Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I wish I could agree. I adore LeGuin, but that one may be my least favorite.
The problem is that Ursula's weakness may be an inability to understand villains. The bad guy in Forest was a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out, assembled from cliches. I couldn't believe in him, and hence couldn't appreciate the story.
I had similar reactions to _The Dispossessed_. When Shevek's Urras servant finally drops his carefully subservient mask and begs Shevek to "free them from the masters", I wanted to throw the book against the wall in disgust. The masters of Urras were cliches, who might have been drawn from cartoons in the 1930's Socialist journal "The Masses", with top-hatted cigar smoking robber barons grinding the poor under their heels in the service of profit. If you are inclined to see that as the way things work, it won't bother you. If you think the real world is a bit more complex than that, it falls on its face.
I was also annoyed at the authorial strings and stacking of the deck. Shevek came from Annares, a companion planet of the same star Urras orbited. It was much more marginal, and the inhabitants existed in a sort of anarcho-communist society that was made possible only by the fact that it was a marginal environment, with just barely enough to go around, and it simply wasn't possible to become significantly better off materially than anyone else. It would have vanished like a moth in a flame if set down on Urras.
But _The Dispossessed_ was a larger and richer work, with enough other things to mitigate my distaste and make it worth reading.
My favorite of LeGuin's ouvre is _The Left Hand of Darkness_.
______
Dennis
|
I liked 'Left Hand' too.
But I said 'Word for World' was strange. I felt the arrival of a starship with an interstellar radio on it, was rather deus ex machina. That is what ruined the story for me.
As for the bad guys, I grew up in a small town with people like that as part of the local power structure. They did seem narrow and carboard cutouts, but that simplistic hatred, with no good reason for the hatred to exist, is the 'type' of people they are. So, I rather understood why and whom they were in the story. They were like watching an old 1940s Film Noire movie full of cliches... but it was dangerous to underestimate what kind of evil they were capable of.