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'.
I read _Always Coming Home_ about 30 years ago now, and ever since, "heya" has been my default greeting. I could count how many people recognised it on my fingers, but that doesn't matter.
2026 is the 60th anniversary of Rocannon’s World, the first novel of her Hainish Cycle SF books. I’m rereading all of them over the course of the year to celebrate.
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.
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.)
As a person actively organizing with anarchists and who has had a lot of long, fraught relationships leading to my late 40s, I found the Dispossessed to be relatable is ways I wouldn't have if I'd read it earlier in life.
I don't know if it's a difficult book, but I can see how it might land differently for me in different situations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
