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…
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 :(
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 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.
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.
And it’s now 2024, and nothing has changed. Maybe for the worse.
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.
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)
Truly we do live in a society
