Comments on: A Left-Handed Commencement Address

By: yeuxdefeu

yeuxdefeu — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:01:38 +0000

i was never really able to get into the EarthSea series, but i did just recently read the annals of the western shore series, which is maybe her most recent series, and is YA-focused, with colonialism/occupation/slavery being an important part of the various plots.

By: Sky

Sky — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:28:27 +0000

My favorite book of hers is The Dispossessed.

By: Chally

Chally — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:28:54 +0000

My favourites of hers are probably the A Fisherman of the Inland Sea stories, especially “Another Story” and “The Rock that Changed Things,” and the Four Ways to Forgiveness suite.

Oh, Tlönista, seconded on the centring of non-whiteness.

By: Tlönista

Tlönista — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:34 +0000

Thank you so much for posting this speech, which I’ve never read or heard before. And Grenade delivers it beautifully—got to love the audience response when she says the “equal pay for equal time” bit.

Le Guin is one of my favourite sf/f writers ever—her work is full of nuance, ambiguity, comfortable darkness, and profound…human fellow-feeling?

She is one of the very few white writers who makes a point of centring people of colour in her stories; she builds worlds where whiteness is not the norm, the beauty standard, or the default state of humanity. And she has vociferously spoken out against whitewashed adaptations of her work. This means more to me than I can express.

By: Rivikah

Rivikah — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:08:40 +0000

Personally, I’ve always thought that LeGuin’s short stories tend to be much nicer than her novel-length works.

By: Nancy Green

Nancy Green — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:58:00 +0000

LeGuin wrote a lovely short story in the 1970′s called The New Atlantis. Has anyone read it? Like much of her writing, it’s prescient, becoming more real as the decades pass.

By: P.T. Smith

P.T. Smith — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:45:56 +0000

Ah, my bad. I doublechecked myself on Earthsea. I was thinking that like the Hainish cycle, it was written in a different order than the universe’s timeline. Thanks for that.
Bah. I need to read more SF in general.

By: Chally

Chally — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:36:57 +0000

Well, certainly with Earthsea. But with something like the Hainish cycle, I’d just go with whatever grabs your attention.

By: P.T. Smith

P.T. Smith — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:31:26 +0000

Any recommendation on whether to read her cycles in the order they were written or the order they take on internally? I read Dispossessed in a sweet, highly Feminist Utopian Fiction course in college but haven’t read more since, even though I own…2?…copies of the Left Hand of Darkness.

Thanks for posting this. Watching…now.

By: Chally

Chally — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:17:26 +0000

If we could perhaps leave the comments on her name aside, folks?