[HN Gopher] Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le...
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Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 147 points
Date : 2026-02-08 10:13 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hyperallergic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hyperallergic.com)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula
| K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The
| Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| I have a signed copy of 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and I will
| never let it go.
|
| I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book
| is a masterpiece!
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The
| Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's
| probably because her interests were broader than mine.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| If you want some help then check out Mythgard Academy's
| course: https://mythgard.org/academy/dispossessed/
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book
| so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to
| me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a
| literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high
| school was that it inoculated me against the great works
| of literature.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Lucky you! Make sure your heirs realize the significance...
| Phelinofist wrote:
| > ... 'The Left Hand of Darkness'
|
| I read it last year. I found it to be quit boring and it also
| felt kinda "dated" in the sense that more recent SF is more
| space-y. However, the social constructs were well thought out.
| opto wrote:
| Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a
| Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of
| her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts
| of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism.
| Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist
| response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an
| anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it
| would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions
| people might try.
| jackyinger wrote:
| The social constructs were the entire point. The spacey stuff
| was just a vehicle to get a more relatable protagonist into
| the story.
| mbb70 wrote:
| In the foreward, she calls out to her, great SF is
| descriptive, not predictive. TLHOD is about sex, gender,
| friendships and culture in _our_ world.
|
| Also a huge number of spacey contemporary works like A Mote
| in God's Eye, Rendezvous with Rama, Dune, Ringworld...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| what does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy
| (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is?
| Or set in outer space?
|
| If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for
| decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural
| focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science
| fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the
| outdated space focused science fiction of the previous
| generations.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Funnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common
| criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray
| guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always
| will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
| gessha wrote:
| She wrote a short essay on her blog about this:
| https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
|
| The TLDR is technology is how we cope with reality and for
| her it was more interesting to describe this reality and how
| it makes her subjects feel rather than describe the
| technology they use to address their problems.
| jibal wrote:
| The Lathe of Heaven was the first I read and had a big
| impression on me. Much later, The Ones Who Walk Away from
| Omelas did.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was
| low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book
| well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene
| centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My
| Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.
| roughly wrote:
| I think "The word for world is forest" is criminally
| underrated.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, true, that's also a great one. I should really re-read
| all of them.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I enjoyed _The Left Hand of Darkness_ and _Earthsea_ , but my
| favourite of her works is _Always Coming Home_ [1]. Such a rich
| and varied and humane book.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
| ilamont wrote:
| I grew up reading Earthsea but later discovered Threshold/The
| Beginning Place. Some of her short stories are very good, too.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Interesting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their
| famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most
| often go back to Le Guin's audio book reading of 'Lao Tzu: Tao Te
| Ching' with short musical interludes and small sound effects.
| 100% satisfying to listen to.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. My local library has it; I'll grab it
| tomorrow.
| codeduck wrote:
| Le Guin's characterisation of magic and the power of Names
| remains one of my favourite treatments of the themes in modern
| fantasy. Earthsea remains one of my pleasures.
| csense wrote:
| I could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while
| since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very
| mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually
| go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of
| political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't
| get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned
| about the racial aspect of it.
|
| If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include:
| Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering
| the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering
| stakes.
|
| LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems
| kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over
| Earthsea.
|
| (Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to
| like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm
| posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is
| about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting
| opinions are welcome!)
| jenniferCrawdad wrote:
| please do not feed the troll everybody
| leejoramo wrote:
| I remember Le Guin speaking at my university around 1990. She was
| amazingly open about her writing process. While she did not
| directly answer questions about the "meaning" of her writing, she
| did facilitate the discussion about her work's meaning, and asked
| the audience challenging questions.
|
| Of all my time at uni, I wish I had a recording of this event.
|
| I understood from students who had attended a writing workshop
| with her earlier in the day, that she was gifted teacher.
| nestorD wrote:
| Her book Steering the Craft, is very much her writing workshop
| distilled into book form.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What a nice link. Thank you.
| abracos wrote:
| Why do people rate "The Left Hand of Darkness" so much? Is it
| because it was good at the time of writing? All concepts there
| are very shallow and mainstream now
|
| edit: honest question, don't want to flame
| dexwiz wrote:
| I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category.
| When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I
| do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.
| abracos wrote:
| Agree on "I, robot", but foundation series is still very good
| (probably because it's not really character-focused)
| croes wrote:
| The keyword is now.
|
| The first telephone is also pretty bad compared to nowadays
| phones.
| abracos wrote:
| Yes, but now it doesn't make sense to read it anymore right?
| It reads outdated and there are better books nowadays
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| Can you list some better books for those of us who liked Le
| Guin and are interested in what could be better?
| abracos wrote:
| it's hard to understand for me what you liked in Le
| Guin's books, but maybe Children Of Time?
| ecaradec wrote:
| I would suggest "In the Mothers' Land" from Elisabeth
| Vonarburg. It also talk about alternate society centered
| around gender. I didnt really liked the left hand of the
| night, but liked that one. And LeGuin saluted the book
| apparently too.
| rexpop wrote:
| Most people on earth still live in social and political
| environments where the core thought experiment of "The Left
| Hand of Darkness" - a human society without fixed male/female
| sexes - is not just unfamiliar but fundamentally unintuitive or
| threatening, which implies the book's work is far from done.
|
| In most countries, law, bureaucracy, language, and daily life
| remain built on a binary model of "men" and "women," from ID
| documents to restrooms to family law. Surveys show that even
| where support for protecting transgender people from
| discrimination is relatively high, recognition of nonbinary
| identities and comfort with nonbinary social roles remains much
| weaker and highly contested. For a majority of readers shaped
| by these institutions, a society like Gethen, where nobody is
| permanently male or female and where gender roles have never
| crystallized, is not a recognizable extension of their world;
| it is a radical negation of how their societies are organized.
|
| Globally, anti-"gender ideology" movements and laws frame
| challenges to binary gender as dangerous Western imports, and
| they coordinate across borders from the US to Eastern Europe to
| parts of Africa and Asia. In places where same-sex
| relationships are criminalized or where public discussion of
| queerness is suppressed, the premise of ambisexual humans would
| not just be controversial but literally unspeakable in
| mainstream forums. Even in regions that are relatively
| accepting of LGBT+ rights, polls show large minorities
| resistant to full legal and social recognition for trans and
| nonbinary people, indicating that the novel's underlying claim
| - that gender categories themselves are contingent - remains
| outside everyday common sense.
|
| Many major languages encode gender in grammar so deeply that
| even _translating_ a gender-ambiguous society is difficult,
| nudging readers back toward familiar male /female categories.
| This structural bias means that, for a majority of non-English
| readers, the book's attempt to erase stable gender can be
| partially blunted or reframed, underscoring just how far their
| linguistic and cultural worlds are from Gethen's premise.
|
| Research on nonbinary people repeatedly highlights "binary
| normativity": the assumption that only two genders exist and
| are socially real, leading to erasure, misgendering, and lack
| of legal recognition. That everyday experience maps directly
| onto what Le Guin tried to imagine away on Gethen, showing that
| the novel's central question - what happens to society when the
| binary disappears - still addresses a world that overwhelmingly
| cannot yet imagine such a disappearance. If most readers still
| inhabit strongly binary, often anti-"gender ideology" cultures,
| then the book's themes remain provocations from the margins
| rather than reflections of the mainstream, and its work of
| unsettling those assumptions is clearly not finished.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| "The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in _1969_. I 'm a
| transgender person in my 30s and Le Guin's writing makes me
| emotional every time I reread it. The ideas about gender and
| sexuality are more mainstream than they were almost 60 years
| ago, but the future is not evenly distributed and I think TLHOD
| would be eye opening for a lot of readers. Le Guin's prose and
| world building also place her among the best science fiction
| writers of all time.
| sonofhans wrote:
| The core ideas are only mainstream in extremely modern and
| extremely liberal contexts. I bet the majority of teachers in
| this country would get shit for assigning this book, even at a
| college level.
| jibal wrote:
| Lovely.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Slightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous
| literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and
| rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century,
| in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, they never met but
| they struck up a polite friendship over email when they were both
| old and chatted back and forth.
|
| Some might consider this raises the stature of Ursula Le Guin. I
| consider it rather as raising the stature of Harold Bloom. He
| recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or
| perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
| ilamont wrote:
| > He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside
| (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
|
| In the 70s and 80s, Le Guin and other SFF authors were very
| aware of the literary divide that often regarded most science
| fiction and fantasy as little better than pulp fiction. Gene
| Wolfe's essays and speeches in _Castle of Days_ touch on this
| several times.
|
| What changed was the arrival of a new generation of literary
| critics, researchers, and readers who knew greatness in some of
| the SFF works of the era.
| grahamburger wrote:
| I just started reading the Earthsea series to my kids last night,
| what a coincidence to see this here! I discovered Le Guin
| relatively late in life and I'm so glad I did.
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(page generated 2026-02-08 23:00 UTC)