it’s official: welcome, voyagers and comrades, to catadromously’s little trading post! come throw some coins at the fool whose working field is nothing but seasonal jobs, and in return, receive blorbo from your shows, brain, or field guide in .png form. dm me here on tumblr if interested ꩜
hi! im sure you get a ton of asks but i do know that you are a fan of le guin and i wanted to ask whether u had ideas or suggestions for how to approach her work. i tried reading left hand of darkness but unfortunately i am not much of a sci-fi/fantasy reader so i put it down. but i want to understand the worldbuilding! im trying again with wizard of earthsea but im still worried about finding much of her work too dense to follow; left hand of darkness & the dispossessed remain on my reading list. any thoughts or considerations?
btw you are one of my favourite blogs and i think you are incredibly cool
hi! I have put this question for discussion by Chat (le guin discord) and we have some suggestions:
Rocannon’s World and The Lathe of Heaven are both less dense Le Guin SF and can make a better starting point. Rocannon’s is, iirc, a Hainish story - same extended universe as lhod - but it’s an early work and full of all kinds of alpha release wackiness, in the best way. Lathe is set in Oregon in 2001.
LHoD (and Dispossessed) does reward persistence. I didn’t like LHoD either at first and it took me a few tries to gather the momentum to see it through. it is like that on purpose. I think that if the beginning feels like a slog through mud and ice in a distrusted alien city, it’s working. for me, the payoff in the end was so high! per Chat “It really rewards fandom-brained overthinking…” I hope you can take that as a ringing endorsement.
we are split on Earthsea but agree that it’s worth a shot, especially if you like character development over traditional plot or drama.
finally, one of the biggest endorsements was to point you toward Le Guin’s short story collections! that was my entry point for sure. Changing Planes and The Birthday of the World are “Le Guin sampling platters” that introduce you to her themes and methods of world building in colorful, bite-sized chunks. some of my favorite Le Guin stories of all are in there, real hidden gems. you can actually read two of the short stories that hooked me right here:
if you like fake academia, queering queerness, weather, textiles, slices of life, or the spatially extensive, rapid, multiplex choruses of sea writing, I tell you, these go crazy bonkers.
They stopped laughing and began to smile at each other. From across the room, across the mattress, across the table. Their language diminished to code at times, and at others ballooned to monologues delivered while cradled in the other’s arms. They never looked at the sky or got up early to see a sunrise. They played no music and hadn’t the foggiest notion that spring was on its way. Vaguely aware of such things when they were apart, together they could not concentrate on the given world. They reinvented it, remembered it through the other. He looked at her face in the mirror and was reminded of days at sea when water looked like sky. She surveyed his body and thought of oranges, playing jacks, and casks of green wine. He was still life, babies, cut glass, indigo, hand spears, dew, cadmium yellow, Hansa red, moss green and the recollection of a tree that wanted to dance with her.
Skeletor has forever destroyed our ability to come up with voices for skeleton characters.
this is like saying NASA has forever destroyed our ability to wonder what it’s like on the moon. like we can still use our powers of imagination if we want to but the question’s pretty much fucking settled.
That specific sickly, weird, mottled green color that appears when two mirrors are reflecting each other into infinity is so fucking beautiful… I love you weird nasty green of the aether….
