this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
1024 points (98.0% liked)
People Twitter
8196 readers
1093 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I still haven't recovered from reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
I'm in the middle of the Dispossessed and I love The Left Hand of Darkness. I swear if these books were less sexual I'd want teenagers to have to read them. Left Hand to teach about cultural and gendered biases and the Dispossessed to teach that your ideology won't create a utopia, but that doesn't mean it won't make things better. It's an absolute shame that LeGuinn kinda requires nerdiness to be introduced to.
City of Illusions still haunts me as well and I keep bringing it up to my wife as we watch Three Body Problem. Its prequels Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile were good as the sci fi sword and sorcery followed by sci fi pocahontas (problematicness included) that they were. But City was a book about a Taoist against lies and liars and it hit hard for that.
Personally I found Omelas highly overrated though. It's a visceral depiction of a common thought experiment but a common thought experiment it was
Teenagers shouldn’t be reading about sex? Am I reading your intention correctly?
I'm not going to be the one to advocate for teenagers having to read about sex
Well I think it needs done. But like many things…no one asked me so here I am! Have a good day, Comrade.
Bro when I was 16 all I thought about was sex
I read those Dispossessed and LHoD in the 80s, and then reread them more recently, and I'm amazed at how well they hold up. So often stories and sensibilities feel dated when you get to many decades from when they were written, but those two books could have been written yesterday. Both masterpieces, for sure. I'm not sure who you feel they're inappropriate for teenagers though.
I never read City of Illusions - at least I don't think I have. I'll add it to my list. What do you think of Three Body Problem? I read the book and didn't really care for it (I know I'm in the minority there).
I just finished the Dispossessed and yeah I think if I read it as a teenager I would've had a head start on where I was headed. My hesitation with recommending them for teenagers is not that teenagers shouldn't read them but that I'm not comfortable being the one to call for books with sexual components to be part of the curriculi for them. Though both, especially had they been available as options for summer reading would have been enlightening.
I do think both feel dated though, but only in the gendered interactions. The terran on Winter having these gender issues makes sense, it's the point of the story. But on Anarres the Odonians feel gender divisions in a way that feels like if written today would have explanations. Honestly i feel that even 10 years later, but definitely 20 LeGuinn would have written Odonians as seeing gender as trait only affecting that which it must rather than as a source of division, conflict, and frustration. And in that vein in both books the cold war is powerful and omnipresent lingering over every aspects of these books, especially the Vietnam war. In the Dispossessed it has to be, that's the point, but it is dealt with in a way where you can feel the 1970s in it.
I don't think these elements take from the stories though, it's no different from how if you know what to look for you can see that Tolkien didn't entirely leave WWI or Star Trek TOS is a product of the 60s while TNG is a product of the 80s and 90s (the lipstick choices alone). A work of fiction cannot be truly timeless as a person cannot be truly timeless. But a classic is one that draws you past it's time and speaks regardless of its time, and eventually you find yourself cherishing your Shakespeare, your Homer, your epic of Gilgamesh all the more for it has grown fine with age. I feel LeGuinn is aging very well indeed.
I think there's a big difference between overly graphic sexual descriptions and the simple fact of characters having sex. LeGuinn, to me, does the latter, not the former, and I think it's fine for teenagers to read that. They know people have sex.
I didn't feel that the characterization of gender roles felt dated because none of these places are earth, they're alien worlds with their own norms being described. We, the readers of today, are left to think about those norms in comparison to our own, just as readers were at the time the books were written. Sure, there has been some shifting of our society's norms since then, but I think the points being made still apply.
One of the things I think is most masterful about TLHoD is the initial underlying sexism of Ai, our narrator. He's just a little dismissive of women and feminine things, and the subtlety of his evolution as he really comes to grips with a race who alternate between male and female is amazingly well done. I think that message is absolutely as relevant today as the day it was written, and can be applied to more than just gender.
City of illusions is to a degree a sequel to Planet of Exile (which is the only book of hers I think doesn't hold up), which is kinda a sequel to Rocannon's World so I definitely recommend reading all three.
I'm enjoying three body Problem but not to the degree I'd recommend it to people. Well made and all that, but it has issues that I feel come directly from cultural differences and from the writing.
I'll put them on the reading list.
Yeah, I wondered if my problems with the 3BP book were culturally-based from the translation, though it was pretty universally lauded as masterful. The motivations and actions of some of the characters just seemed so unlikely to me.
Yeah I also just see a lot of the imperial propaganda that I had to learn to recognize being an American in it, but for China. It's very, "support for China doing bad things is morally superior to opposition to it". Like, you have a victim of the cultural revolution and you're telling me that she's wholly in the wrong for begging aliens to help saying that we cannot save ourselves.
The show leans away from some of it but the entire story revolves around the full villain status of people with reasonable criticisms and their blind faith that makes them to a certain degree uninteresting.