Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

I love her SO MUCH. Since moving to Seattle I've met her a couple of times at book fests, and oh, she is the coolest person imaginable. I want to be like her when I'm her age.

What I wanna know -- in a battle between her school for wizards & the Harry Potter school for wizards -- who wins?

In the Tombs of Atuan, Ged asks Tenar (= ex-High Priestess of the Nameless Ones) if she can read, and she says, "No, it's one of the Black Arts obv"

just noticed that Ged is depicted as caucasian on cover of my puffin copy!! oops!

i like that the dragons find humans v.komikal

The Lathe of Heaven ft(obvious)w, but did you know she translated the Tao Te Ching?!

The Dispossessed is uncannily masterful

How this thread can have gone so long without mention of the best SF short-story collection ever written, _The Compass Rose_, is beyond me.

I'm kinda annoyed, I looked over just now to my bookcase and I can't see my copy of Compass Rose there. I didn't get rid of it, I hope!

(I can see Orsinian Tales, Always Coming Home, all the Earthsea books and a slew of the sixties and seventies novels.)

I looked over to another bookcase and found Compass Rose there. All is right with the world.

the slug lords read and discuss "things" this week, from 1970

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime

the way she puts sentences together is pretty incredible - it's got this comfortable yet ancient feel to it, like liturgy or something

The Dispossessed blew me away aged 18, I must dig it up and re-read. City of Illusions is a fun overlooked one.

I thought the no knowledge of swimming or boatbuilding in 'Things' was a bit of a stretch, but overall I liked the semi-mystical tone, and the ambiguity of the ending and hence possible interpretations. Earthsea is the only other stuff of hers I've read - Tombs of Atuan is my fave - I mean to try some more but the library's got nuthin; time for another trawl of the second hand shops.

I think Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness are in print as part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series.

thought this was brilliant again tracer, do you offer a talking-book service? enjoyed mark and katie's discussion also

don't suppose you can read "things" online?

wow, thanks cozz-own d.h. i don't know what you mean by a "talking-book service", but it sounds old-fashioned, like a seltzer man or something that mr. burns would be familiar with.

no, you can't read "things" online, which is one of the inspirations for the show, actually - to make these stories more accessible for an illiterate online age

by talking book service I meant will you come round mine and read some of my long-festering books into a dictaphone for me : )

cool; will def. be hitting the bookstore today then to grab some ursula

New Le Guin feature/interview via the LA Times, prompted in part by her Nebula win two weeks back for Powers.

I finally read one of her books recently (thanks SF book club!), and really liked it. It was the one about the flipflop ambisexual aliens. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed it, as I had somehow picked up the idea that Le Guin's work is a bit serious and full of makes-you-think moments. Instead I got a book with loads of exciting political intrigue and stuff about human societies. Deadly.

just been on an earthsea binge. tombs of atuan > a wizard > tehanu > other wind > farthest shore imo, but they're all remarkably solid. tehanu is in some way the most interesting, in examining the earthsea male dominated power structure she's obviously questioning some of her earlier decisions as the author and creator of the world.

farthest shore freaked me out as a kid. so did tehanu, actually. i was probably easily freaked out.

i just read The Beginning Place/Threshold, and what impressed me was the fact that the novel was fairly short and sweet. cuz it was definitely the kind of story that someone else would have milked for ten volumes. this is true of her short stories too. the ideas are so good that other writers could dine out on them forever. but she herself just moves on to the next thing.

um, with the exception of her two long-ass series.

Brief but accurate:

http://io9.com/5924893/ursula-k-le-guins-great-unsung-masterpiece

I never got further than about 10 pages into this, and always felt vaguely guilty about the fact.

You should. (Trust me, it's very, very worth it.)

Ugh that other list of books linked in the article. So much boring.

^^^ list is terrible

I have been wondering if Starmaker is worth reading for awhile now tho...

like really people can't make it through Cryptomicon or 1984 wtf

Starmaker is superb, amazing scope, encompassing the whole universe and the end of time. Haven't read Last and First Men, but it's on the list. As is Always Coming Home - think I'll order it tomorrow in fact.

I don't most people have even heard of that Leigh Brackett book let alone pretended to read it.

Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren are definitely books that are more pretended to be read than actually read, but I wouldn't recommend reading either so...

^^^ has not been able to finish either book in all honesty.

Or Finnegan's Wake for that matter.

I've never heard of that Brackett book myself. agree about Dhalgren. never bothered with Gravity's Rainbow, not interested in its subject matter really

SF Public Library does not have a copy of the Long Tomorrow so yeah basically no one has read that book.

You people. (Have fully read and loved both the Pynchon and Delany books.)

Actually if I hadn't've read Dhalgren and wrote a paper on it in college, I wouldn't've been accepted to grad school and given a full fellowship, whole life story changed etc. So there ya go.

I like some Pynchon (primarily Crying of Lot 49, but V and Vineland were both enjoyable too). absolutely hate Delany.

I like plenty of Delany, but Dhalgren is overlong and irritatingly written. Basically feel the same about GV as well, but I'm not a big fan of any Pynchon really.

i mean not really but in the moment i felt that

Two years ago my wife and I flew to PDX to surprise my wife's grandmother on her 80th birthday. We had some time to kill in the evening before the party, so we took our rental car and went wandering up along the Columbia. At some point we pulled over to a little park to watch the sunset. There were only two other people in the park: LeGuin and her assistant. They sat at a picnic table, LeGuin holding some manuscript pages and watching the sunset, and the assistant fussing with her phone. Always Coming Home is one of my favorite books, and I desperately wanted to tell UKL that this was the case, and to thank her for a billion pages of reading and ideas. But I didn't, and I think it was the right call. But we shared a sunset together, which is kind of ... like something she might write.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/LeftHandMillsCollege.html

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa”

No words

chapter 1 of her Tao Te Ching translation:

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is a mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

Most idiotic hot take, which I had to rant about on twitter because it was so, so stupid:

Today, in 'The fact that I admit I don't know what I'm talking about, am almost diametrically wrong about what I'm saying, and am about to draw a ludicrous and specious comparison will not prevent me from tweeting something stupid': pic.twitter.com/gxrxHZAwHY

— Caustic Cover Critic (@Unwise_Trousers) January 24, 2018

Wow what a take that is

well, excretions can also be hot so

I AM MAD ABOUT MY THING SO I AM GOING TO SHIT ON YOUR THING

twitter, forever and always

lol it so totally figures that the king of shitty hot takes, clickbait hack noah berlatsky, chimed in to support that horrible tweet

RIP. No-one i would rather re-read, and I still have a good few to discover for the first time.

I've always found her a difficult read, but wanna persevere. Is the first Earthsea a place to start?

Yes. Or "The Rule of Names."

The trailer to the long in the works documentary is here:

https://vimeo.com/268831999

Per io9:

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is set to premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest on June 10, followed by a series of US festival visits and eventually a digital release online. Curry also revealed on Kickstarter that the documentary will be broadcast on PBS American Masters sometime in 2019.

Just finished Tehanu. Bleak, but perfect for me, and for right now. It's really quite a feat to go from epic to intimate and have it feel liberating rather than anticlimactic.

Ursula K Le Guin's house is for sale! If we club together we could probably afford it, right?

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article245407450.html

lets do it

I am good with this approach.

Holy wow that home is glorious.

wish i was always coming home to there.

omg yes please let’s do this

I don't think this will work out the way you hope, Laura.
Oh social media. pic.twitter.com/49m1UWnVzl

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) December 8, 2020

Awesome.

We are delighted to announce that the 33rd stamp in the US Postal Service Literary Arts series honors Ursula. Stamp release will be later this year, date TBD. From then on, all our letters will be three ounces! Thank you @USPS for this distinction. https://t.co/jGboi8i5LU pic.twitter.com/8H3UOGafPv

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) January 15, 2021

Gorgeous

And as I've been muttering elsewhere -- while I'm not positive this is the first US stamp to feature a nonbinary figure, that background scene is obv Left Hand of Darkness and thus features Estraven, so.

Yes, I was just admiring that illustration of Ai and Estraven. Really nice work.

so cool

I’m reading Tombs of Atuan with my son right now and that book is a god damn masterpiece.

You spend almost half the book just living in Arha’s rhythms, feeling the texture of her world and understanding what structures it it: the boundaries of fear and ritual. You have the sensation of a society living on just the husk of an unremembered time. The living drama of humanity has moved on from this place yet we are centred on it. (It’s like the US Senate!) What scriptwriters call “the inciting incident” comes a good third of the book’s length too late, by today’s standards, but what you gain is a recognition of its gravity. Plus it’s goth as shit. It really is astounding. Once the motor of the story picks up its pace all the weight of that long opening gives an inertial force to events that is just awesome. Honestly - the first book - Wizard of Earthsea - is very good, but it follows a fairly traditional structure. And the elements are not very surprising. It’s told masterfully of course, but you know, you’ve got a wizard’s school and some dragons and a hot-headed protagonist. This though - this is really something else. The intensity of it is frankly almost overwhelming.

There’s so much in there about freedom and breaking free of stultifying tradition and whether it’s possible to cast off beliefs you were inculcated with, and how morality intersects with these questions, and how you sometimes need to take the biggest risk you can take, and how an act of kindness - even made without really realising it - can open up your whole heart and change your whole life

booming and otm

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Atuan has been my favourite of the Earthsea books for a long time. It was one of the first books I used inter-library loan for as a kid and it was so unlike anything else I'd ever read at that age.
I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I haven’t read Tehanu yet Ned but why do you think it’s more impressive than Tombs of Atuan? Is it possible to explain without giving anything away?

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Yeah, as I said upthread, it's amazing that the series' turn from epic to intimate feels so liberating.

I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I did this in 2020 (actually was my first readthrough of books 4-6) and cannot recommend enough.

I'm curious about her translation of the Tao Te Ching as well, but I think I might want something more traditional there.

literally bought this based on yr rec, th

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

The UKL TTC is U&K.

Sean Guynes concluded his excellent Le Guin reread with a post on why Tehanu is Le Guin's best book:
https://www.tor.com/2021/02/24/tehanu-le-guins-return-to-earthsea-and-her-best-novel

the 1st time i read it i did it with wrong expectations (and probably at a wrong age).
it'll likely speak more to me now that i'm older, lol.

Psyched

I also found Tombs of Atuan much more immersive and approachable and generally meaningful than Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is very much a figure of legend, running around fighting monsters (even if they're of his own making), and there's something correspondingly chilly and distancing about the narration. With Tombs of Atuan, you're plunged into the emotional world of someone who can't go anywhere or have adventures or even have a name; she's just a kernel of humanity hidden away in the dark, being somehow herself in spite of everything. I guess it's the difference between a traditionally masculine story and a traditionally feminine story, but Le Guin has turned the contrast way, way up.

I'm in the minority, I guess, as I don't think Tehanu works as well as Tombs of Atuan. Tehanu feels to me like Le Guin very consciously trying to write a feminist Earthsea book, in a way that comes across as forced to me.

That post feels very incoherent, sorry. I think I meant "the difference between a traditionally male story and a traditionally female story" - the kind of story imposed from without by traditional gender roles, but exaggerated to the most extreme point, so that the man can literally go anywhere and do anything but has an emotional life/interiority that's almost entirely inaccessible to us, while the woman is literally stuck in a freaking cave and we are immersed so fully in her POV that it's dizzying. Like the difference between, idk, Tom Jones and Persuasion, but side by side in the same series, and the characters are able to sort of step outside of the lines that have been drawn for them and meet and communicate, and somehow both of them seem more human through each other's eyes - idk where I'm going with this but I think it's cool.

Anyway, great posts, Tracer.

See whereas I loved Tehanu because I felt like "oh finally, this stops being about male magic and male energy and turns the dial to matters more rooted and more intimate". It resonated.

I actually didnt like Tombs much because all the scenes down in said tombs felt weird and claustrophobic to me.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I liked what she was trying to do in Tehanu but I just felt like I could see her trying, and it distracted me. But I do like it, and I get why a lot of people love it.

Had the thought recently that the Jedi are basically orgasm denial wizards which is probably what makes them so fucked up as “good guys”

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

I keep thinking of that story these days because of QAnon, the way they watch this religion spring up from absolutely nothing and then take firm enough root to potentially derail everything, and then the oh-so-important vote where sanity just barely prevails, it all feels very familiar.

yes, nice parallel!

Tombs and Tehanu are tied for my favourite, I didn't read the latter till I was much older and found it incredibly powerful, like she was taking the traditional patriarchal structure of the first books and burning it with fire. Wizard/Tombs/Farthest Shore = thesis, Tehanu = antithesis; Tales & The Other Wind = synthesis!

I reread The Farthest Shore recently and liked it much better than I remembered. I had it lumped together in my mind with A Wizard of Earthsea, but it's much darker and more adult - and more personal as well, even though you still don't get much of a sense of who Ged is. This central idea of a world where something has gone deeply, inexplicably wrong everywhere, all the joy and sense of purpose running out of everything, all these people walking around feeling like they've lost something, and they can't even remember what - it all felt, honestly, like a really disturbing reflection of the world as it is now. And I'm not usually a big fan of world-building for its own sake, but the imagery she invents for the land of the dead just feels so right: the wall of stones, the dry river with its dry source, the mountains of pain, all feel like they're part of some vast collective unconscious, like they've always been there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/21/realists-of-a-larger-reality-wanted-ursula-k-le-guin-prize-for-fiction-to-launch-in-2022