[HN Gopher] The Child and the Shadow (1975) [pdf]
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The Child and the Shadow (1975) [pdf]
Author : lolinder
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-03-30 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.johnirons.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.johnirons.com)
| WillAdams wrote:
| Is this included in:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798061-the-language-o...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yes.
| yarnover wrote:
| If you have access to JSTOR, the essay (with better formatting)
| is available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29781619
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Related,
|
| The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
|
| ought to be mandatory reading for every adult in the Western
| world.
|
| https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
| tanepiper wrote:
| I've already used it as an example when talking to some people
| about our technology choices.
|
| Sometimes - to be able to live in the societies we do, we have
| to accept that there's very little choice. But if you live in
| full awareness that every choice you make to participate in it,
| there is a cost and effect that someone else has to experience.
|
| One is example is Social Media moderators - for us to not see
| the worst of humanity, they have to experience it for us and
| make a decision that literally can manipulate people's opinions
| and preferences
| asdffdasy wrote:
| Except it is about colonization and social classes.
| mandmandam wrote:
| It's not about any one thing. It's a thought experiment
| about the moral compromises societies make, and the
| emotional responses people have toward such compromises.
| ww520 wrote:
| Ursula's work was one of my favorite reads in my teenage years.
| Earthsea opened me to the world of fantasy novels. The Left Hand
| of Darkness was a difficult read at the time, but I greatly
| appreciated it in the later years. I wished she had written more.
| rendaw wrote:
| I remembered liking them when I was a kid, but I just tried
| reading A Wizard of Earthsea again and it was just "Ged went
| here" "Ged learned that" "These people didn't like Ged" etc.
| Does it get better later?
|
| This right after mixing up Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K Le Guin
| and finding out that the Pern series was just fetish dragon
| smut.
| timonoko wrote:
| Ursula was one book wonder, methinks.
|
| And so was Gardner Dozois, whose "Strangers" was eerily
| similar to "Left Hand of Darkness".
| WillAdams wrote:
| For a person whose oeuvre includes _A Wizard of Earthsea_,
| _The Left Hand of Darkness_, and _The Lathe of Heaven_, I
| would gainsay that.
| alangou wrote:
| She is one of the great American novelists. She's won 8
| Hugo's. There's the Dispossessed, a great novel.
| timonoko wrote:
| I forgot the Dispossessed. So Ursula is now two book
| wonder.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| She said she purposefully wrote in a simplistic style to
| mimic the traditional epics she was familiar with, like
| Beowulf. The books were supposed to have a wide appeal, and
| evoke that sense of the archetypal struggle between good and
| evil.
|
| I personally love the style, even as an adult - it's a very
| easy read, but the world of earthsea, true names, and it's
| daoist philosophy is very appealing to me. It was the first
| of its kind, and really established the idea of "balance" in
| the fantasy genre.
|
| The books definitely do get more sophisticated, though, both
| thematically and stylistically. But ultimately it's going to
| be a purely subjective experience, as these things always
| are.
| rendaw wrote:
| I didn't realize it was intentional! Though, I think
| Beowulf is notable to a significant degree for its historic
| context...
|
| I think the mention of daoist philosophy is interesting.
| Those works are very direct too, but I think (from a
| Western perspective) there's a huge amount "between the
| lines", both due to missing cultural context and refinement
| over generations of tradition, which means that while the
| writing is simple the meaning and implications are vast and
| complex.
|
| Aside from the name thing though, I'm not sure I got that
| from the first book. Especially since most of the actions
| listed in it are very concrete.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| I was shocked after listening to this story by her, probably the
| best psycho horror I know:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5637siSxu-E
|
| SPOILER: Most commentaries seem to cast this as a story about the
| evil of utilitarianism, and that sort of us true if you take the
| narrator at his word, but I think the genius of the story is that
| at the end you start to realise how delusional the narrator is.
| It there in the title and at the final sentence, "it is the ones
| that walked away" that the narrator does not understand while you
| as the reader fully sympathise with them.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams:
| they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the
| language of the unconscious - symbol and archetype.
|
| The bookend narration of 2011 film Sucker Punch mentions such a
| thing.
|
| > Though they use words, they work the way music does: they
| short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts
| that lie too deep to utter.
|
| I appreciated music more after someone pointed out that music is
| the most evocative art form. Paintings can look realistic, movies
| can be based on real stories, video games can feel immersive, but
| music is almost never _like_ anything. I like that.
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