Tag: Ursula K. Le Guin

No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

No Time to Spare collects and arranges pieces that Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for her blog from late 2010 until 2015 or so. She was initially unimpressed (not to say sniffy) about the form but one of her favorite authors from the later part of her life caused to change her mind. “I’ve been …

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Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

Planet of Exile

Winter is coming. The orbit of the planet Werel gives it winters that last five thousand nights, give or take. Sound familiar? Well, Planet of Exile was published in 1966, four years before George R.R. Martin sold his first professional story. As in Le Guin’s other Hainish stories, humans have been on Werel a very …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/09/10/planet-of-exile-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon

Conversations on Writing

Conversations on Writing grew from three sets of discussions between Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon for the Oregon radio station KBOO. She completed her introduction to this volume less than four months before her death in January 2018; Naimon wrote his not quite two weeks after her passing, it’s a touching valediction. “I …

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Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Rocannon’s World was Ursula K. Le Guin’s first published novel. It contains some of the forms of a fantasy story but takes place in a science fictional setting, part of the Hainish universe that she developed in several of her later novels, including The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/22/rocannons-world-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin

Here is Ursula K. Le Guin on life in pre-Roe America: My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/15/words-are-my-matter-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/19/the-dispossessed-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Wrapping Up

Time for some short takes, to mostly clear the desk for the coming year. The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest. In the fourth of her five Clockwork Century novels, Priest takes a stab at telling her story mostly from the point of view of an unsympathetic narrator. Rector Sherman is an addict, hooked on the “sap,” …

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The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on a world nearly frozen, with people constantly contending against the natural forces that will kill them, given half a chance or just a little too much inattention. The Word for World is Forest takes place on a warm and pleasant planet, where plentiful rains and abundant sunshine …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/06/the-word-for-world-is-forest-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Like the human aliens of the planet Gethen, The Left Hand of Darkness is first one thing and then another, encompassing all of them yet remaining bounded by its humanity. The inhabited worlds of Le Guin’s interrelated Hainish novels are tied together by membership in the Ekumen, eighty-odd planets in something like a trading federation, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/04/15/the-left-hand-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

This book seriously freaked me out. It is a reminder, as only a science fiction novel can be, of what a tenuous thing subjective reality is. I have never done acid, but based on the testimony of others I would say that this book resembles an acid trip in that it is both mind-altering and …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/23/the-lathe-of-heaven-by-ursula-k-le-guin/