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".

  • Snackuleata [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I've only listened to The Lathe of Heaven on audiobook at work. I enjoyed it well enough. I went in expecting a bad philosophical work so when it turned out to be a classic science fiction story complete with

    spoiler

    bad guy wanting to take over the world

    I was amused. But I can understand how that may be boring to some.

    • captcha [any]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Its more of a classy SciFi for sure the two bits that stuck out were:

      spoiler
      • Guy dreams to end racism, world turns greyscale.
      • Guy dreams to end alien robot invasion he accidentally dreamed. Alien Robots are now slaves.

      In comparison with PKD

      spoiler
      • Abusive husband gets possessed by alien. Wife is cool with it.
      • Mortician in propeller beanie
      • mutant Jesus vs satanic jimmy Kimmel
      • summoning elden sword with mind
      • 3+6 gears = 9 speed bike
      • autistic children can time travel

      And of course, triple titty women.