She was a fantastic author. I read her earthsea books as a child and I read much of her adult fiction later on. She has always remained one of my favorite authors. However, it seems that she had a long life that was good so I can't be too upset.
Anyone remember the source of the essay about the town where everyone was happy, and how it feels unbelievable until you find it has a horrible secret, which somehow makes it more believable? I think that is her writing.
It's basically taken almost verbatim from a dialogue between two characters in The Brothers Karamazov. She later said she didn't remember the dialogue at the time but it was stuck in the back of her head and was definitely an influence.
To help the child and end it means to deprive many others of happiness as well. It is also likely to be wasted, as she writes in the story, the kid may be so far gone beyond consolation.
I almost always skip the intro of books like this. I didn't skip this one. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books of all time.
All I mean is that the obituary linked to at the NY Times contains much more information than the one linked to at Locus. I'm not judging the quality of either source more broadly.
Locus promises a more extensive obit later. I'll guess they don't have writers on staff whose job is to write obits in advance and update periodically. ;-)
I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
Butler's books made my skin crawl in the best possible way. I can't think of another author in SF who so thoroughly conveyed the feeling of rape to a man who'd never experienced it.
Her books were potent brews of control, acceptance, family, and love. I keep hoping Kindred will be made into a mini-series one day.
When I was deep into The Invisibles, I looked up "King Mob" and learned the character was likely inspired by the real-life radical group of the same name from 60s-70s London.[0]
I always liked John Varley's take on those topics — in some of his short stories in particular (collected in The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, and Blue Champagne, amongst others).
I loved that book. I read it once and never forgot it. I immediately remembered what part of the book that quote was from even though it's been 20 years since I read it.
More than 40 years has passed since I read it, but I still remember that last part of the book, where he goes skiing down to the waiting guards. You know when you read the last sentence that it was the last sentence of the book, no need to turn another page.
There's a lot in The Left Hand of Darkness, but the thing I got out of it is there are some things that can't be learned by being told the answer. I could tell you what the left hand of darkness is right now, but if you didn't read the book, you'd be none the wiser. Some things can only be taught through experiencing it yourself, or through the proxy of storytelling.
Storytelling is the greatest tool we have for passing down wisdom to the next generation. Ursula LeGuin, we celebrate what you have taught us and will continue to teach us, and we mourn your passing.
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
I'm not usually affected by authors passing away but damn this stings a little. One of my favourite authors.
It's such a fine last paragraph it's worth quoting in full:
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Took me a while to find one near the very end, where Ketho, a Hainishman, member of the oldest sentient race in the universe, decided to risk his life with Shevefc on his return to Anarres:
"[Ketho] looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevefc as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it “It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port."
me too. when talking about the prison odo was held in, she describes it as sitting there as if to say, "i've been here for a long time, and i'm still here."
when i read that first i had to put the book away and walk around a minute.
I enjoyed reading The Dispossessed, though I have also been known to characterize it as, "A Sci-Fi universe where communism actually works, hence the 'Fi' part." However, I've recently read Thomas Sowell's book about the original formulation of Marxian economics and philosophy, and I've come to the conclusion that the technology of the late 21st century might possibly enable a viable communal society through the replacement of the distributed optimization of the market with AI, as Ursula K. LeGuin presaged in The Dispossessed.
But the whole point of the novel is that neither system really works very well! I think you're doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way.
Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way."
One major weakness of Capitalism, due in part to Pareto, is the perception of relative disparity. Psychological research indicates that such perception is a basic reality of the human condition. We should regard the bitterness of have-nots as real, even if the have-nots are fabulously well off in a global and historical sense. Any system which is forward thinking should take that into account, or fail to do so at its own peril. (One of Basic Income's biggest problems is that it does nothing to alleviate the problems relative disparity, so plants the seeds for its own political instability.)
She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.
Any system which isn't perfect is going to fail in innumerable ways, in that countless instances of terrible tragedy and injustice will exist within it, and no system is going to be perfect.
Re: Your user name: I once came up with an acronym for a sensor-network Internet thing. BACON: Basic Autarchic Communication/Observation Network.
> Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way."
It worth noting that Marx was tremendously excited about capitalism: The first part of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto contains a lot of praise to capitalism - some barbed, some delivered straight. For example:
> The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
and:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Socialism was conceived in it's modern form as a direct result of optimism over the rapid growth in productivity brought about by capitalism, and Marx shared that view: He saw capitalism as both absolutely necessary to bring the material wealth that could make redistribution possible, as well as the eventual catalyst for socialist revolution (and in doing so repeatedly warned against trying to push or socialism in poor underdeveloped countries other than as part of a larger wave of revolutions). He also praised capitalism for doing away with a lot of other outmoded aspects of society: to him it was the best so far, and a tremendous step forward for humanity.
The idea that wanting socialism necessarily means thinking capitalism is awful needs to die. But neither is there any reason to think that socialism in any form will be perfect either, even if you want socialism. Any given system can have flawed implementations, or outright fail. Marx himself as early as 1845 (in The German Ideology) warned, for example, that socialist revolutions somewhere underdeveloped would be doomed to failure: If you redistribute somewhere where redistribution just makes want common, he said, the old class struggles would just reassert themselves. Anyone who seriously cares about any given system needs to be open to considering how and why it might fail if they want to make it a success.
As such, Le Guin stands with people like George Orwell in an important but small tradition of socialist literary writers open to showing the dangers too.
People often miss it, but the planet Urras has many countries and actually two superpowers: A-Io (conservative capitalist parliamentary democracy) but also Thu (a totalitarian socialist regime). A very cold war like setting.
A-Io allowed the Odonian rebels (anarchists) to exile to the moon, but their counterparts in Thu we never hear much about. Possibly their fate was more gruesome.
There should be a sequel where there is a Project where A-Io gives rise to a successor society A-Jo, which doesn't work out, but then gives rise to another successor using the same iterative naming scheme. Then that successor should then switch to a successor naming scheme advancing only the 1st letter, and the whole story series should be directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima.
Ursula Le Guin was a supporter of libertarian socialist ideals, which are opposed to both capitalist and centralised/authoritarian socialist ideologies. She was a big fan of Murray Bookchin, who came from an anarchist background and founded the ideas of "communalism" and libertarian municipalism.
> She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.
It wasn't a communist system, but an anarchist one. And it didn't fail in so many ways, it's just that life in Anarres was tough. A barren moon with few natural resources. They even had bad harvests and people starved to death.
A communist system is an anarchist one. The main split between communists and anarchists is over the means of getting there, not over the end-goal; Bakunin and Marx split the First International over differences over how to use or destroy the state, not over the society they wanted in the end.
Oh, I think it's pretty obvious which system portrayed in the book anyone sane would prefer to live as part of. They aren't portrayed as equally "not working very well", no?
If some people read the book preferring Urras or thinking it's a toss-up, I'd find that curious and be interested in hearing more (do you?), but still doubt that's what Le Guin intended.
Does PsychoHistory and "The Mule" make any more sense than The Force? In the end, it is all space opry. Our far flung mind children are likely to be stranger than the mind of Homo sapiens is able to imagine.
Most of classical Star Trek (TOS, TNG, Voyager, and large parts of DS9) consists mostly of self-contained morality plays where the sci-fi just provides a setting. Some of those morality plays are related to the science part - notably a lot of the issues around the morality of treatment of Data and holograms. But most of it could be set in any time period. The Sci-Fi setting just made it easier to juxtapose things without running into "but that's not how it was then/there" objections and allowing more extreme contrasts.
Enterprise, parts of DS9, Discovery and the new movies have largely done away with that format. It's a very sharp relief.
I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin.
My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists.
Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?
Plenty of communists are far closer to anarchists than to the Stalinists, and historically plenty of people have applied both labels to themselves.
E.g. the founder of (left)-libertarianism was an anarcho-communist (Joseph Déjacque) [1], and among early libertarian socialists, you for example would fine some the earliest leading figures in the Socialist League, which counted Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels among their members.
> I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin.
I find that a very curious statement. Kropotkin explicitly criticized the collectivist nature of the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin as simply being a different type of wage system that he believed would eventually lead to centralization again, and promoted local self-sufficiency etc. as means to explicitly counter collectivism. Here's an interesting overview of the history of anarchist communism (or communist anarchism) [2] that covers both Kroptkin and Dejacques.
Anarchist-communism is specifically in opposition to collectivist tendencies in many anarchist ideologies, and explicitly rejecting anarchist systems that are based on exchange of value or other ways of letting some party assert authority over another's access to goods, just like Marx (e.g. based on Marx mentions in Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, that set out "higher" forms of socialism as doing away with means of exchange).
Anarchism is a subset of communism. In the 20th century, for obvious reasons, both the Soviet and American propaganda machines sought to associate "communism" with authoritarian collectivism, when in reality it's a much wider umbrella.
The rise in viability also comes through the new knowledge we now have on gamification which may prevent the citizens from gaming the system. RIP Ursula.
Iain M. Bank's Culture is perhaps my favourite example of a "working" communist society - but it does rely on "magic" technology, engineering of its inhabitants to be nicer and ultimately on god-like AIs to actually run things. Most humans in the stories are effectively pets of the AIs - pets who are very well looked after, and who can leave the Culture if they want (which the vast majority don't - of course) but where they don't really matter.
I seem to remember an interview where Banks described the Culture as "anarchism within, socialism without," but yes, it very much depends on being post-scarcity and transhumanist. I wonder what Banks would have made of "Meditations on Moloch"? I could see the Culture's progenitors using something like that as their manifesto.
Every time I've read an Ursula Le Guin book, it's changed the course of my life. Both fiction and non-fiction. Her writing always felt like it could weave between all the complications of life to get at the Truth of things.
Coincidentally, I purchased the Earthsea series for my son a few days ago, who I think is the right age.
I also read some of her work from the 1990s, a short story collection whose name I cannot recall, but was very powerful and thoughtful. I think in many respects she was able to take science fiction and fantasy in emotional and social realms where few authors were willing to tread.
I am just in the flow of re-reading her novels, and now this news. :-( Such a writer! And one from whom it has been easy -- well, never easy, but accessible and immensely rewarding-- to learn the craft of storytelling on a human, epic scale.
God bless you and family, Teacher, and your voice still sings.
If you aren't familiar with her work, "Left Hand of Darkness" right now is on sale at Audible for $4 and the narrator is George Guidall. I didn't add a link because I'm not looking for some kickback, just a rare combination of two all-time greats on one book and for very cheap.
This might not be the best time to put this comment, but quite some years ago I attempted reading Dispossessed, because it is such highly rated novel and Le Guin even more highly respected author. But I didn't get very far, the whole Communism vs Capitalism aspect felt so hamfisted and overbearing that I lost interest. That cold war did end, as such the context of modern reader is quite different. The political nature left kinda bad taste in my mouth when I was expecting more of fancy futuristic/scifi stuff.
196 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
The EarthSea Trilogy has stuck with me too.
Short read and available online:https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
But then I wondered "Why did they walk away? Why not comfort the child and end it?"
In the story she says a single kind word to the child would end it. I can understand living there, but I don't understand walking away.
By walking away you are not helping the child. So what does it matter that you are not benefiting?
That has more votes at the moment. This looks like a better source, though.
Similarly, the LeGuin site currently directs readers to the NYTimes obit: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html
We shall miss her.
—The Left Hand Of Darkness
Her books were potent brews of control, acceptance, family, and love. I keep hoping Kindred will be made into a mini-series one day.
0 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Mob]
Noise, buzz, confusion, alarm, welcome.
"We came over the Gobrin Ice."
More noise, more voices, questions; they crowded in on us.
"Will you look to my friend?"
I thought I had said it, but Estraven had.
-- [The Left Hand of Darkness], Ursula K. Le Guin
Storytelling is the greatest tool we have for passing down wisdom to the next generation. Ursula LeGuin, we celebrate what you have taught us and will continue to teach us, and we mourn your passing.
https://twitter.com/JessFink/status/955938603921702912
I'm not usually affected by authors passing away but damn this stings a little. One of my favourite authors.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
The book also had a big effect on me.
"[Ketho] looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevefc as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it “It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port."
when i read that first i had to put the book away and walk around a minute.
She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.
Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way."
One major weakness of Capitalism, due in part to Pareto, is the perception of relative disparity. Psychological research indicates that such perception is a basic reality of the human condition. We should regard the bitterness of have-nots as real, even if the have-nots are fabulously well off in a global and historical sense. Any system which is forward thinking should take that into account, or fail to do so at its own peril. (One of Basic Income's biggest problems is that it does nothing to alleviate the problems relative disparity, so plants the seeds for its own political instability.)
She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.
Any system which isn't perfect is going to fail in innumerable ways, in that countless instances of terrible tragedy and injustice will exist within it, and no system is going to be perfect.
Re: Your user name: I once came up with an acronym for a sensor-network Internet thing. BACON: Basic Autarchic Communication/Observation Network.
It worth noting that Marx was tremendously excited about capitalism: The first part of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto contains a lot of praise to capitalism - some barbed, some delivered straight. For example:
> The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
and:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Socialism was conceived in it's modern form as a direct result of optimism over the rapid growth in productivity brought about by capitalism, and Marx shared that view: He saw capitalism as both absolutely necessary to bring the material wealth that could make redistribution possible, as well as the eventual catalyst for socialist revolution (and in doing so repeatedly warned against trying to push or socialism in poor underdeveloped countries other than as part of a larger wave of revolutions). He also praised capitalism for doing away with a lot of other outmoded aspects of society: to him it was the best so far, and a tremendous step forward for humanity.
The idea that wanting socialism necessarily means thinking capitalism is awful needs to die. But neither is there any reason to think that socialism in any form will be perfect either, even if you want socialism. Any given system can have flawed implementations, or outright fail. Marx himself as early as 1845 (in The German Ideology) warned, for example, that socialist revolutions somewhere underdeveloped would be doomed to failure: If you redistribute somewhere where redistribution just makes want common, he said, the old class struggles would just reassert themselves. Anyone who seriously cares about any given system needs to be open to considering how and why it might fail if they want to make it a success.
As such, Le Guin stands with people like George Orwell in an important but small tradition of socialist literary writers open to showing the dangers too.
People often miss it, but the planet Urras has many countries and actually two superpowers: A-Io (conservative capitalist parliamentary democracy) but also Thu (a totalitarian socialist regime). A very cold war like setting.
A-Io allowed the Odonian rebels (anarchists) to exile to the moon, but their counterparts in Thu we never hear much about. Possibly their fate was more gruesome.
It wasn't a communist system, but an anarchist one. And it didn't fail in so many ways, it's just that life in Anarres was tough. A barren moon with few natural resources. They even had bad harvests and people starved to death.
If some people read the book preferring Urras or thinking it's a toss-up, I'd find that curious and be interested in hearing more (do you?), but still doubt that's what Le Guin intended.
What about Star Trek?
Star Trek just pretends to, though. Most of its fictional conceits are barely thought out, including its post-scarcity communist utopia.
Does the Force really make any less sense than Q? It's all space fantasy.
Enterprise, parts of DS9, Discovery and the new movies have largely done away with that format. It's a very sharp relief.
Anarchists generally get along with communists even worse than capitalists do, so I don’t think this distinction is just pedantry.
My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists.
Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?
E.g. the founder of (left)-libertarianism was an anarcho-communist (Joseph Déjacque) [1], and among early libertarian socialists, you for example would fine some the earliest leading figures in the Socialist League, which counted Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels among their members.
> I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin.
I find that a very curious statement. Kropotkin explicitly criticized the collectivist nature of the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin as simply being a different type of wage system that he believed would eventually lead to centralization again, and promoted local self-sufficiency etc. as means to explicitly counter collectivism. Here's an interesting overview of the history of anarchist communism (or communist anarchism) [2] that covers both Kroptkin and Dejacques.
Anarchist-communism is specifically in opposition to collectivist tendencies in many anarchist ideologies, and explicitly rejecting anarchist systems that are based on exchange of value or other ways of letting some party assert authority over another's access to goods, just like Marx (e.g. based on Marx mentions in Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, that set out "higher" forms of socialism as doing away with means of exchange).
[1] This is the first use of the term libertarian in a political sense: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...
[2] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alain-pengam-anarchis...
Edit: Personally I would sign up in an instant.
An activist and mentor for many writers. This is a sad day.
I also read some of her work from the 1990s, a short story collection whose name I cannot recall, but was very powerful and thoughtful. I think in many respects she was able to take science fiction and fantasy in emotional and social realms where few authors were willing to tread.
God bless you and family, Teacher, and your voice still sings.
If you aren't familiar with her work, "Left Hand of Darkness" right now is on sale at Audible for $4 and the narrator is George Guidall. I didn't add a link because I'm not looking for some kickback, just a rare combination of two all-time greats on one book and for very cheap.
It's not like Ursula K. Le Guin's work was directly focused on allegory.
Feeling absent from two systems was a major point of The Dispossessed, not the content of either systems.
The communists in the book were not mentioned a lot from what I remember (there was a communist state on Urras?).
https://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Gals-Other-Animal-Presences/d...