1071
Ursula LeGuin puts the publishers in their place
(lemmy.world)
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
Related communities:
What a badass
She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts "I am a man." It is not about her gender identity, it's just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
I also cannot recommend enough (thanks for the correction!) her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It's an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.
The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.
Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965...
I just reread The Left Hand Of Darkness last month, and it's such a great book. Nothing in it is dated. It was written in 1969, and it's not just about hermaphrodites; the people of that planet are essentially genderless except once a month when, if they get together with someone else also going through it, one becomes female and the other male essentially randomly - it could switch next time. She takes that situation and explores what a society like that would be like. Further, it's told through the eyes of a more traditional male who seems somewhat misogynistic. It's an amazing piece of work, and it's amazing it was published when it was.
It was my introduction to her writing, and wow what a fucking book. I read it in two days, I couldn't put it down.