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".
Asimov is defiantly similarly dry and curt. This is just a common writing style of mid-century sci-fi, to be very sparce and let you fill in the blanks about the character's personality and motivations. I don't find it boring, but it's definitely a deliberate stylistic choice. You can just kind of tell if you're reading something from around the 1960s, just like you can kind of tell if you're reading something from around the 1860s - authors are reading their contemporaries, and end up kind of writing in a similar way.
Rand's writing is sort of the opposite of Le Guin in a lot of ways. Atlas Shrugged is a cudgel of prose all formulated to advance her political philosophy, and all character motivation can be boiled down to "I want to act in a way that demonstrates this point that Rand is trying get across". The Dispossessed is a story about people in a place with motivations to advance their own interests, and in doing so they prod the reader into thinking about the political and societal ideas that LeGuin is interested in exploring. That they both have kind of a dry writing style and wooden characters is, I think, more of a reflection of the writing styles of the day - these were both people writing sci-fi (I do consider Atlas Shrugged a sci-fi novel) to be published and make money in the middle of the 20th century, to an audience who has certain expectations.
It's okay to not like an author's writing, don't feel obligated to read their stuff even if it's a Well Regarded Classic. But do circle back to them a decade or two later and try again, your tastes might have changed.
This makes sense. Thank you.