The Ursula K. Le Guin Megathread

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

This is an important thread to have. LeGuin might have been the most important science fiction and fantasy writer of the 20th century, in no small part because she was willing to treat the genre as literature first, rather than a vehicle for its ideas.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 22:51

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

TOOT BOOT posted:

I'm not sure I get the Omelas story, is it meant to be a critique of utilitarianism? Collectivism? Something else?

Read broadly, it's a criticism of us. Any society which generates wealth through exploitation. Like Hieronymous said, I don't think it presents a clear solution. It's just sort of an...examination.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 23:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It wasn't a novel, exactly, and it certainly wasn't major by American SF/F standards, but it is worth noting that some great SF was written by people of color even in the lovely colonial days. The Sultana's Dream is pretty cool.

And kaworu I think you're dead on about LeGuin's subtlety. She's not only a gentle writer, but her fiction seems to make an argument for the power of being gentle, both in its prose style (which delivers some real gutpunches without any pyrotechnics or coarseness) and in the behavior of its character.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2013 15:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

We could do that, but I want to ask what people think of Tehanu, which, as noted above, has always been controversial.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2013 15:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

LeGuin is one of the few writers whose prose gets more and more impressive the more you learn about writing. As a naive teenager I was like 'eh, this is fine workmanlike stuff', but no, turns out, she's a genius!

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 05:19

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I also read Tehanu pretty young, and found it jarring. Returning to it as an adult I think it's a really important story. I admit I'd probably prefer if Tenar had become a badass wizard and torn down the whole Earthsea gender system by main force, but LeGuin's take on it is probably more sophisticated and more important - it's not just a criticism of her own focus on men, but of fantasy's focus on the powerful, the 'doers', at the expense of the workers.

In trying to talk about the value of 'women's work', I think LeGuin runs the risk of gender essentialism. But it's interesting to note that Tenar rejects the explicit essentialism she encounters. One of the witch characters declares that women have their own power, separate from wizards, a deep dark ancient power - but Tenar (rather cuttingly) replies that she's had quite enough of deep dark ancient powers in Atuan.

I do think it's a shame we never got to see a really powerful woman wizard. Dragonfly almost qualifies, but, of course, in the end she's a dragon. (I never actually noticed the pun in her name :lol:

)

# ¿ Nov 6, 2013 15:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

While Tehanu is a troubling book, both in terms of its content and in its impact on the reader - it's a startling reversal of tone from the past three books - it also leads up to The Other Wind, which is an overwhelmingly pleasant, hopeful, serene book full of decent people. It's a really impressive conclusion to the Earthsea cycle because it seems to resolve all the tension in the world, all the ugliness Tehanu called out. It leaves you with a sense of mending.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 07:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Haha, yeah, that's a painfully sharp comparison. LeGuin is the fantasy author America needs. GRRM is the fantasy author America wants and deserves.

Couldn't agree more.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 06:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Zola posted:

Has anyone else read "Always Coming Home"? The first time I read it, I was a little puzzled because it wasn't a straight narrative, but subsequent re-reads have given me more appreciation.

As a historical note for those who may not be aware of it, Ursula Le Guin is the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, who was a famous cultural anthropologist in his time. I had taken several classes for native American anthropology, and one of the things my professor brought up that I thought was really interesting is that Le Guin's stories often showed influence from the mythos of some of the tribes her father studied. I think that step away from standard American culture might be why her work is so compelling--she has somewhat of an "outsider" perspective of culture that not many who are born to it can achieve.

I completely agree. Reading LeGuin helps illuminate how blinkered and narrow the main thrust of much American SF in the past century has been - she helps mark the invisible boundaries just by stepping outside them. I think she's potent evidence for the argument that SF writers must actively seek cross-cultural exposure to do their jobs.

I also want to know how she got her sense for prose.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Dec 26, 2013

# ¿ Dec 26, 2013 18:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's a nice quote, but for all that I love Darkness for opening up the exploration of gender in science fiction, it has some queasy essentialism I'd definitely take issue with if it were written today. I don't buy the argument LeGuin's making there at all.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2014 02:37

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Her prose control is enviable and incredible. I've only disagreed with one sentence of hers, although for some reason it's stuck in my head ever since - there's a passage in The Dispossessed where a character compares her daughter's goodness to clear water, and I felt like it was such a LeGuin metaphor it almost felt like self-parody. A stupid thing to get hung up on, but I think it's a testament to how incredibly precise and minimalist she is that I got annoyed with just that one image.

I always find her little poems from Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness very comforting. I leave them open in browser tabs when I'm depressed at work. :unsmith:

# ¿ Jul 13, 2014 01:10

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