Ursula le Guin RIP thread

Author of the Earthsea series dead at 88 after a long stretch of poor health.

F
Loved her books since I was a teenager. It's sad to see such monumental writer passing away.
Checked Veeky Forums thread. It made me remember why I didn't browse that board. The concentration of salt and elitism is critical.

...

I was not a big fan of hers but she was a seminal author in her field and contributed much. She'll be missed. Sleep well, Ursula.

The thread from the weekend terry does still gives me a rageboner

She was an old school 1930s Red. You know the type, the "Stalin never did anything wrong" kind. Eric Hobsbawm was one too.

Great writer though. Her "Those Who Walk Away From Omales" should be required reading in every school.

It isn't as frustrating for me as when Robert Aspirin died, because legal woes robbed us of his best years and he died young, while she was still contributing less than ten years ago. I can't get over that she outlived Aspirin, Douglas Adams, Robert Sheckley, and Terry Pratchett. Do prolific writers tend to die young or something?

I never liked Omelas. I understand the point it was trying to make, but it gives no reason, even a vague one, as to why the child must suffer. If the story is not going to fill in the details that support its ethical theme, why write a story and not an essay?

Regardless, rest in peace, Le Guin.

I've never been in love with her work, but wouldn't ignore her legacy in sci-fi/fantasy.

She was my first real introduction to leftie mind poison.

Earthsea was good until her rabid feminism set in.

Ouch. I am in pain.

Not Veeky Forums related

>I understand the point it was trying to make, but it gives no reason, even a vague one, as to why the child must suffer.

Yes, autistic people do need everything spelled out don't they?

>>If the story is not going to fill in the details that support its ethical theme, why write a story and not an essay?

You've got it backwards, sperg. Essays require facts, stories just tell a story.

bait

>She was my first real introduction to leftie mind poison.

She had that in spades, especially in later life.

Still, her stories were fun reads.

...

Left Hand of Darkness was an excellent Sci Fi story

>She had that in spades, especially in later life.
To her credit, she wasn't very preachy about her political and feminist views in her books, even in later works like "Tehanu". If anything else, feminists criticized "Left Hand of Darkness" for the lack of "proper nouns".

A professor introduced me to her recently and I started reading the left hand of darkness. Any other Veeky Forums approved books by her?

I won't lie, I posted this thread to settle a bet as to whether Veeky Forums reads anything but graphic novels anymore. Rather pleasantly surprised.

that's very very sad
Earthsea was my second and very much beloved fantasy
Rest in peace...

those who burn brightest burn out faster

I always liked the Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness, it's about time I read them again.

I unironically think Veeky Forums is even worse than /v/

Finally.

Earthsea (first 3 books and short stories)
Annals of the Western Shore
Dispossessed
Changing Planes

really good books

eh, I always use Veeky Forums for my literary needs, it delivers
I've tried posting on Veeky Forums long ago, never again

Earthsea thread here The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea are, I think, here biggest ones. IIRC, she created, or at least named, the ansible.

Another SJW bites the dust, thank God.

Its not against the rules to report dickheads who show disrespect to a recently dead great writer, no matter how one feels about her late work, right?

>Another SJW bites the dust, thank God.
Yeah. Good thing she didn't have a long and influential career. Oh, wait...

It's even worse than that, Veeky Forums is worse than /mu/.

I wouldn't. Being a disrespectful dick doesn't actually violate any rules here.

but in a thread dedicated to said dead person its clearly malicious trolling, no?

>niggas ITT feeling the relentless need to clarify her politics and where they stand in respect to that
Great writer. Started with Earthsea, didn't read her SF stuff until later. Got me into Tiptree. F.

Yes, the leftist death spiral of our society passed her by. She went from being a bleeding edge radical to being insufficiently revolutionary. She even forgot to include trannies in Left Hand of Darkness!

I don't feel the need to throw great stories down a memory hole because I'm afraid they'll pop a "narrative". Unlike what other people have done with, say, HP Lovecraft.

>something offended me
>on Veeky Forums
>who will protect me by banning all the wrongthink?
I have a feeling LeGuin would laugh in your face.

How can you be a good writer without having ideas that inflame human passions? A writer with nothing divisive to say would probably have spent her career writing manuals for typewriter repair.

>neocommunist retard does damage control for a dead commie
damn people of color me surprised

You don't have to turn a memorial thread into a political bitchfest which is exactly the conversation you are starting

Inverse poes law, chances are some of these people are genuinely expressing their opinion; they have every damn right to. Fuck off back to plebbit or tumblr if you want to censor people. I agree it's disrespectful but out of principle we shouldn't report them.

Why can't we seperate the politics of a creator from their work? Unless it's directly inserted in it isn't relevant, for example I still like The Smiths even if I disagree with Morissey's radical veganism, it's only referenced in a single song Meat Is Murder which I just don't listen to, it was by far one of the weakest tracks on that album.

>She went from being a bleeding edge radical to being insufficiently revolutionary.

What was once left is now right.
We must dwell on this.

We human beings can. Neocommunist cultists cannot.

Has anyone here read Changing Planes?
Pure Veeky Forums stuff, I tell ya.

>Aspirin
shit
>Douglas Adams
somewhat shitty
>Robert Sheckley, and Terry Pratchett
those are okay, though pterry got worse in later books

Veeky Forums has always been welcome to cross boarding topics that don't involve autistic screeching.
Kill yourself.

Not every feminist is an SJW, if by SJW we mean a weakling that complains about imaginary problems like rape culture that doesn't exist, gender wage gap that is justified, etc., and wants to overthrow patriarchy because it's always evil for everyone, patriarchy meaning everything male-related. That's not the thing.
Anyway, fuck feminism.

>I always use Veeky Forums for my literary needs,
Man, you must have read a lot of entry level genre fiction in your day

She was an author, not your grandmother. This is a discussion on an image board, not a chapel.

Cthulhu always swims left.

You're incorrect. Feminism is about creating equality (aka "social justice") for women. Moderate feminists will stop at equality of opportunity (those women are now called self hating conservatives by the radical core). Today's feminist mainstream desires to remake physical reality to conform to their ideology, and destroy anyone who notices that the sky isn't green (basically the story of the Damore memo).

Aspirin's young adult stuff was good but definitely not for everyone with all the puns. Cold Cash War was ok. Thieves' World started off gritty but turned into fanfic-meets-Tumblr. But he wasn't allowd to write for Thieves' World because of a legal dispute, his name only got on the project as an editor. And Thieves' World's serious approach didn't suit him for the one story he did write.

Adams pulled in the young atheist and Brit-comedy fanbases, causing his work to be rated more highly than the average American would feel it was worth.

I once got in a nasty argument with a woman over Sheckley's story about snake people. She asked me what made it good and I told her the one snake just up and asked the other a few paragraphs in "did you kill your wife yet?" She replied that I wouldn't like that unless I was intent on killing my own wife (!), then went off to her job as a greeter at Walmart. So not everyone will get him either.

I mean, I enjoyed the premise of Rand's The Fountainhead but it didn't suddenly make me a libertarian. If modern politics is about making sure not to hear any arguments to ever do anything the other side likes, that's a little boneheaded.

>though pterry got worse in later books

In fairness his brain was fucking melting.

funny thing even with brain rot he was ten heads taller than 90% fantasy and social satire writers

No, she’s just a woman. Women just tend to live longer, probably because they don’t tend to live as hard.

Yesterday’s radical, today’s regular, tomorrow’s reactionary.

>making sure not to hear any arguments to ever do anything the other side likes
No, but a lot of us are pretty damn tired of it. A large majority of culture-makers are leftists and so progressive ideology seeps into a lot of movies, TV, and literature. It can get pretty tiring after a while. We get it, people who want to increase their wealth are always greedy, exploitative capitalist swine. Christ, pick another fucking moral already.

>Christ, pick another fucking moral already.
And preferably not an environmentalist one. I agree with it and even I'm fucking sick of simplistic "civilization bad, nature good" plotlines and Captain Planet tier propaganda.

Not only did le Guin open up my brain to non-standard fantasy, she also made me a communist. God bless her.

>Its not against the rules to report dickheads who show disrespect to a recently dead great writer, no matter how one feels about her late work, right?
It depends on the mod. If the mod likes said author, he'll hand out bans. If he doesn't like said author, he might ban you.

>damn people of color me surprised
Next time, make an original joke.

OK, if you're going to bitch about that one I'm going to take a swing at the endless stream of "fuck yeah war, screw you uptight liberals/government bureaucrats who try to stop our awesome unaccountable heroes from doing crazy stuff that seems suicidal" action films. You could just leave that scene out of every movie and it would make just as much sense the vast majority of the time

I mean, either way it gets irritating, but it's not like "spamming the same plot over and over" is ever NOT going to be a pain in the ass.

Environmentalism is kind of important for most of my job, since biologist, but none of the things they ask the public to do DOES FUCKING ANYTHING so screw that with a stick and give me some regulations that actually help rather than going on about recycling and foxhunting all day please green groups.

>Yesterday’s radical, today’s regular, tomorrow’s reactionary.
Just like in early USSR. And still we learn nothing.

>made me a communist
>God bless
Subtle troll.

>Environmentalism is kind of important for most of my job, since biologist, but none of the things they ask the public to do DOES FUCKING ANYTHING so screw that with a stick and give me some regulations that actually help rather than going on about recycling and foxhunting all day please green groups.
Speaking from the enviro cleanup side, confirmed. Most people are content to pour waste chems in to the water supply even when they end up being the ones drinking it themselves, nevermind the regard they have for somebody else's health. Asking Average Joe to plan for something that may extend generations beyond his own lifetime is an exercise in futility.

>screw you uptight liberals/government bureaucrats
That's mostly a Michael Bay thing and it's a generic jab at politicians/bureaucrats in general rather than any political party/ideology.

>The Fountainhead didn't suddenly make me a libertarian
That's because that isn't that book. You've either mixed up your book or your philosophy.

Seconded, I never really saw that being specifically a partisan thing, at least in most settings. The chaotic good who tells The Man off and then goes and does what he knows to be right, damn the regulations, seems like it's classically a liberal archetype, not a conservative one.

[*]

Congrats on making this a worse thread than Veeky Forums ever could, /pol/.
...oh wait, wrong board?

Hell, it also exists within purely military stories as the NCO "man of the people" vs the politically minded officer. Or in cop dramas with the loose cannon vs the director who is being forced into inaction by the mayor.

The everyman NCO who knows his shit versus the new guy officer who formally has authority but in reality doesn't know anything other than how to succeed in officer school (or, in older settings, is only in that office because he's nobility) is a pretty damn old trope, too. In this case, I think its origins aren't so much political as a commentary on the nature of command and leadership, since its origins go back long before this line of political reasoning existed.

>Checked Veeky Forums thread. It made me remember why I didn't browse that board. The concentration of salt and elitism is critical.
It's actually a pretty tame thread? Mostly Fs. With all the horror stories you hear, you'd think they would be dancing in circle and praising the heavens for taking another hated fiction writer, but it doesn't look like that at all.

Point taken. Really shouldn't be taking swings at partisan culture, since I don't know how to do it.
I'm apparently a weird leftie by the standards of the people I hang out with because I don't really give a damn about the whole "culture" thing and want to talk economics. Can't help but feel that it makes more sense to argue about things you can easily quantify with statistics so the argument might conceivably end someday even with polite disagreement rather than HATE HATE HATE THE EVIL ONE, but whatever, doing one of my politics rants again.

Sunday school environmentalism needs some environmentalist campaigning against, I think. Then again, it was always going to be a hard problem to solve with the bottom-up approach since for the most part that's not the problem at this point in my area. You can recycle all the aluminium cans and "upcycle your furniture" (really? It's made of unpainted fucking wood, mum. It wasn't going to be too toxic to the environment at this point.) all you want, but all my creatures and all the marine scientist's coral is going to keep dying.

Just got back from the most depressing research trip of my life, which is why I'm annoyed at that at the moment. Spent three days hunting through what's basically ruined cities filled with corpses, Judge Dredd Necropolis style looking for anything that might be left. No significant luck, which means that even if we manage to leap on the sea temperature problem this damn second we're probably still going to lose most of the smaller reefs.
I normally do the happy trips like investigating worms with fiber optic nanotech fur, dammit.

>Congrats on making this a worse thread than Veeky Forums ever could, /pol/.
>...oh wait, wrong board?

Nope, you got it.

Leftists don't like talking about economics because leftists don't understand economics. You're just a future conservative who hasn't been mugged yet.

What is “Sunday school environmentalism”?
Is it like “Sunday School Christianity” where a person started with a sufficient-for-their-age knowledge set but either left before they could upgrade or were given more milk when they should have switched to meat?

>HATE HATE HATE THE EVIL ONE
This is because most leftists are driven by emotion, not reason. It's easier to stoke emotion with things like "punch a nazi!" than things like statistics.

Basically. With a side of chirpy home-spun wisdom. As the post says: most people are getting switched on to home environmentalism 30-50 years too late.
That describes political discourse all over nowadays. I know, I know, "both sides" and all that, but I can't talk politics to anyone I know any more. All the sensible people are apathetic centrists. Anyone willing to engage with the topic has bizarre views on one side or the other of the Overton window. I have relatives unironically blathering about microaggression and then a guy at work who thinks IQ differences between races mean we need to start registering and encouraging "appropriate parenting matches."
The train seems to have no brakes.

Whatever, it was a long time ago, you get my point, I can like the premise of a tale even if it is subtle propaganda without believing it, just as I can like a fantasy roleplaying game without worrying that Strahd will murder me in my sleep.

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Never did religion to begin with, so I stole that phrase from another chap, but that seems about right.

Basically, people get too fixated on "everyone do their part" and forget that that means fucking nothing. Teaching eight-year-olds to put the right stuff in the recycling bin, save water or use renewable power where possible is a good thing, but the problem is that every group that spins off from that sets their goals too low to accomplish anything. Banning foxhunting was this massive political fight in the UK despite the fact that it barely happens as it is and means very little, but the SSEs brought out the PETA-style "you murdering bastards" argument, then the Tories called it "class warfare" and in the end nothing of value was gained or lost despite a big kerfuffle.

They point to one company that they've got to cut down on packaging or a chain of eco-friendly places that only used organics and cardboard to send out food or whatever, but that's nothing compared to big companies, industry, agriculture (and, ironically, corn and other crops grown for biodiesel) and stuff like that, and there's more of them with more money so they'll never make a dent that way.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the older leaders of the environmentalist groups are old sixties and seventies counterculture hippy types, and they don't like the idea of turning something over to the government or using high technology.

In my opinion, any environmentalist group that wants to get something serious done needs to play the same game as the big corporate lobbyists, although I'm not so well-read on the rules for that in the US I hear they're a lot less strict than the ones here. Get the fifty thousand splinter groups, pick some reasonably decent politicians, pour the damn money into them and get them to draft and vote in more serious environmental regulations, get some serious work done rather than picking at one company over the course of years. It's not like they're going to get lambasted for taking money from "Big Hippie" in elections.

Toss some taxes on assorted pollutants that scale linearly with output over a certain level, get some money to pay for other shit from it rather than just suing people or burning money on subsidising it all while still looking like you're being nice to big business.. Sure, the completely unenforceable, non-binding and pathetic international treaties help a bit if manufacturing economies and people like Trump don't just ignore them, but the amount of actual impact that governments have had on this is entirely disproportionate to the scale of the problem.
Build more nuclear power plants, they're currently far better than fossil fuels and the waste could be ran through a breeder reactor or two once we have enough to justify running one. They even output less radiation and are less dangerous to workers because they're much more tightly regulated. Let public GMO scientists do some work once Monsanto's patent on GURT tech runs out, the government can be convinced to knock that oligopoly with a legal stick or another method is found, that would solve the "we don't know the long-term problems" bullshit people argue against GMO since seed isn't usually saved over multiple years anyway. If we're going to spend most of the output of farming zones like Iowa on a huge biodiesel monoculture, at least take the time to maximize the yield/land ratio.

I mean, I consider myself to be mostly a boring left-of-centre type (trade unionist), but 60% of everyone I know is that pic or a glummer version of. Then you have 20% muh immigrants and 20% muh patriarchy.
>It's not like they're going to get lambasted for taking money from "Big Hippie" in elections.
Well, no, because environmentalists don't have any fucking money. All the money in environmentalism is from deathbed converts leaving inheritances and rival companies sandbagging each other by proxy.

>bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
What a fucking moron

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Yeah, really not going to happen in the forseeable future.
My general stance is that the government is for doing the big things that would be a royal pain to regulate the private sector into doing halfway properly/would be a massive natural monopoly or oligopoly and not really get anything out of "competition", so healthcare, national defence, infrastructure etc, plus keeping some level of essentials for life available for everyone so everyone has a chance to actually climb whatever ladder they choose to before dying in an alley somewhere.

Sometimes my biggest problem is that things aren't free market enough, like patent law and international certification for upper-middle class jobs like doctors and lawyers. Hardly sane if you're going to go nuts on the free trade for cheap labour/strict contract regulations to hinder bargaining there and keep your own field happily insulated from foreign competition (and also massively drive up the cost of public healthcare and similar, raising tax requirements anyway), but mostly I cause people to rant about ebil socialists taking their moneys.

True. I believe the general idea would be to get the spare money that people burn on the useless stuff to go into ye olde politician bribing
fund instead to do some actual good, since it would be hard to find many people on the left, centre or centre-right that wouldn't at least want to publicly seem like they're "environmentally friendly" to the usual

Oh balls.

meant for

I have my doubts that the charitable donations of even half the population would compare the the economic might of the industries involved. I would love to believe it would work, but I'm not convinced.

Why can't I want increased police presence and universal healthcare at the same time, user? Because some rhetoric says I can't? Here, let me translate that for you: baa baabaa baa baaaa. Don't tell your pimps now.

I'm not exactly sworn to uphold that policy I pulled out my ass either, I haven't exactly sat down and done the maths.

Judging from Australia's right, a decent chunk of the North of England and some American states mostly being bought by just one or two big industries at once it might win some local victories at least, and I guess some neutral politicians might decide to take some campaign contributions from a group like that without much of the collateral reputation damage that sometimes comes from being blatantly in somebody's pocket, but again, thinking out loud with zero evidence.
Can't really be less effective than the anemic efforts currently coming from everyone concerned, and at least you could centralize campaigning efforts a bit more.

If anything it’s the extremes that are contradictory.
>i want smaller gubmint, but I also want my religion to pass its favorable laws to make everyone submit to it
>I want gubmint to have more of a monopoly on lethal violence by limiting civilian access, but I also don’t trust the police or army as gubmint agencies to have the physical interest of the people at heart, especially those of minority groups

>Can't really be less effective than the anemic efforts currently coming from everyone concerned
Ain't that the truth!

Yes. Just because two sides lump it into "big govt" and "small govt" doesn't mean they are impossible to have. That's a canard that groups sell because that's where their power base is and they want to give that base a larger slice of the pie. The ordinary joe only buys into it because he gets told he can't have it or that he's bad for wanting it, and he fucking believes it because omg thinking is hard.

It's preposterous to me that we have examples in recent history, backed by evidence and the testimony of people who were there, of things going horribly wrong in both directions, and yet we still have people who say "that side is always wrong about everything." It's animal level stupidity.

And even me saying that doesn't make me a 'centrist', because I think some changes are long overdue, like that poor town going without proper tapwater for four years now. The real problem is stupid pantsshitting idiots like this guy need to upgrade their brains so they can handle more than two possibilities, because no way is the world as simple as drooling imbeciles like this would have you believe. Don't tell them that, though, or they'll throw a tantrum because then they'll have to learn how to count to 3.

>oh no, ursula died
>I didn't realize there were so many fans on Veeky Forums
>it's just /pol/tards shitting up yet another thread

Hooray.

Famous Leftist...Paul Krugman?