I just finished re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan last week. It was enjoyable because I picked up some of the themes that teenage me missed when reading the series all those years ago. A gifted writer RIP
Ursula Le Guin has died
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Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like Sci-Fi that likes to speculate on the nature of sex and gender, also check out Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis saga.
Butler's books made my skin crawl in the best possible way. I can't think of another author in SF who so thoroughly conveyed the feeling of rape to a man who'd never experienced it. Her books were potent brews of control, acceptance, family, and love. I keep hoping Kindred will be made into a mini-series one day.
I'm from the 90's, partially. I hope your username is a reference to The Invisibles.
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#63She started blogging[1] at 81. This is an interview with her, around the time of the publication of her book which came out of that. She will be missed. [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/144719/happens-science-ficti...
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Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#64The introduction to one of the versions of Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite texts about Science Fiction: http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html
I almost always skip the intro of books like this. I didn't skip this one. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books of all time.
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#65The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. I'm not usually affected by authors passing away but damn this stings a little. One of my favourite authors.
It's such a fine last paragraph it's worth quoting in full:
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#66We will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#67[flagged]
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#68I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy. —T…
"We ask the hospitality of the Domain."
Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.
"We came over the Gobrin Ice."
More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.
"Will you look to my friend?"
I thought I had said it, but Estraven had.
-- [The Left Hand of Darkness], Ursula K. Le Guin
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#69"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art."
Re: Ursula Le Guin has died
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone remember the source of the essay about the town where everyone was happy, and how it feels unbelievable until you find it has a horrible secret, which somehow makes it more believable? I think that is her writing.
That is a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
Salem O backwards