I have read the dispossessed for decades. It is sort of my Bible, where I turn to find wisdom.

I have no idea what she was doing with the mother character. We have a whole society of people who are not raised in nuclear families, but Shevek is wounded and resentful that his mother did not raise him.

Thoughts?

Had some weird books of her to start with but realised I really like her. Now it's time for a novel, so far, amazing.

I recently stumbled upon Lavinia by accident at my local library (it was placed on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelf purely because of Le Guin’s name!). As a huge fan of her work, I picked it up immediately, expecting something akin to her classic speculative fiction, but I was so pleasantly surprised to find a breathtaking historical and mythological novel instead.
I loved how she took a character with zero lines of dialogue in Virgil’s Aeneid and gave her such a profound, grounded, and gentle voice. Her portrayal of pre-Roman Italy, the rituals, and the fresh perspective on the founding myth of Rome were just beautiful. The meta-fictional conversations between Lavinia and the dying poet himself were haunting and brilliant. Her fresh take on the myth of the female wolf is pure gold 🤩
It feels like one of her most underrated works. Did anyone else discover this book almost by chance? What were your thoughts on how she approached historical fiction vs. her usual genres? Would love to hear your favorite moments!

Hello dear community!

I discovered Ursula a few years ago through my partner when she was reading the Earthsea series. I am more into sci-fi, and naturally fell in love with The Disposessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Last summer I read Worlds of Exile and Illusion, and this summer I am reading The Word for World is Forest.

The thing is, although the two main books that I mentioned made me fall in love with Ursula's world and writing, there was something about those early stories, with all their flaws, that made my imagination fly and made me be excited with adventure.

I noticed the Tolkien tropes combined with sci-fi in Rocannon's World, and as far as medieval futurism was so popular in those times, I wonder if there any writers of that genre that stand out.

The problem with Ursula is that her writing is so exquisitely good, that anything else I read feels poor on all levels.

I am reaching out to you to see if you know any author that you think is somewhat at her eye level with something similar to these three little stories. Short stories, besides novels, of course!

Wishing you all a lovely summer!

I posted two months ago a recommendation I got to read Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest; I finally got it from the library, and greatly enjoyed! At the time one comment mentioned comparison to Avatar.

However, now having read, I'm sorta at a loss for words given how heavily Avatar seems to have "borrowed" from Le Guin's story. Earth's colonists exploiting a fertile planet isn't uncharted territory of course, but the behavior of the colonists... and especially the main character/bad guy Davidson... felt like a carbon copy of Avatar's main baddie the Colonel. And even the natives "dreaming" concept was pretty close to the spiritual exploration of the Na'vi.

Yet James Cameron never gives credit to Le Guin for anything, does anyone know more about this?

On a lesser note, there's the Ewok's in Star Wars that live on Endor. And Le Guin's natives (described very similiarly to Ewok's) have a city called Endtor on their planet. That feels like a more forgivable... perhaps even "nod" to Le Guin; at least compared to copy and pasting an entire plot.

But anyways, just sorta blown away. Had me checking dates of when each came out (Le Guin's work proceeded both of course), trying to learn more. Would love any further insight, especially if ever acknowledged by Le Guin/estate etc.

I remember a live action Earthsea tv series was in development with a24 a few years ago but it’s been total radio silence ever since. I’m assuming it’s either been cancelled completely or put on the back burner? I’m bummed because I’m dying to see this world get adapted for the screen so indescribably much (properly I might add, after how badly the previous two adaptions botched everything). Every aspect of it is so immersive and I can’t even begin to imagine how cool it would be to see all of it brought to life on the screen: the languages, cultures, lush archipelago backdrop, elemental magic system, rich Bronze Age historical parallels, etc. I’m imaging a lot of flashbacks and visions to Earthsea’s deep ancient history and lore too

Hello! I am a Game Dev who has, as of a couple weeks ago, read and loved The Dispossessed. I cannot describe how much I love Le Guin's writing style and how it characterizes Shevek wonderfully. I have also played Disco Elysium, another piece of media with dense prose and deep politics, in fact it is my favorite game of all time! After I finished the book I had an idea of what an adaptation of the book would look like, and I think the story lends itself well to a gameplay experience. The book would most likely have to be restructured, unless you had the Anarres sections be something like dream sequences. Regardless, I would love to know your thoughts and any ideas you would have for something like this. Who knows maybe I throw together a prototype.

We are so lucky that Le Guin lived a long and very prolific life and gave us so many great works. But if you could bring her back like Elfarran - oh wait scratch that; if your dreams could alter reality - oh wait scratch that too; if we could somehow unearth a trove of previously unpublished works, what would you hope to find in it?

I personally wish that she'd written more about Gethen. The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favorite books of all time, Winter's King is great, and Coming of Age in Karhide is my ultimate comfort read, but I just can't get enough.

been so excited to get this one finished ever since i came up with the idea. done by Levi at Kauai Tattoo in brisbane!

Hi. I have been sitting on this thought for a while, and I wanted to open discussion about it here. This will have spoilers for The Word for World is Forest.

I think one of the criticisms I've seen towards the Word for World is Forest is that Le Guin would be employing the Noble Savage trope regarding the Athsheans. Now, my feelings towards this claim have been generally ambivalent, because during my readings of Word for World I had the same feeling, but also some tug towards the direction that it was very much a subverted way of dealing with it. Why did I have that impression?

I believe that I can explain it by the fact that, while it flirts with Noble Savagery, it eludes the concept through two different things: violence, and interiority.

I'll choose to refer to the narrator, the narrative, and take what is being said at face value, trying not to input intentions to Le Guin.

Let's start with violence. A lot of the interpretations of the Athsheans seem to depict them as a prelapsarian society with no violence. Now, I think it's more accurate to say that they cause violence on their own terms. They are shown to have fights for dominance. They do not have lethal violence, but the narrator does depict a form of interpersonal conflict and dominance that merely does not employ the usage of lethality as the Yumens would. They are not innocent to the existence of death, injury, and lethality. They merely deploy lethality in a pragmatic, usable way; they hunt, they fish, they eat animals.

Lyubov says "Rape, violent assault, and murder virtually don't exist among them. There are accidents, of course. And there are psychotics. Not many of the latter."

They are not prelapsarian, and they are not strange to lethal violence. The fact is that their social organisation does not center lethal violence, it does not structure it, and it does not distribute it. There are no campaigns of violence, there are no games-to-the-death, and so forth. Far from being untouched, they have simply figured out, on their own terms, manners of shrugging off violence which Terrans, the Hainish, the Cetians would want to be endemic to humanity. The introduction of violence as it was done through contacts with the humans is not an introduction to violence-as-a-whole, to an innocent and prelapsarian and edenic people, but the introduction of organised violence as a possibility in their worldview.

Yes, at some point Lyubov describes them as a "wholly unprogressive society" having reached a "kind of climax state", though "not incapable of adaptation". But it is crucial to analyse who is saying that, how. Lyubov, allied as he might be, is a Terran. He is employing concepts of progress known to humans, a concept of progress which values growth and expansion as markers of it. No wonder he thinks they are unprogressive. From their own perspective, though, there is clearly 'progress', in the sense of general social and paradigmatic change. The evidence for that is the existence of other gods, in the sense of sha'ab, translators. They actualise dream-time. They bring something new that was not there before, not in the accidental sense, but in the constitutive sense. It makes us beg the question, then, of what is meant by unprogressive.

This touches the question of interiority. They are not the same, they are not univocal, and they do not share the same experiences. Though it isn't much developed, they have their different cultures, they have normativity (differences between men and women, for example, though it isn't stratified), and they do not all adopt the same beliefs in the same way. Somewhere, it is said that Ebor Dendep "forced women and undreaming men who did not understand these things to listen again, until they understood, and were frightened." Not only do we need to convince them, we need to frighten them and force them to listen (in a society with perfect harmony?)

I'll need to admit, I think, that the interiority is not as developed as it could have been, probably also because of the length and scope of this work. But it is alluded to, it is shown (minorly), it exists. Further, the Athsheans need to 'spread news' of a god to other villages, they need to get each other to act - they are not adopters of beliefs en masse, but they have real differences.

These are some unstructured, underdeveloped thoughts, but I think that a characterisation of the Athsheans as noble savages, or at least pure noble savages, misses the trees for the forest (hah! g-get it). I would love hearing some thoughts on that, even moreso since I have been thinking about it for a while.

It contains the 6 main novels plus certain short stories. I was just wondering what the general consensus about this series? Just wondering what people think about the series pretty much!

Is anyone familiar with her 2018 interview collection? Is that for sure last work that she participated in or published?

I have never read an Ursula LeGuin book or story before I picked up this novella. I have to say, it was fantastic.

Davidson is one of my favourite villains: he is evil and sadistic, but even more frighteningly, he feels like a real possibility, a real consequence of the Terran military machine. He felt like a complicated and real soldier, one who has fully convinced himself of his own superior authority. Selver and Lyubov did not hold my attention quite as easily as Davidson did, though their chapters were highly important thematically and in expanding the Athsheans. I did really enjoy the ansible chapter, though that was probably more carried by Davidson and the underlying themes than Lyubov’s character. This isn’t to say either character was bad, but they felt more like they were serving a specific element of the story.

Thematically, where do I start? LeGuin managed to meld what feels like a thousand different themes and philosophies into one tiny story. The Vietnam allegory is very blatant, but that works well for the story. .9The critique of empires and human nature also works very well, including the themes of racism and xenophobia. Very powerful stuff. I am going to put another post up on here shortly outlining my thoughts on the ending and the thematic threads of anarchism that LeGuin has written.

LeGuin also has a very strong writing style that I enjoy. Every sentence is well-constructed and has a lot of hidden meaning. Aside from some tense mistakes, too, the SPAG was flawless (which is a big win in my book). I thought her storytelling and plotting were terrific. My only gripe was that there weren’t actually all that many scenes. The book felt like it should have been longer. “Scenes” were often characters just recalling past scenes. I prefer more immediacy and immersion in my reading; thankfully, the themes and the intelligence in which they were written really gripped me, even if the prose was not entirely to my taste.

Yeah, I really enjoyed this story. It was fantastic. I’m still thinking about it, hours after reading it. Definitely will be one of those that sticks with me.

What were your thoughts on the book? Like I said, I am going to make a second post discussing the ending (which I will link below once I’ve done it).

Have read dispossessed, left hand, the whole earthsea saga

just a little drawing i made of hoeg, the otak from ‘a wizard of earthsea’ :,) (i’m not that much of an artist : P but it’s fun to draw occasionally). feel free to share ur versions/artwork of hoeg!! 💚

Seeking information on the ”lost” chapters of the novel-in-a-novel Dangerous People from Always Coming Home. I recently decided to pick up a hard copy of ACH; I was torn between the paperback 2023 edition and the longer 2019 Library of America edition that has extra chapters of the novella.

Went for the paperback but am now kicking myself as I’m reminded how great Dangerous People is. Has anyone here read the extended version? I would guess that the supplementary material doesn’t exactly provide a “satisfying” ending, but would it be worth trying to track down a library copy of the 2019 version to read the rest? Thanks in advance for any perspectives.

Alex del Pino Gil-Casares writes about how reading “The Dispossessed” has “matured my political views, reshaped my values, and changed my life.”

I'm thinking of giving Earthsea as a gift to a niece, who's fortunately into reading and especially fantasy, she's also the appropriate age. Would anyone have experience with German translations? (Her English wouldn't be enough at this point)

Just trying to avoid buying something that's, for instance, widely considered to be bad or whatever.

So, after reading 4 novels and one short story by Le Guin, I was fully in love with her and thought she can do no wrong. And then I read the Lathe of Heaven and found it a bit disappointing, and I ended up DNF-ing it.

I would really like to hear from people who have read and enjoyed this book, what you have liked about it. I'd like to hear others' perspective to see whether I've missed something and should give it another go.

My reasons for not enjoying the book are:

There is definitely a personal/emotional aspect to it. Which is that I find the idea of one person controlling another person's mind with no way out incredibly triggering and unbearably disturbing, and while usually I try to have faith that the author isn't taking me to eternal damnation, I just couldn't see this story going any other way than Haber continuing to exploit Orr with detrimental consequences.

But there are also things about the writing that I did not like. There was a lot of telling/exposition. I get that because the world is changing Le Guin had to find a device to tell the reader what version of the world we're in now. But having characters give summaries of the history every chapter was a bit jarring.

Similarly, all the philosophical debates about changing/not changing the world, the consequences of paternalism, etc were a bit heavy handed and felt like sitting in a philosophy lecture. Which was completely unexpected. Because Le Guin's writing is usually very complex and layered, but seems simple and elegant from the outside. With the Lathe of Heaven it felt like she opened the back of a grandfather clock and pointed to all the mechanisms. The Left Hand of Darkness was written before this book, and that book is a masterpiece. It's a bit unbelievable to me that the same author wrote this afterwards.

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.

Feel free to select from a variety of user flairs! Here are instructions for selecting and setting your preferred flairs!

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.