Big Penny’s feet, obviously.

Thanks!

I admit I haven’t read it in many years, so thanks for correcting me on the details. The way she goes in depth exploring the societies and beings she imagines while still maintaining a plausible plot and believable characters you can empathize with is really incredible. It’s something other writers rarely achieve. Iain M. Banks had similar literary skills.

The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more,[3] I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. And I found that its principal character, whom I’d first glimpsed in the original misbegotten story, was alive and well—my guide to Anarres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed#Background

I’ve seen it before. It’s some trendy thing I don’t get because don’t you have to wait for the tank to fill back up before you can wash your hands with water more than just a trickle?

I don’t normally get claustrophobic, but if I had to sit on that toilet…

And fucking hate socks apparently. Unless they’re wearing the grippy kind they have in hospitals.

In general, monarchs no longer claim to rule by divine right. Monarchs are not necessarily running their country as more than just figureheads by reasoning that it’s what a god wants. That’s a big change.

A bit, but I felt like Heinlein’s book was much more ‘hit you over the head with the message’ than her books ever are. I still really like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much more heavy-handed in terms of messaging. LeGuin lets you mostly figure it out for yourself. You can certainly read her books and not learn a thing if you don’t want to (many people, especially her male critics over the years, do so), but if you open your mind to what she’s saying…

I have re-read all of the books and short stories a couple of times. They’re really good. The BBC did a radio dramatization of the books a few years ago. It was pretty abridged, but still worth hearing.

Mainly though, I just wanted to point out how Rowling very clearly used LeGuin as a source for her books (along with the Worst Witch books, the first of which came out when she was exactly the right age to have read them).

Yes, sorry, fixed.

Whoops. The latter.

She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts “I am a man.” It is not about her gender identity, it’s just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).

You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html

I also cannot recommend enough (thanks for the correction!) her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It’s an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.

The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.

Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965…

(I am so sorry, please, whatever gods there may be forgive me…)

Whoever sells this is going to lose their marbles.

Maybe, but be nice to them, because they know who you are and they hold grudges.

https://www.livescience.com/23090-crows-grudges-brains.html

I wouldn’t care about big names unless it was remade as a movie. Honestly, I’d be happy to see it done by the local repertory theater company. Unless the play was filmed while it was on Broadway or at the Old Vic or whatever, I probably wouldn’t see it with someone like Tom Hiddleston. I think David Tennant might be just about the right though. John was played by David Lee Smith, who was 44 at the time. Tennant is 53, but looks younger. Basically the guy needs to look old enough to be an established professor but young enough to still be attractive to grad students.

Incidentally, it was written by Jerome Bixby, who also wrote four TOS Star Trek episodes, including the famous mirror universe episode. That was the initial draw to me. That and John Billingsley from Star Trek: Enterprise. What can I say, I’m a sucker for Trekkie bait.

Good to hear it doesn’t suck, but eh. I don’t need to know any more of his story.

I’d like to see the movie done as a play.

Thank you, I have seen it and I really love it! I hear there is a sequel, which seems needless so I never watched it. But I’ve seen that one twice.

It seemed like the person I was talking to didn’t. The implication was that tape was viable as long-term storage. It isn’t. I’ve seen tapes rot after a year. DATs were especially prone to that, but even things like 2" multitrack audio tape can go bad that quickly.

As a former audio engineer in the days where we still used it- tape can rot.