Not really a meme, I know, but I thought this was amazing and worth sharing and I didn’t know where else to share it on Lemmy.
Ursula LeGuin was an incredible person and, although she did live a long life, her death was still a huge loss.
What a badass
She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts “I am a man.” It is not about her gender identity, it’s just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).
You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.
So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
I also cannot recommend enough (thanks for the correction!) her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It’s an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.
The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.
Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965…
I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it’s not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it’s told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It’s an amazing piece of work, and it’s amazing it was published when it was.
“I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it’s such a great book.”
It was my introduction to her writing, and wow what a fucking book. I read it in two days, I couldn’t put it down.
Well that description got me to place a hold on it at my library. I have a hard time getting into new authors and have wanted to try her work for some time
I’m confident you won’t regret it. I read quite a lot of SF, both older and newer. There’s a lot of classic SF that’s really good, but you have to constantly keep in mind the time it was written in because the story or the characters or the dialog is dated. There was zero of that with that book, it could have been written yesterday (the setting kind of insulates it culturally and technologically). And the sensibilities are so, so far ahead of its time.
I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.
So it sounds like the Mormonism in the stormlight archive. Where it’s ever present but requires literary analysis to see
I admit I haven’t read it in many years, so thanks for correcting me on the details. The way she goes in depth exploring the societies and beings she imagines while still maintaining a plausible plot and believable characters you can empathize with is really incredible. It’s something other writers rarely achieve. Iain M. Banks had similar literary skills.
As someone who grew up at the height of the potter craze, and was well and truly entrenched in it (stood in line for the books, read them through without sleeping, went to events, et cetera) I can honestly say that the first earthsea book is legitimately better than the potter books. I’ll never be able to hate the HP books, despite despising JKR, but a wizard of earthsea is just much better written. It’s so freaking good, and tells it’s story in such a charming and completely unique way.
I have re-read all of the books and short stories a couple of times. They’re really good. The BBC did a radio dramatization of the books a few years ago. It was pretty abridged, but still worth hearing.
Mainly though, I just wanted to point out how Rowling very clearly used LeGuin as a source for her books (along with the Worst Witch books, the first of which came out when she was exactly the right age to have read them).
Haven’t heard of the worst witch, I don’t think, unless that’s the one that also uses a magical platform at kings cross
If you’re British, I can’t explain that. If you aren’t, it’s big in the UK (or at least used to be?) not only a whole book series, but a movie and a TV series.
The movie stars a very young Fairuza Balk and was big enough to get Diana Rigg and Tim Curry in it.
So not exactly Harry Potter, but still well-known. And certainly known well enough for Rowling to not have only heard of them, but very likely at least read the first one because she was 9 years old when it came out, which is pretty much the perfect age for that book.
No, sadly I live in the US :(
The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon.
Sounds very similar to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, one of my favorite books.
Instead, Earth had colonized the moon, and is doing the normal routine of extracting all possible value at all costs. They are shipping ungodly amounts or ice water from the moon’s ice caps down to earth, which has left the lunar denizens with little water, and few crops. So they stage a revolution to avoid the impending collapse of their society.
They go into the actual war strategies a moon might take upon a parent planet, and it is fascinating, I highly recommend it.
A bit, but I felt like Heinlein’s book was much more ‘hit you over the head with the message’ than her books ever are. I still really like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much more heavy-handed in terms of messaging. LeGuin lets you mostly figure it out for yourself. You can certainly read her books and not learn a thing if you don’t want to (many people, especially her male critics over the years, do so), but if you open your mind to what she’s saying…
I’ll have to take your word for it on the strength of messaging, as I haven’t read LeGuin yet. But it’s definitely been added to my reading list.
I like politics/religion/etc as topics well enough, but usually never enough to read about on their own as a book. It just doesn’t sit well with me.
But add a bit of science fiction to it? That god damn I’m on board. It’s like taking meds with a bit of honey for me. So when I find authors that explore things and have some fun with it, I jump at the chance.
Her older stuff is good, but I’ve always been of the opinion she got progressively better and better as she got older. Birthday of the World, a short story compilation, is a masterpiece.
Her overall style is particularly well-suited to the short story format, as it allows her to hyper-focus on just a few themes, letting her stay almost uncomfortably tight. She’s already the kind of author that can leave you thinking for an hour with a single paragraph, and short stories almost let her condense a work into a higher percentage of just those paragraphs.
I also cannot recommend her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
I hope you meant you can recommend them. They’re both very good.
I liked the dispossessed a lot
Yes, sorry, fixed.
Cannot recommend? Or cannot recommend enough? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but that’s exactly the sort of brain typo that I would make, giving my audience exactly the opposite claim to what I’d intended, and based on context, I think the latter is what you were going for?
I’ve heard of Earthsea, but had no idea what it was about. Now I may need to pick it up. I rather enjoyed a more recent story with a similar plot, written by an author with, shall we say, less progressive opinions.
Whoops. The latter.
As a kid I just wanted to read weird old shit. LOTR, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick, you can guess where this is going. I still can’t let go of my childhood Lovecraft nightmares. I am aware most of that is stupid and racist and misguided. But strip that hateful garbage out, you still have a lot
Addendum I f’d up and didn’t mention my adoration for Ursula K. Leguin
How is wanting to read weird old shit racist ??
Ok they weren’t all racist. Racism is the basic premise for Lovecraft for sure.
hah, Lovecraft specifically. I heard he was racist af but couldn’t see it in his work (haven’t read all of it but a good chunk when I was younger)
Some people are right way before their time. Fortunately, they sometimes also know how to write.
And it’s now 2024, and nothing has changed. Maybe for the worse.
You’re not wrong, but when you compare the general perspective of baby boomers vs the general perspective of Millennials/Zoomers, you can at least see that there now exists a will for change.
I like to think that maybe Ursula LeGuin was able to play a role in that change through her words.
yea change takes time and active effort, the fact that corporate interference is so present in the newer generation’s minds is already a massive step in the right direction, doomerism (as always) does jack shit for fuck to actually solve anything
And a czar was killed by a revolutionary’s bomb decades before the first of the three socialist revolutions of Russia. Will is slow to build and spent suddenly.
Honestly the last decade plus does feel like the lead up paragraph in a history textbook to some major paradigm shift. But it could still be years and years away. But it does feel inevitable.
Mad respect. She has bigger balls than I do.
A few months back my boss asked me if I wanted to join him and the CEO for coffee. Apparently the CEO was doing a thing to see how the lower level employees were feeling about things. It’s not exactly a small company either, few people at the company meet the CEO.
I turned him down because I knew it would be too tempting to tell the man to his face that he is effectively a dictator, that the company should be employee owned, that they shouldn’t have the power to restrict where people work (90% of the staff can do their jobs remotely), etc.
And saying that shit would have probably lost me my job.
If you ever get the opportunity again, it would be interesting to ask for the smallest win worth fighting for and see if it’s scoffed at or received well.
Potentially. However, I’m a very argumentative person, and I have a very hard time biting my tongue. So for me, it’s just not worth the risk to begin with.
Lmao friend, you probably did well to say nothing and not participate. But please don’t forget: you got good ideas
Yeah. There is a time and place, you gotta choose your battles. That was very much not one of them.
Well, it’s none of his business what you think.
There is that as well. There is no convincing a CEO that capitalism bad. So he can get bent before I have a conversation with him.
They should have expected as much. She’s basically just paraphrasing The Lathe of Heaven for that speech.
You would expect that from the author of The Dispossessed. She’s an anarchist (Paul Goodman leaning) through and through. She also wrote the preface to Murray Bookchin’s The Next Revolution.
The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more,[3] I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. And I found that its principal character, whom I’d first glimpsed in the original misbegotten story, was alive and well—my guide to Anarres.
Truly we do live in a society
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
To me that seems like a bold claim considering “the divine right of kings” has not been successfully resisted nor was it escaped from. Monarchies still exist on every continent, people of royalty still get more rights and better treatment than others, once-royal families still possess loads of wealth, still rule countries in high political positions, still own many companies and other wealth generating assets. Humans have gained unfair advantages due to their lineage for thousands if not tens of thousands of years and I highly doubt that this will change massively in the next thousand years.
Regardless, it still sounds like a really nice speech though.
In general, monarchs no longer claim to rule by divine right. Monarchs are not necessarily running their country as more than just figureheads by reasoning that it’s what a god wants. That’s a big change.
Monarchies still exist on every continent
Sorry, but where are the monarch in the American Continent? And I mean from the north of Canada to the South Of Chile.
Where are they?
The US president reminds me of the kings of old - more so than anybody actually called a king. The kind of fawning exaltation their current and former leaders receive is way, way over the top. ‘Presidents Day’ like there’s a pantheon that needs worshipping: pathetic. The fear/respect people close-to treat them with reminds me of the servile peons under some all-powerful autocrat, and not for no reason. The power these people have is way, way, way over the top, power that - rather than helping disillusion an entire population brainwashed by the lie of superiority - wages revenge wars and swings dicks.
The monarchy of England is still in charge of Canada.
While true on paper, they don’t have any actual power here.
Then why do you keep them around?
Inertia.
Also while a wealthy family enterprise, they neither
- a) rule over any nation(s)
- b) receive any authority through divine appointment
It’s actually a huge step down from the kind of power royalty used to enjoy.
CEO s are too stupid to know that stuff. They can’t start a car without help.
