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Originally Posted by tompe
I had read ninet of them.
I thought the decription of A Fire Upon the Deep was accurate.
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I didn't see the menace as a computer virus, nor was there evidence it transformed matter.
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The Left Hand of Darkness of a better book than the Dispossesed but you can argue that the idea content of the Dispossesed will influence you more.
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"Left Hand" actually influenced me more. Her depiction of a society of human hermaphrodites who could become either male or female in breeding season had all sorts of interesting implications. (And LeGuin stated a while back that had she to do it over, she would have used feminine rather than masculine pronouns to emphasize the differences even more strongly.)
The Dispossessed annoyed me. From where I sit, LeGuin's principal weakness is an inability to understand and therefore do convincing portrayals of villains. Her society on Annares was too carefully set up. The utopian communal ideal was a nice one, but she set it in a marginal environment where there was just about enough to go around. It simply wasn't
possible to be significantly better off than your neighbor in material terms. It would have vanished like a moth in a flame in a more abundant environment.
And the society of Urras, the system's other habitable planet, felt like the main inspiration was the sort of thing depicted in old copies of The Masses, with top hatted capitalist owners oppressing slave workers in the name of profit. When Shevek's servant throws off his careful mantle of obsequious silence and begs Shevek to "help free them from the masters", I nearly tossed the book across the room in disgust. It simply didn't work for me, and I couldn't believe it. (And back when I first read _The Dispossessed, I was far more left wing in my beliefs than I am now, and far more likely to swallow such a notion.)
I felt LeGuin was stacking the deck and visibly pulling strings to make a particular point, and the book suffered because of it. It's more annoying to see that when it's someone like LeGuin than it is with lesser writers, simply because LeGuin
is so good, and I expect better.
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Dennis