r/UrsulaKLeGuin

Welcome to the /r/ursulakleguin "What Le Guin or related work are you currently reading?" discussion thread! This thread will be reposted every two weeks.

Please use this thread to share any relevant works you're reading, including but not limited to:

• Books, short stories, essays, poetry, speeches, or anything else written by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Interviews with Le Guin

• Biographies, personal essays or tributes about Le Guin from other writers

• Critical essays or scholarship about Le Guin or her work

• Fanfiction

• Works by other authors that were heavily influenced by, or directly in conversation with, Le Guin's work. An example of this would be N.K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," which was written as a direct response to Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

This post is not intended to discourage people from making their own posts. You are still welcome to make your own self-post about anything Le Guin related that you are reading, even if you post about it in this thread as well. In-depth thoughts, detailed reviews, and discussion-provoking questions are especially good fits for their own posts.

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Ged speaking to Arren after >!having survived the attack on Obehol. !<

"You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?"

What an incredible piece of writing on the idea od death giving meaning to life. These books are so important to a younger audience.

Hi I’m currently reading the dispossessed and just finished third of it

and I’m just wondering how TF she knows that much about adolescence in males and the nature and desires of men

and i just don‘t get how smart and comprehensive and super entertaining she is

i just finished the naked sun by Isaac Asimov before it and it just feels like a children‘s book compared to this

like i actually catch myself off guard forgetting that Urras and Anaress are not actual existing worlds

Fiction asks a strange favor of us: believe, for a few hundred pages, things that are not true. Readers grant that favor gladly, but it is a loan, not a gift, and the collateral is consistency. An author may posit anything — dragons, telepathy, a machine that whispers instantly across the galaxy — and we will believe it, provided the story then obeys the rules it has laid down. Suspension of disbelief is not an agreement to stop thinking; it is an agreement to think inside the author's system. That is why internal contradiction is the one unforgivable error in speculative fiction: it doesn't ask us to believe something false, it asks us to believe two things the story itself says cannot both be true. Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels — canonized, and genuinely great as sociology — rest on exactly such a contradiction, and their reputation has largely exempted them from having to answer for it.

The contradiction has two halves, and Le Guin commits to each with total confidence. The first half is Einstein's. Her universe runs on real special relativity, invoked by name and by consequence. Ships are "NAFAL" — nearly as fast as light — and their crews pay relativity's price in full. In Rocannon's World, Semley is promised that her interstellar errand "will last only one long night," and returns to a world where her infancy-aged daughter has grown up without her. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai explains: "If I simply turned around and came back, my few hours spent on the ship would, here, amount to thirty-four years." In The Dispossessed, the Terran ambassador Keng speaks of a granddaughter "who was five when I left, and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from Terra to Urras in a nearly light-speed ship" — eleven years, across what the same chapter calls "this castle eleven light-years from my Earth." The arithmetic is deliberate. Le Guin wants the tragedy of time dilation, and she takes it straight from the textbook.

The second half repeals the textbook. The ansible, invented in The Dispossessed by the physicist Shevek, is "a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space… simultaneity is identity… Like a kind of telephone." In The Word for World Is Forest the claim is sharpened to a specification: "the instantaneous transmission of a message over any distance. One element must be on a large-mass body, the other can be anywhere in the cosmos… It takes no time."

But relativity's central discovery — the one everything else follows from — is that "at the same moment," between two locations in relative motion, does not exist. Different reference frames genuinely disagree about which distant events are simultaneous, and the disagreement grows with distance and relative speed. A device that is instantaneous between arbitrary pairs of moving endpoints, as the ansible is explicitly described to be, is a causality weapon: chain two exchanges through suitably moving stations and the reply arrives before the question was sent. This is not an obscure quibble; it is the "tachyonic antitelephone," a consequence Einstein worked out in 1907, six decades before these novels.

Le Guin stages the paradox herself, on the page. In Chapter 3 of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly demonstrates the ansible to King Argaven: "A NAFAL ship takes 67 years to go between Gethen and Hain, but if I write a message on that keyboard it will be received on Hain at the same moment as I write it." The king asks what makes a man a traitor; "somebody seventy-two light-years away" composes an answer; the reply materializes minutes later, within the same audience. Two planets orbiting different stars are necessarily in relative motion — tens of kilometers per second is typical for neighboring stars. Run the numbers: at 72 light-years and 30 km/s, the two worlds' "now" disagree by about five days. An exchange between them, each leg instantaneous in its sender's frame, can deliver an answer days before it was asked. And notice the passage's own bookkeeping: a ship that cannot exceed lightspeed covers 72 light-years in 67 years. The flagship demonstration of the ansible contains, three sentences apart, a faster-than-light "slower-than-light" ship.

The standard defense is that Shevek's General Temporal Theory supersedes relativity — new physics, new rules. This defense fails on the books' own terms. A theory that abolishes the relativity of simultaneity abolishes the framework that produces time dilation as Le Guin depicts it; you cannot repeal Einstein's postulates in Chapter 9 and collect Einstein's consequences in Chapter 11. There was even a repair available: if the speed of information was infinite in one universal preferred frame — a possibility physicists have understood since Lorentz — causality survives. Le Guin never reaches for it. Her texts insist on relativity existing and all consequences such as time dilation existing fully, which is precisely the paradoxical version. She researched relativity carefully enough to borrow its poignancy, and not carefully enough to notice she had detonated it.

Even where her physics is qualitatively right, the costs are silently waved off. Genly's "few hours" covering seventeen light-years requires a Lorentz factor around thirty thousand: kinetic energy exceeding four years of present-day humanity's entire energy output per kilogram of ship, and accelerations in the tens of thousands of gravities, applied to unprotected passengers whose journeys are described only as psychologically disorienting. No exotic inertia-canceling technology is ever gestured at — indeed, in The Dispossessed the starship Davenant putters between two neighboring planets for three days "by chemical propulsion at conventional speeds."

Compare Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, which asks for exactly one impossibility — an organism that manipulates energy in ways biology shouldn't allow — and then honors every consequence of that premise with obsessive bookkeeping. That is the contract working as intended: one loan, faithfully collateralized. Le Guin took out two loans that foreclose on each other.

None of this diminishes what the Hainish novels do well; Le Guin's anarchism, anthropology, and prose need no defending. But we should be honest about what the physics is: not a consistent speculative system, but relativity used as mood lighting — switched on when separation and loss are wanted, switched off when the plot needs a telephone. And we should say plainly why it matters. Rigor in fiction is not pedantry; it is respect. A story's invented rules are promises to the reader, and a culture that shrugs when those promises are broken — because the prose is beautiful, because the themes are important — is a culture that has quietly stopped valuing coherence itself.

Appendix: numbers, for anyone who wants to check.

Simultaneity offset: Δt = Lv/c². L = 72 ly, v = 30 km/s ⇒ v/c = 1.0×10⁻⁴ ⇒ Δt = 72 yr × 10⁻⁴ = 2.6 d; two-leg exchange (each device instantaneous in its own frame): 2Lv/c² ≈ 5.3 d of causality violation. Δt scales linearly in L and v; any nonzero relative motion suffices.

Lorentz factor: t = 34 yr = 2.98×10⁵ h, τ ≈ 10 h ⇒ γ = t/τ ≈ 3.0×10⁴.

Kinetic energy: (γ−1)c² ≈ 3.0×10⁴ × 9.0×10¹⁶ J/kg = 2.7×10²¹ J/kg. World primary energy production ≈ 6×10²⁰ J/yr ⇒ ≈ 4.5 yr of global output per kg of ship.

Required acceleration: γ = cosh(aτ_a/c) ⇒ a = c·acosh(γ)/τ_a; acosh(3×10⁴) ≈ 11.0; τ_a = 2.5 h = 9.0×10³ s ⇒ a ≈ 11.0 × 3.0×10⁸ / 9.0×10³ ≈ 3.7×10⁵ m/s² ≈ 37,000g. (For contrast, 1g sustained over 15 ly gives τ = (2c/g)·acosh(1 + gD/2c²) ≈ 5.5 yr — days-scale crossings are not a 1g regime.)

The slip: 72 ly ÷ 67 yr ≈ 1.07c, from a ship defined as slower than light.

Hello! I bought a box of old paperback books and the Earthsea trilogy was in there. What little research I’ve done says it should be appropriate for my 10-year-old niece. She just finished the Harry Potter series and I was wondering if y’all could help me with this. Do you think she would like these or are they too mature for her? Thanks!

Orr uses the alien codeword that's supposed to summon help, or something. But it doesn't seem to do anything, or matter. He loses his powers, leaves (why??), then Haber plugs himself in, starts to effective dream, then Orr rushes back and unplugs him. What good was the codeword? Didn't see how the aliens or anyone else was helping Orr. Also not clear to me why everyone saw the change happening when Haber dreamed but basically no one did when Orr did the dreaming.

I recently plowed through the entire Books of Earthsea and I already know for a fact that I’ll be endlessly re-reading these stories for years to come. The world Le Gujn built is just so indescribably rich it rivals my other favorite fantasy worlds as of right now: Tolkien’s Middle Earth, GRRM’s Westeros, Tad William’s Osten Ard and R Scott Bakker’s Earwa. From the linguistics/philosophy-focused magic at the core of the world (knowing the true name of animals/people/objects and and maintaining the worlds balance through equilibrium) to the lush descriptions of archipelago life (sailing, trading) to all the historical parallels to Bronze Age Polynesia to the Native American styled mythology. I love how truly ancient the world feels too, with the mysterious Hardic rune system, all of the forgotten ruins everywhere, the gradually increasing amount of lore (as if she’s dusting off newly discovered tablets/manuscripts from an archeological dig), etc.

Yesterday I found a used copy of lathe of heaven to replace the one I loaned a co worker a couple years ago, I quit and gave up hope of getting it back. He was hyped up about reading dune, which has become a bit of a bro thing to read. It's great the bros are reading, but I have a feeling that loaning him LeGuin killed his new found joy of reading, cause he never finished it. I'm pretty sure I started to think less of him for that. Am I wrong for that?

I'm mostly kidding, there were other reasons, work related that make me not want to contact him and ask for it back. 8 dollars is a cheap price to pay to avoid talking to a non leguin lover.

I read it a few years back after a bunch of people really hyped it up and the world building has all these fundamental problems with it. I'm totally open to the fact there was something I missed, but everyone I've talked about it with never really addresses these arguments and sort of just tells me I'm wrong. I get people liked the text, I'm not a teenager and I don't feel the need to make someone not enjoy a thing, but it's always been good to sit with a few things at once, you're growing if it feels a bit uncomfortable at first.

With that in mind if this or the following rears your hackles up it's totally fine to have that feeling, half the reason I'm posting this is to see exactly why people have those feelings along with the last time you read the book, I'm not here to say don't have fun because certain things might not hold up the way you thought.

So then is it supposed to be a hypothetical, why is one of the moons far worse off, it's no longer a fair comparison and your sort of just shorting through noise for the authors thoughts, was it never supposed to be, was that a sacrifice to fit it in the series, or does she just not know how to do this stuff?

Why did she assume anarchists couldn't produce massive projects? We have plenty of ruins from prehistory built by egalitarian societies today we would call anarchist, infact the first cities were egalitarian. On the moon they also have easy space flight and specialists and complex logistics, with a society and police so utterly unbelievably well organized that no one died, even accidentally for the majority of the time that society has existed.

How do the capitalists actually still build anything? Their society is much further along than ours, but they still can make enough missiles to fight a wars, and it doesn't cost a sqaudrillian dollars to make a bridge like it does in the first world today. Marx wrote about financialization, about how one day you would be able to make more money just on the stock market then you could if you actually made a well run business buying, selling and making things with that same amount of money just like right now.

Finally why do the women cover themselves up? In most radical movements people wear far less clothing, not more, and the only time that isn't true is when it's appearance control being done because the society is a cult. to add to that in societies where nudity is common place no part of the body is inherently sexualized, and so it becomes contextual giving people far more control of themselves and how they appear.

With all this stuff in mind and going over it I feel like I could certainly find more if I read it again knowing what I know now, when I look at an art piece I want to be rewarded for thinking about it for days on end, I want to care about all the little things the author cared about too, and this stuff is culturally important, no one can fully separate art from reality, look at all the trans people Psycho killed.

When you write something unlike whatever currently exists it's your job to be good at making assumptions x to y to z, it's about knowing how to let go, when to bite bullets how to change up all the big patterns while keeping most of the little ones intact, her work just sort of seems shoddy. From reading about her she comes across as one of those arts who just likes and feels a bunch of stuff and golomps it together. Maybe I would feel differently now, but I don't really remember the characters or prose and that's not a good sign, I remember Mark Watney and AM and I read the Martian as a little kid. What am I missing here?

The story only has one child locked in the basement. And the city's joy runs on that child's misery. Most of them just live with it. Some of them, every now and then, just walk away to never come back.

I am sure, I am not brave enough to walk away. Why? Because I see them everyday. Not just one, but so many who are just unlucky.

I couldn't care less about the ones who are unlucky. In the news, on my feed. Because like most, I am just happy being in the system that has created the comforts for me at the expense of the others. Systematic oppression is great as long as I benefit from it. It's easy to be moved by one child in the basement. But now make it a group of kids in a land far away from me, and I wouldn't care. It's just a stat.

And that's how our world works. There are entire societies out there, civilizations that are suffering just because they got the worse part of the deal. Whole populations that are at the wrong end of an arrangement they never agreed to. So the rest of us can keep ourselves comfortable. And we don't really care. I mean, we pretend to care, but we are all hypocrites. We look away. We would rather ignore than be aware of the privileges that give us our lives.

Because looking away doesn't cost anything. The story is not about the ones who walk away. It's about the ones who stayed, saw the child, felt bad for an afternoon, and went back to the party.

We are not the ones who walk away.

I read Ursula's Earthsea and Hainish cycle in my native language (Turkish) and became addicted. I aim to read her other works as much as I can. What order would you recommend?