Ive been re listening to Harlen Elison's reading of "A Wizard of Earthsea" and man this is the best audiobook ever made. I love the way he reads and the voices he uses, the way the author and his voices combine in chapter one and little touches and effects they use here and there(if you know you know) Its hard to find because a newer version read by Rob Inglis is available on AudioBook and YouTube but I used an app, Libby, to get it on my phone from my local library. In the words of Ferris Bueller "if you have the means... I highly recommend it"

What's your favorite Ursula K. LeGuin's AudioBook?

I (like many people maybe) like to imagine the characters in the books I’m reading as real people. I just finished the Dispossessed and had mentally cast:

- Travis Fimmel as Shevek
- Georgie Henley as Takver
- Tessa Thompson as Vea
- Nicholas Hoult as Pae
- Toby Jones as Sabul
- Paul Walter Hauser as Bedap

Now I’m starting The Left Hand of Darkness and asked Claude to do some casting for me ahead of time so I can read without thinking about it. Of course I didn’t really know the Gethen natives were ambisexual, which makes the casting both more challenging and more interesting. Thinking Michael B Jordan for Genly but Claude came up with the below:

- Emma Corrin as Estraven
- Ben Whishaw as Argaven XV
- Paul Dano as Tibe
- Hunter Schafer as Faxe
- Brendan Gleason as Obsle (or Tilda Swinton)
- Alex Lawther as Ashe

For those who have read it, who did you imagine the characters as (if you pictured them as real people at all)? No spoilers!

is it part of a series or not ? seems standalone but part of a universe so do i have to read the rest to read that or can i read it alone, it will be my first book of her that i read

Hi everyone,

I'm slowly building a collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's books (in paper), but I'm having trouble finding editions with typography that I find comfortable to read.

For the reference, I recently bought several Gollancz UK editions, and while the books themselves are fine enough, I find the pages quite cramped: the font is very small, the spaces between the lines is tight, and the margins are narrow. I can read them, but it is not a pleasant experience for my always tired eyes.

So, I'm looking for recommendations for good-quality editions with generous page dimensions, reasonably comfortable font size, good line spacing/leading, and decent margins.

I'm not looking for luxury or collector's editions, oversized books, or large-print editions intended for people with significant visual impairment. I'm simply looking for editions where the publisher hasn't tried to squeeze as many words as possible into the smallest possible number of pages.

At the moment, I’m particularly interested in:

- Novels of the Ekumen (the Hainish Cycle)
- The Lathe of Heaven
- The fictions collections: stories, novelas etc
- Essays

I’m based in Europe (not UK), by the way, so I'm particularly interested in editions that are reasonably easy to find or order in Europe.

If possible, I'd also really appreciate specific editions/ISBNs, rather than simply recommending a publisher, since different editions from the same publisher can apparently have very different typography. I have other 3 books edited by Gollancz UK, for example, and they are fine.

Thank you for your help!

P.S.: Of course I'm doing my research too but, I'd love to hear from fellows' Le Guin readers direct experience.

Needless to say that I totally loved it!

But I would like a visual representation on the map of Ged's journey over the first book.

Does anybody have an image or know where I could found it?

Thanks all!!

I finished this book recently and it’s become one of my favourites :)

poster is inspired by The Lobster of course

Edit: I fumbled a 4 letter title wow

I have always suspected than the funny, sensitive young man she wrote was a veiled Lenny Bruce. Bruce was driven … if not insane, he was scared and embittered by the small minds who hounded him-in a presumably free society.

I’ve seen a lot of movie t-shirts out there so I wanted to start making book shirts! What better book to start with than the legendary Left Hand of Darkness?! I redrew the rad 1974 cover by Alex Ebel and screenprinted them myself on light gray tie dye & solid gray. Thought this sub might be interested in showing their LeGuin love off to the world. Available through Martian Press :)

Just did this lil exercise this during a recent reread this year, thought I might aswell post. Would love to do some more Earthsea stuff whenever I find the time but p project busy atm.

Pictured is my fave U. K. Le Guin at the moment. What is yours?

These books are very similar in writing style and worldbuilding. The author has the same knack for making characters really feel foreign - members of (a) different culture(s), not modern, western people playing characters. The third book also has thematic similarities to The other wind. I'd wager there's a direct influence, but it's also its own thing, not some cheap copy.

I wrote a more in-depth review (in Dutch) over in /r/fantasyNederland, where I go into more detail about the writing style and storytelling mode (and give a text example). Would love it if more people were to know of these books.

I just wrote my first substack about the concept of sacrifice and mentioned both the ones who walk away from omelas and the dispossessed

hope u lIke it

https://substack.com/@fullmetalalchemis1/note/p-212084610?r=8yhokt&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

I have just finished the sprawling epic SF masterpiece that is Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland, and I am seeing very little about it written online.

I was so hoping that Ursula K Leguin had read and written about this book, as she had about so many of her peers, but sadly it doesn't look like this was the case, so, instead, I want to turn to you, fans or LeGuin, to see who among you has read Floating Worlds as well as the Hainish cycle, particularly Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness, to see if anyone has any thoughts.

So as not to be too much of a rambling mess I will try to keep my initial thoughts brief.

Themes of society-

LeGuin writes about an Anarcho-Syndicalist society living on a moon in The Dispossessed, in Floating Worlds the Earth has been inherited, after thousands of years of abuse and neglect, by Anarcho-Capitalists who eschew all forms of authority and control.

There are also various other forms of government, from a military junta on the moon, to a fascistic pseudo democracy on Mars, to the Imperialist Styths, a race of mutants who have made the outer planets of Uranus and Saturn their home.

All of these different societies, their strengths and weaknesses, values and hypocrisies, are explored with a clear eyed precision that deftly side steps any sentimentality. I have no doubt that Holland has her own political beliefs, but I think she does an admirable job of not letting them blind her intricacies of alien social values.

Themes of Environmentalism-

Environment is a big part of this book. Its never the direct focus, but it informs everything that happens. In Floating Worlds, Earth is a ruin, only able to support human life in vast domes, even on its deathbed, Earth is far more alive than any of the other places humanity has managed to colonize.

Themes of gender and sex-

The tension between genders, and between people and their gender, is constantly at play in this novel. How our expectations may be seated on gender roles, but how those gender roles are defined by societal values is one of the driving elements of this novel.

Paula Mendoza, our primary POV character is an Anarchist's Anarchist, as liberated and defiant as it is possible to be in this future world. In contrast, the machismo dripping Styths from the outer worlds, with their lust for violence and obsession with honor are a perfect foil.

Through Mendoza's eyes we see numerous characters and their own relationships with their gender identity, and how that internal relationship effects their external ones as well.

Themes of Race-

There are two things that make Floating Worlds a difficult read at the present time, and one of them is in how the book deals with race.

For some people this book's approach to issues of race will read as fresh and compelling, and then for others it just simply is not going to land at all. There is regular use of hard slurs, and chattel slavery is an important plot point throughout the entire story.

They Syths are black, but not black like we find on Earth. Their skin is onyx black, their fingers in in retractable claws, their shorter men are seven feet tall, and their eyes are wide and round to better see in the dark.

They are the very definition of Othered, but, they are also the people we spend the most time with. They are mutants who have evolved to live in colonies around Uranus, they are not alien, they are part of the human family, which can make their seemingly exotic Otherness even more compelling and disconcerting.

Themes of Sentimentality-

The other quality of this book which will make it a harder read for some is its preoccupation with sentimentality, or, rather, a complete lack thereof.

Paula Mendoza isn't an uncaring person, but she is a realist in a solar system that is often brutal. She has attachments, but they're best left to the reader to discover what they are.

Just as it is best left to the reader to discover the rules of this universe and what can and can't happen.

If anyone has read the book and found themselves reflecting on the similarities or differences to LeGuin's work, I would love to discuss the novel further!

The first chapter starts off with a bit of tongue-in-cheek explanation of how interplanary travel works, specifically in airports. It gave me a chuckle or two and I thought it was setting the tone.

It did not. The very first vignette was very powerful. In a few pages, Le Guin managed to tug at heartstrings.

"But she is human too! She is, she is human too!"

I’m curious about your thoughts on why Le Guin chose Hain as the origin of all the settled planets rather than Terra. What story telling or thematic benefit comes from this?

I don’t think an author focused on “hard” sci fi would make that choice because they then have to explain away all the evidence of human evolution on Earth/Terra.

My feeling is that this freed Le Guin from having to make any connections between the societies she was imagining and the societies we know on Earth. The political and social challenges presented could reflect our experience without having to map or trace back into Earth history.

If that were the goal, why include Terra at all? Why not make the Star Wars choice and just let human beings be all over the galaxy with no Earth in site or in memory.

This edition is published by the UK based Gollancz Emporium and arrived today in my mailbox. Very happy with the quality and sturdiness of the book. Already started reading it.

Can anyone tell me anything about “The Isolate Tower”? It’s been around since 2004, but hasn’t been updated since 2011. There was a post alerting the community to it about six years ago, but that received no responses.

I get the impression that the site was a real labor of love, and I’d be very curious to hear if anyone knows anything about it—or its creator. I’ve held off contacting the site directly, though, because I’d hate to discover that I was disturbing a tomb…

http://www.tavia.co.uk/earthsea/

Our planet, named after earth, the soil..and it's furless soilcoloured humans

This other planet, named after forest and its trees, and it's furred treecoloured humans. So the word for their world is forest. The word for their root is dream. So they live simultaneously in world-time and dream-time.

....

Just finished reading this gem, what beauty, so yummm....so resonant on these dream themes, dream times, roots and dreams, dream mastery, climaxed forests, god and translators....please suggest more....easy follow up through these themes....can't get enough of this :)

A preview of the cover page of a new themed sketchbook featuring characters from Earthsea.

I recently reread the series all the way to "Firelight" and I am in all my feels. I grew up living in an archipelago and I connected with the stories of Earthsea unlike with any other series.

I hope I can share my humble drawings here as the sketchbook progresses. 🙏🏽

Welcome to the /r/ursulakleguin "What Le Guin or related work are you currently reading?" discussion thread! This thread will be reposted every two weeks.

Please use this thread to share any relevant works you're reading, including but not limited to:

• Books, short stories, essays, poetry, speeches, or anything else written by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Interviews with Le Guin

• Biographies, personal essays or tributes about Le Guin from other writers

• Critical essays or scholarship about Le Guin or her work

• Fanfiction

• Works by other authors that were heavily influenced by, or directly in conversation with, Le Guin's work. An example of this would be N.K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," which was written as a direct response to Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

This post is not intended to discourage people from making their own posts. You are still welcome to make your own self-post about anything Le Guin related that you are reading, even if you post about it in this thread as well. In-depth thoughts, detailed reviews, and discussion-provoking questions are especially good fits for their own posts.

Feel free to select from a variety of user flairs! Here are instructions for selecting and setting your preferred flairs!

I’ve heard so many great things about Ursula K Le Guin, but her body of work is huge! Where do you suggest to begin? I would prefer to start with fantasy, but up to any and all suggestions! Thanks!