing, she did facilitate the discussion about her work’s meaning, and asked the audience challenging questions. Of all my time at uni, I wish I had a recording of this event. I understood from students who had attended a writing workshop with her earlier in the day, that she was gifted teacher.
- nestorD 9mo agoHer book Steering the Craft, is very much her writing workshop distilled into book form.
- pfdietz 9mo agoWhat a nice link. Thank you.
- abracos 9mo agoWhy do people rate "The Left Hand of Darkness" so much? Is it because it was good at the time of writing? All concepts there are very shallow and mainstream now edit: honest question, don't want to flame
- dexwiz 9mo agoI think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.
- abracos 9mo agoAgree on "I, robot", but foundation series is still very good (probably because it's not really character-focused)
- ted_bunny 9mo agoAsimov wrote characters?!
- beng-nl 9mo agoJust to add to this, people say the same about eg citizen Kane being such a classic but without the context of it having genre defining firsts, the film doesn’t stand out as much to a modern viewer.
- croes 9mo agoThe keyword is now. The first telephone is also pretty bad compared to nowadays phones.
- abracos 9mo agoYes, but now it doesn't make sense to read it anymore right? It reads outdated and there are better books nowadays
- ducttapecrown 9mo ago
- jibal 9mo agoLovely.
- libraryofbabel 9mo agoSlightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century, in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, they never met but they struck up a polite friendship over email when they were both old and chatted back and forth. Some might consider this raises the stature of Ursula Le Guin. I consider it rather as raising the stature of Harold Bloom. He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
- ilamont 9mo ago> He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction. In the 70s and 80s, Le Guin and other SFF authors were very aware of the literary divide that often regarded most science fiction and fantasy as little better than pulp fiction. Gene Wolfe's essays and speeches in Castle of Days touch on this several times. What changed was the arrival of a new generation of literary critics, researchers, and readers who knew greatness in some of the SFF works of the era.
- grahamburger 9mo agoI just started reading the Earthsea series to my kids last night, what a coincidence to see this here! I discovered Le Guin relatively late in life and I'm so glad I did.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- monkeycantype 9mo agoI only know your mother from a distance, although sometimes that was only few blocks apart on the map, I'm not aware of even passing her on the on the street, I knew only the part of her revealed in her writing and records of her public speaking, but even from that distance she has been one of the most influencial people in my life, her writing had deep impact on me, my view of the world and the person I have become.
- 8bitsrule 9mo agoUrsula was one of the finest authors in my lifetime, and was a real-life class act to boot. I dared talk to Ellison,Niven, Sturgeon but I only dared a smile in that presence!
- wise_blood 9mo agoI just wish Library of America published the Earthsea books