Bookish Thoughts

What if Game of Thrones was only 120 pages long? That's flip, and LeGuin and Martin are two very different authors, but I can't help but feel like this novella was an influence for GRRM's much longer (and unfinished) series. Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with a much larger orbit than Earth - one Year lasts for sixty Earth-years, meaning that winter lasts for 15 years. We're the aliens on this world, though the human settlement as been there for 600 years (or 10 Years) and is more of a city than a settlement now. As winter begins, several nomadic tribes begin their journey south, raiding as they go. But this year, they're banding together to become a larger threat. The humans and the locals need to figure out how to work together if they're going to survive the sacking and have enough supplies to make it through winter. It's a much more plausible scenario than the hand-wavey magic in A Song of Ice and Fire , and it's still packed with p...

The Word for World is Forest  is a quick little story that reminded me of nothing so much as Avatar . That comparison feels a bit unfair to LeGuin. After all, Avatar  was a movie with a mostly forgettable plot and characters that achieved huge success mostly because it looked cool (and because it tricked us all into shelling out for the more expensive 3D tickets). LeGuin's novella does a whole lot more than look cool. But the bones of the plot are the same. Humanity has discovered a planet with a valuable resource (wood, in this case, which Earth has run out of) and has determined to take it all for themselves, ignoring the local life who are seen as so primitive that our only choice is to either exterminate them or force them into slave labor.The book switches between three points of view: Captain Davidson is heading up one of the logging camps, and he provides the most heinous voice as he keeps finding new ways to justify the atrocities he commits. Raj Lyubov is an anthrop...

This is easily my favorite LeGuin book yet. I don't know if that's because I'm more familiar with her work and know what to expect from her (and what is probably asking too much) or if this book really is head and shoulders above the rest (it has been argued that this is so). Regardless, it was fantastic and it made my brain buzz in all sorts of good ways. The book follows one man's journey through two diametrically opposite cultures. The chapters alternate between his life growing up on the moon Anarres, where a libertarian anarchy holds everyone equal, and his time as a professor on the planet Urras, where a highly regulated capitalism maintains strong class and gender divides. All his life he's been told that his home is a utopia, the planet a stand-in for hell. But he's not satisfied until he can see this for himself, and he wants to bring his ideals back to the planet and build a better society there. But he discovers that things aren't quite that sim...

I have a weird relationship with Ursula K Le Guin's work. I feel like I'm supposed to like her more than I actually do. Not that I actively dislike her. But I always find myself disagreeing with her about something fundamental. As beautiful as her prose tends to be, and as forward-thinking and progressive as many of her ideas are, we just seem to be coming from different places. I think it boils down to the fact that she's espousing feminist ideas from a generation or two ago, and they simply aren't radical enough to interest me. The Left Hand of Darkness does some interesting things with gender by essentially getting rid of it in all but on character and making that one character undeniably alien. A more strange stranger in a stranger land than anything Heinlein ever conceived. And to an extent it's interesting to see this alien, Genly Ai, continuously project gender onto everyone around him. It makes sense. As the book points out the very first t...