“The old terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the farborn. And little by little, with majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them–rejecting the graft.” I have a few […]
How can you tell the legend from the facts on these worlds that lie so many years away?
“How can you tell the legend from the facts on these worlds that lie so many years away?” This continues: “–planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is a matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.” This is how the […]
Funny, she doesn’t look Hainish – The Found and the Lost part 2
Part twoooooo. Novella 8 A Woman’s Liberation 1994 4/5 Stars Another Hain novella, this one narrated by an “asset” or in our words, slave. In this particular society, these assets are total slaves to their masters through legal status, through training, and through their utter dependence to the system itself. Our narrator, used and abused by her masters, in this particular society, all women, she finds herself liberated by order of fiat by her new master. This presents a real problem. Like in much of […]
A Hain, a Doe, and a Willa Cather novel walk in a bar Part 1
I got this book as part of my free trial with Audible….it’s 34 hours long….it’s 13 novellas. Deals! Novella 1: Vaster than Empires and More Slow 1975 – 4/5 stars I haven’t read any of the Hainish novels. And in fact, I haven’t read much of Ursula K Le Guin at all. So I will have to reverse engineer any of the novels that come across in this collection that refer back to any series or worldview. I THINK it will be ok, because […]
The sort of book I would have liked more had I read it 20 years ago
I’m giving this book 3 stars, and I feel guilty about it. I feel guilty because I know it’s a classic, because it’s 50 years old and still going strong, because the writing is really beautiful, and because I KNOW that if I had read this 15-20 years ago, I would have adored it. 8-13 year old me, who reread books about Narnia and Prydain and various retellings of King Arthur legends year after year (and read a crapload of mediocre Catholic historical fiction in the […]
Life’s too short to read stories without well-written female characters
I feel a little bad calling one of Le Guin’s books meh, but A Wizard of Earthsea was really only so-so for me. I bumped it up a little in the rating purely due to how groundbreaking the book must have been in 1968 when it was released. This series influenced many famous authors and for good reason. A wizard protagonist with dark skin? A school for wizards? An epic bildungsroman featuring a somewhat unlikeable character? All those things should be considered when evaluating this […]
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