Ursula Le Guin has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#181

Post by jonnycomputer » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #113

zumu wrote: post #85

I've always been interested in Le Guin, but never read much, outside of an Earthsea book or two as a child. From the contents of the thread I seem to be gathering The Dispossessed might be the best place to start. Is this correct? Are there any other must reads?

I second this request. I have read A Wizard of Earthsea recently — because of its status as an archetype of fantasy writing — but (perhaps not surprisingly considering its intended younger audience) it seemed to me a bit dry and descriptive in its prose. I gather that her more adult-oriented works are different?

was it intended for a younger audience?

her sequels are more reflective. you might like them more.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#182

Post by nkrisc » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

mmustapic wrote: post #124

“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest so…

It's remarkably true and something I relate to. Some of the smallest but most satisfying experiences I have are hauling heavy rocks up a riverbank to build a fire pit and chopping firewood after walking miles to find the right spot to camp. It was menial and tiring but damn was it satisfying and did it make me feel good to have done it.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#183

Post by linsomniac » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

Sebguer wrote: post #178

notahacker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think I've ever been as disappointed in the second half of a book as "Stranger in a Strange Land". Starts off with a very interesting high concept about the awkwardness of interacting with a human who has no idea of human values (as well as a solid stock plot about people trying to control him) and then rapidly turns said vulnerable, weird protagonist into a powerful free love cult-leader promoting all the very…

This is a problem with Heinlein's books in general. They tend to start off strong and then just get kind of bizarre in the second half.

Totally agreed. Friday was the first book of his I read, bought largely based on the cover when I was 15 :-). I prefer his short stories in general, though I've read Starship Troopers a few times.

I just finished Ringworld by Niven, and felt it had a similar problem, where the ending just kind of petered out. Maybe it is just the style back then?

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#184

Post by ixtli » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

MaysonL wrote: post #156

ixtli wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also found that socialist positions get downvoted here. I'd recommend that people read the works of socialists (Marx, Rosa, etc.) because most of my negative associates came from liberal insinuation I received growing up in the US :) The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia (which, btw, hasn't been anything remotely socialist i…

And yet there seems to be a fair amount of support here for guaranteed basic income / guaranteed employment.

As the other commenter said: it's a capitalist solution. But as well I find that the concerted effort to paint the word 'socialism' as a bad thing implicitly in america is exactly why the effect you observe happens. I think, from talking at length with lots of people from various places, background, and of various identities that americans are pretty amenable to socialist policy we just have some cultural peculiarities that make it hard to talk about.

This is why bernie's platform vs trump's platform get more and more interesting to me as the majority continues to rebel against _how_ trump governs. It shows me that people really do want a progressive populist but there are a lot of bizarre little artifacts in our culture that keeps them from accepting certain concepts at face value. I guess what I'm saying is that socialism needs rebrand AND people need to be encouraged to discover the rich American history of socialism from the union workers in Appalachia that were attacked by our government for striking, to harriet tubman, mlk, and eugene debs.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#185

Post by ixtli » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

Synaesthesia wrote: post #170

microcolonel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia It might also have something to do with the roughly 85-100 million people whose deaths can be directly attributed to policies enacted in support of socialist utopia during the 20th century. Advocates of socialism like to say that they're anarchist, or that they're anti-authoritarian; but enac…

Socialism is about improving the lot of workers, and ordinary people and giving them more power, for instance saying that workers should own the factories together, make their own decisions democratically, rather than take orders from a boss. In that respect the USSR has very little to do with socialism, more resembling state capitalism. See Chomsky: The Soviet Union vs Socialism. https://chomsky.info/1986____/

yes. the person you're responding to is getting caught up in a very narrow style of authoritarian communism which honestly i can understand being repulsed by! But, as i was saying in the original comment: hundreds of years of work has been done by thousands of scholars and activists to develop marxist theories. the person you're responding to paints leftists as a bloc, all trying to accomplish the same thing! If only!

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#186

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #175

WorldMaker wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always assumed Heinlein was more socialist than a lot of people give him credit for, so in my own impressions of his books Strange Land seems the more honest/hopeful than many of his works (and also why the actions in that book cynically fail in the longer timeline). In that I also saw the dystopian elements of Moon is a Harsh Mistress, just below the surface, intentional commentary, and the ending a relatively mec…

Have you read any of Heinlein's essays/journals/non-fiction writings? I think they would probably disabuse you of the notion that he was a closet socialist.

I have read some, yes. He was a complicated person with complicated opinions and many decades to shift his worldviews. Early in life he was an open admirer of the Social Credit Party, the turn of last century Universal Basic Income party, so he was an open socialist for some years.

It's easy to chalk his early socialist inclinations as youthful vigor that maybe he regretted later in life, but that isn't the only way to read it. Despite what modern political in-fighting and team-formations may wish us to believe, socialist and libertarian are not mutually exclusive constructs (one is socioeconomic and the other sociopolitical, and there can be and is an intersection; UBI is very libertarian as an ideal/project). Up until the Red Scare and McCarthyism there were American socialists on both sides of the aisle. After the Red Scare there were still socialists on both sides of the aisle, but yes, most of them at that point were forced into the closet and out of mainstream discussion for many decades in the later part of the twentieth century.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#187

Post by BenjiWiebe » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

muricula wrote: post #151

frostwhale wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty big sci-fi reader and have never read her (to my shame), can you recommend where to start?

Her most well known sci-fi novels are probably the Left Hand of Darkness, Winter, and The Dispossessed. They are well summarized in the obituary. If you prefer fantasy, she wrote The Wizards of Earthsea series as well. Le Guinn explores social and political questions overlooked by those who came before, and has had a profound impact on those who came after. The recent Hugo winner Ancillary Justice was heavily inspire…

The wizard of EarthSea... That's why her name sounded so familiar!

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#188

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #186

jrochkind1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read any of Heinlein's essays/journals/non-fiction writings? I think they would probably disabuse you of the notion that he was a closet socialist.

I have read some, yes. He was a complicated person with complicated opinions and many decades to shift his worldviews. Early in life he was an open admirer of the Social Credit Party, the turn of last century Universal Basic Income party, so he was an open socialist for some years. It's easy to chalk his early socialist inclinations as youthful vigor that maybe he regretted later in life, but that isn't the only way…

I think you misreprepresent history. The people calling themselves "libertarian socialists" in the early part of the 20th century were not "on the other side of the aisle" exactly, they were almost all anti-capitalist. And if you're talking about the literal U.S. major political parties, there was not the "Republicans==conservative/right and Democrats==liberal/left" association then, what literal congressional "side of the aisle" did not have the left/right liberal/conservative association it does now, party politics were different. And "libertarian" didn't mean then what it does now in the U.S. either.

But yes, a variety of politics are possible, not just two, and Heinlein certainly had his own odd one, agreed.

In Starship Troopers, of course, everyone gets a kind of UBI I think, but only those who serve in the military have the political franchise. That was a fairly early work of his, and he definitely kept getting weirder from there.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#189

Post by fulminatorz68 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

I'll login for this.

Timeline: * Susan Cooper * Tolkien, Lewis, Saberhagen, Howard * Le Guin, Wolfe and Ellison. * Jack Vance.

With Vance I understood all in fantasy and everything before but you need to have read those imitators/influences to understand Vance. Wolfe may be the exception but he is jaundiced by religion. I find decoding him without merit now.

I once told (online) Le Guin that her opinion was without merit and was without intellectual honesty in condemning the habits of other (political figures) promiscuity: those days had come and gone. I don't think she was wrong. I think she was beyond the temporal distinction.

This hurts. She was amazing and kind and I will miss her and Ged.

Re: Ursula Le Guin has died

#190

Post by KSteffensen » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #71

krapp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then you have Star Wars which really doesn't give a ####. Star Trek just pretends to, though. Most of its fictional conceits are barely thought out, including its post-scarcity communist utopia. Does the Force really make any less sense than Q? It's all space fantasy.

Does PsychoHistory and "The Mule" make any more sense than The Force? In the end, it is all space opry. Our far flung mind children are likely to be stranger than the mind of Homo sapiens is able to imagine.

Psychohistory makes sense as a sort of statistical sociology. Probabilities of society as a whole moving in this or that general direction.