I'm over half way through The Dispossessed and I'd rather rub sandpaper on my eyeballs than read anymore. How can someone so progressive about sexuality have utterly sexless writing? The main character repeatedly has gay sex with a socialist revolutionary inside a highly patriarchal, capitalist state and somehow the relationship is less interesting than a scatterplot with no coorelation. Le Guin's prose has zero color, zero suspense, zero humanity, zero poeticism, all anodized on an aimless plot. This is the most ivory-tower, assume-spherical-human author I have encountered.

I've read Those Who Walked Away from Omelas and its the best Le Guin has to offer because its only like 2 pages. Even then half of it is a professor hand-waving away what a utopia might be.

When I was a I child I had to read The Wizard of Earth-Sea for school and I actually read it. My memory of it is all white noise because there were no humans in the book, only ideas with no flesh. I've never seen someone make a fantasy book boring. Tolkien would spend pages describing a single tree but at least it would be in color and depth.

I watched the film adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven. A man who's dreams actually become reality, but he must actually go to sleep and dream the reality. Fascinating idea. One of a kind premise. SOMEHOW STILL BORING.

Is Asimov this bad too? I've read Starship Troopers from Heinlein and it was about as bad but it at least had some suspense and violence to keep things wet. If anyone has read Rand and Le Guin, I'd love to hear a comparison.

I need to rehydrate myself with my big wet boy PKD, and try to finish VALIS. I had to keep putting it down because, "thats enough crazy for today".

  • Comp4 [comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I can't speak about her books since I have never read them, but I have heard only good things about them, especially in any leftist circles. Then again, I will fully admit that I prefer the book equivalent of Marvel movies, so I'm not even sure if Ursula K. Le Guin would be something for me.

    • captcha [any]
      hexagon
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      1 year ago

      They're hailed by left wing circles as she's the most progressively left wing of all the classic SciFi authors. You should go read Those Who Walked Away from Omelas right now to get an idea: https://files.libcom.org/files/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf

      Its great essay but now imagine reading an entire book that reads exactly the same way. Like a hundred page long thought experiment.