Finally!! Got this way back on August 16th. Shortly after my 2000's Marvel binge, and well before I nabbed Discovery season 5.
Eeeeverything conspired to slow down my reading.
But!! Here I am!!
The Left Hand Of Darkness (1969)
"What dazzles me is that the majority of the posters on WF are Trek fans and, to some extent, science fiction fans as well, and gender has always been fluid in s/f - STTNG's "The Outcast," Sisko's reference to a pregnant male crewman, the trigendered species in Enterprise, even Trills' ability to choose a host of either "standard" gender.
I'm sure there are other instances, but LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (published in 1969) is a wonderfully sensitive depiction of the puzzlement of an Earth human encountering a species that can change gender depending on certain societal factors. Some other more obscure writer wrote about a subset of a Vulcan-like society called Changers who made the transition for spiritual reasons in a trilogy called The Others.
Yet some otherwise intelligent, educated people here seem to think the only thing that defines a person is what's in their underwear. Baffling".
-Margaret Wander Bonanno, June 6th, 2015. Re: Caitlyn Jernner.
Her writing was sometimes dense, but worth getting into.
"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow."
*Salute*
-Margaret Wander Bonanno, January 23rd, 2018. Re: LeGuin's passing.
Those three quoted lines being from 1. The Left Hand Of Darkness 2. The Lathe of Heaven and 3. A Wizard of Earthsea respectively.
I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the "incredible originality" of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a "school novel", good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
-Ursula K. LeGuin.
Yeah, those quotes say it, don't they?
How in the Hell can you be a Trekkie, and an SF fan, and end up a goddamned TERF?
How are you a LeGuin fan, and end up a TERF?
Much less one that clings to JK Rowling like grim death?
Well, one supposes much the way one ends up being a bigot pretending to stand for logic and truth.
Astroglide tobogganing down dissonance pyramid.
I was hoping to find answers in this book, and have more questions.
I like one particular line though: toward the end, Estraven is betrayed by a friend, and they say "I asked too much of him. Strained a small spirit too far".
Yeah, that's how I have to look at some of my ex-friends.
Small spirits strained too far.
Anyway! The first MWB quote lays the basics out.
A human ambassador, Genly Ai, goes to an alien world of hermaphroditic neuters who become male or female once a month.
A Gethenian can be both a mother and a father.
Genly is a bit hung up about this, but grows throughout the story.
Plus, there's "Game Of Thrones" level intriguing among the Gethenian politicians that place Genly in danger.
Speaking of politics!
Online fascists have been obsessed with picking on hair color for some reason, and the afterward to this book is by Charlie Jane Anders, a transwoman author who when I Google, an image of her with pink hair pops up.
So, y'know, I'm pissing off all the people who suck just by holding this book in my hand.
That's just extra sauce.
It matters more that LeGuin is brilliant, and the book is a masterpiece.
If I just wanted to piss off bigots, I could chuck Barbies at the Sturgis rally.
Fish in a barrel with those guys.
BTW, the villains in LHOD act very familiar.
LeGuin wouldn't have flinched at the Trump/Harris debate.
Same shit, different decade.
Anyway, yeah, I'm an instant LeGuin fan.
Or, a re-upped one.
I read the first 2 Earthsea books back in middle school, and never got to the rest, or any of LeGuin's other work.
Something I need to remedy.
LHOD has made me fall in instant love with her Hainish universe, and I need to get the rest of those.
This is my new Sandman quest.
I needed a new quest.
Starting with "The Word For World Is Forest" and "The Dispossessed".
Stay tuned for those!
7 comments:
I need to re-read that book. I only read that and a couple of short stories by her, the names of which I forget. All were for a college science fiction class I took in spring 2002. I remember the book as being really good.
If you want to read a sci-fi book from the 1960s that DOESN'T handle gender-extrapolation-stuff very well, go read Anthony Burgess' "The Wanting Seed," which was published right at the same time he was writing "A Clockwork Orange."
I've got the LHOD prequels on order. They'll probably be in by next week. I've gotten started on the William Calley thing. I'll peck away at it until it's long enough, and feels right. I'll try to make it worth the wait.
Oh fuck Le Guin wrote "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," I haven't forgotten that short story. Very short, very blunt, but I've never forgotten it. Also probably written in response to Vietnam. Hey, there's Calley tied in, right there!
What I really want to know from your high school experience here is how similar it was to mine--whether or not they tried to soft-pedal the whole thing. They had a guy who'd been in 'Nam come in, and he sort of soft-pedalled all the shit they pulled over there.
This sort of whitewashing has always colored my opinion of the military and every time we get into some war and stuff like Veterans' Day and the whole "thank a vet" thing.
The guy they brought in also repeated something I have a hard time believing in the first place, the whole "vets got spit on at airports" story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/opinion/myth-spitting-vietnam-protester.html
They did say Calley and his guys slaughtered the village. They left out the rapes. We had a mock trial, and of course the drama club girls were the prosecution, and they won. Thankfully, I didn't participate in that mess, I just got to watch. I'm a writer, not an actor. I had to find out later Calley got his 20 years whittled down to three fucking years of house arrest. So, yeah, bits were left out. Do you at all remember in "Stand By Me" when the junkyard guy tells Teddy "your dad is up with all the loonies up in Togus!"? Togus is still a thing. They still handle veteran trauma, but they also do drug and alcohol rehab. I dunno if in the 50's, where SBM happens, if they were gross, or what. They're classy now. Spooky from the outside. They're up on a hill, and look like the Joker chemical factory from Batman '89.
First Google result for "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," is a free PDF. So, I read it. Wow, only 5 pages. I dig it. "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" ripped the core idea off as an episode. It was heavily sanitized with SF tech, of course. The story is better. Would have made a good "Tales From The Darkside" or 90's "Outer Limits".
"The Dispossessed" and "Worlds Of Exile and Illusion" are in, but I'm still waiting on "The Word For World Is Forest". A lot of people including LeGuin herself have said "Avatar" rips it off. Hers is better, naturally. I mean, I haven't read it, but I can only assume. Safe Vegas bet.
Nope, I was wrong. I was mentally fusing Togus with this other rehab place in Portland that doesn't exist anymore, because they replaced it with a hotel for ritzy people. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the other place. They've gone to great lengths to scrub it from Google.
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