Nate
This book really makes me think Le Guin was a secret pulp fiction fan, of Robert E. Howard in particular. The parallels between this novel and many of the Conan stories are too close to be ignored. Drugs and dreaming, dark dangerous magicians, high seas adventure, and interesting fully realized cultures are staples of REH.
I think this novel may have even been a rebuttal to Howard's dark world view.
Where Howard espouses a philosophy wherein civilization is an island of relative stability doomed to constantly sink back into barbarism, Le Guin counters with relentless optimism. She argues a core of good in people, and the desire to be better. While she doesn't shy away from dark motifs, there's an overarching theme of hope in her writing that, while I don't fully agree with, I find refreshing and charming.
Le Guin's writing style is wispy and beautiful. Her prose magical. I'm constantly bombarded with imagery in the style of Amano Yoshitaka and french impressionism. I've never had writing evoke that kind of response from me. It's kinda cool.
Also. Can I please just fucking live on a flotilla with the Raft People? I love theeeeeem.
WOW.
Best book in the series by a long shot.
FPW is at his best when weaving tales of psychological horror, and goddamn does he absolutely crush it in this novel.
Between orchestrating Bill's loss of faith, Lisl's manipulation into cruelty and egoism, and the absolutely devastating final temptations, Rafe kept me both horrified and completely enthralled.
Also probably the most accurate depiction of how people fall into abusive relationships I've ever read.
So. Fucking. Good.
Wish I would have read this in highschool alongside Catcher. Avoided it for the longest time because of the stereotypes around the people who adore Sylvia Plath. I regret it. I adore Sylvia Plath.
I went in expecting some purple prose about psychotic breaks and their historical mistreatment, and I got that. What I didn't expect was the wealth of charm, wit, and dark humor flavoring the experience. The amount of personality that shines through is stunning, and for every line that made me laugh out, I found parallel heartache at the loss of such an agonizingly relatable human.
“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
Very hit and miss.
For every seminal work ala ‘The Gernsback Continuum' or the aggressively imaginative powerfictions of ‘Solstice' and ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades' there are piles of forgettable poorly written copycats that are properly relegated to banal obscurity.
Fun read though, probably a great choice for a book-club who wants to hate-read some corny cyberpunk.
This series is incredible. I love it so much.
Compared to the raucous fun of ‘We Are Legion', ‘For We Are Many' focuses much more on the Bobs' lost humanity and his increased separation from who he used to be. Howard's story in particular is heart-rending.
For a series that loves referencing other franchises, I was disappointed the dreadnaughts didn't decide to use Culture GSV style naming conventions though. Was realllllly hoping for a ship with a name like “The Unreliable Narrator” or “He Who Sows Wind” or “Don't Have a Cow Man” or something similarly goofy and fun.
Holy shit this was good.
The Tombs of Atuan mirrors A Wizard of Earthsea in the absolute best ways possible. Both are coming of age stories. Whereas A Wizard of Earthsea was an epic globe-trotting journey of a boy owning up to his errors on the path to manhood, The Tombs of Atuan is a much more personal and intimate story about the loss of innocence and the choice between hiding in safety and naivety or embracing bravery and facing the unknown. Tenar is flawed and relatable, and her character development is heartfelt and beautiful. The metaphor of her exploration of the perpetually dark labyrinth contrasting her imprisonment, guilt, and loss of faith is next fucking level.
This book is a goddamn masterpiece.
Repetitive writing over top-tier worldbuilding.
Hyboria is an amazing setting filled with incredible locations, interesting (albeit kinda racist) cultures, and badass characters. It's a shame Howard plays everything so safely. He quickly locks into a repeatable structure, and never gives it up.
His minority and female characters go from being capable, strong, and interesting in earlier stories, to being relegated to trope-y garbage by the end. He was writing for mainstream appeal and not feeding his inner-auteur and it shows.
There is so much unachieved potential here, and it's super depressing it was never fulfilled.
One of the best fictional universes ever created. Shit stories though.
Standouts include “The Hour of the Dragon” (best story), “Red Nails” (setting is too fucking cool. Definitely stealing for a DnD campaign. Could do without Conan being so rapey in this one. Also racism.), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Lovecraftian as fuck, probably the best overall, and first I'd recommend), and “The Slithering Shadow” (Drugged out city of sleeping sorcerers worshipping a timeless tentacle god? Coolest shit ever. Story? Pretty bad).
There's something singularly beautiful about the way Le Guin writes. She eschews complex narratives. Her pacing is terrible. Her characters are flat and boring. Despite all that, her books are true art and high literature.
She shares a strange kinship with Lovecraft in that her nontraditional style is enchanting and enthralling (I'd argue both of them had undiagnosed Asperger's. Fight me.). Le Guin (like HPL) is a worldbuilder. A supremely skilled worldbuilder with a uniquely anthropological slant. She says so much with so little. I wish she'd have taken a bit more time out and hit me over the head with her points a bit more though.
A Wizard of Earthsea tells a very straightforward coming of age tale in an amazingly actualized universe. Once I was able to quiet the voice in my head screaming “She's not showing! She's telling! That illeeeeeegal!”, I was able to not just come to terms with her unique prose, but see the magic and skill involved that's led to Le Guin's lasting appeal.
The more I step back and fight my biases over what a novel can and can't be, the more I'm enjoying her work.
I can't wait to dive into the sequels.
Also I have a new headcanon for dolphins now, so that's fun.
Book takes a weird PhilDickian genre turn near the end that I hated, but makes up for it in the last few chapters. Started as decently hard sci-fi and pivoted jarringly into soft territory.
Very clearly a prime inspiration for Cixin Liu's Remembrance trilogy (modern day masterpiece, best SF series ever, fite me) and I loved seeing the parallels.
Prose is fantastic, characters interesting, and dialogue solid. Immersive and wonderful.
There is a super unfortunate N-bomb dropped in the middle in the most old white-guy way possible. It's weird.
What I expected: Bomb ass classic SF
What I got: Cool alien fantasy treatise on the duality of man, the humanity that lies behind labels, and some badass second-wave feminism.
On paper I should have enjoyed this book more than I did though.
While Le Guin is a master of language, her word choice stunningly perfect, it seems she harbors an intense hatred for beauty in prose. The writing in TLHoD is utilitarian, spartan, and devoid of interesting dialogue or evocative description. The book is a giant exercise in telling and not showing, often completely glossing over potentially interesting scenes and hand waving past important plot points.
For a feminist author she sure loves to refer to (most) masculine traits as intrinsically desirable and (all) feminine traits as repulsive. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that it's because our reader surrogate is male. I would love to give her the benefit of the doubt, but she gives us no reason to. While Ai grows by the end, and sheds some of his intolerance, it's only for the ambisexuals. In fact near the end, after his trials, he complains again about the shrill sound women make when they speak. It feels tone-deaf.
Where she fails at weaving a well-paced cohesive narrative though, she succeeds in being inimitably quotable.
“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
Dune is a book of contradictions.
For something written half a century ago, its style is visceral and modern.
For a book that barely passes the Bechdel test, the female characters are surprisingly strong and three-dimensional.
It revolves around a white messiah leading a native populace, but somehow deftly avoids pandering and falling into the noble savage trope. It's an incredibly progressive novel.
It's either the hardest soft sci-fi I've ever read, or the softest hard sci-fi.
For something so uniquely singular, its influences echo out through countless imitators. Everything about it has been rehashed and copied, but it still feels completely fresh.
It's easy to see why Dune is consistently ranked as the best science fiction novel of all time. Because it just might be.
While the sex and violence at times are grotesque to the point of pornographic and make portions of the book a nearly unreadable slog, the intricate way the myriad narrative threads fall into place by the end is delicious.
So I guess I accidentally reread Worm?
I feel like that in and of itself is as massive an endorsement as I can give it. Almost 7 thousand pages versus my massive backlog of thing I need to read, and I couldn't stop myself.
Worm has something incredibly special going for it.
It's not the writing style, which is overly utilitarian and painfully direct.
It's not the story, which while it DOES have some incredible high points isn't the thing that gives Worm its spark.
It's the worldbuilding and characters that make Worm my ‘favorite' book.
The worldbuilding is incredible, Worm is REQUIRED reading for anyone interested in creating a superhero universe or writing in the genre.
The characters are where Worm breaks through to something transcendental for me. Taylor is my favorite character in any piece of fiction ever, full stop. Her journey, her struggles, her moral battles and mistakes, they're all are so painfully relatable. Her tentative first steps into friendship (LISA <3<3<3!! BRIAN! ALEC! RACHEEEELLL!!! T_T T_T ) and the greater world, the way every two steps in her growth triggers an unanticipated backwards step, her battle for agency in a world that wants to strip her of it, it all culminates in something so bittersweet and painful, beautiful and cruel, fulfilling and draining. Worm fucks me up, and I love it.