#hainish

[smbhax]

Cover illustration by Alex Ebel

[a-honap-leanya]

I am literally about to start uklgposting bc of coming of age in karhide

why was I procrastinating reading these short stories...

when I saw the words *Praise then Darkness*, I almost screamed back *AND CREATION UNFINISHED!!!!*

what am I doing to myself again

anyway, back to reading 💖💖💖

[biblioklept]

Riff on Ursula K. Le Guin's collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1975 volume The Wind’s Twelve Quarters collects seventeen short stories, offering, as the author puts it in her foreword, “a retrospective” of her career to date: “a roughly chronological survey of my short stories during the first ten years after I broke into print.” Le Guin adds that The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is “by no means a complete collection” of her short stories to…

[quietflorilegium]

“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”

Genly Ai, Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

[littlestpersimmon]

I just saw you mention Ursula Le Guin in your last answered ask. I’ve been meaning to start reading stuff by her. I want to regardless, but do some of her books have trans characters?

[rezcowgirl]

The Rain. The first winter in Vancouver rain. The sky like a roof of lead, weighing down on the tops of buildings, flattening the huge black mountains up behind the city.

An early birthday present from Aries that made me cry.

I have a lot of feelings about Ursula K. Le Guin. I love her so much that it's hard to breathe sometimes. Have to put books down to stare at walls. I am trying to slow down on her works because once I'm through them all, I know I'll be inconsolable. The Telling has a queer brown protagonist from post-apocalyptic Vancouver, and it did things to me.

[sparklywaistcoat]

Man, there are some stories by Ursula Le Guin where it is blindingly obvious that she was raised by anthropologists.

[diariodeunrincondemi]

When Ursula K. said "To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future" and also said "To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it"

[l3st1b0urn3s-707]

Following my hyperfixation with The left hand of darkness I read Winter's king by Ursula K. Le Guin, so let's talk about it!

It's a short story that takes place in Gethen (yay!). It's about king Argaven XVII so it takes place a few generations after TLHOD (since king Argaven XV was the ruler of Karhide in that novel). In this time the Ekumen has already settled in Gethen, and the planet is about to experience many political changes. Basically Argaven is kidnapped and her memories are altered, so now she'll have a journey trying to get them back and rule her country without any external influences, leaving her (at the time) baby daughter behind.

This story is particularly interesting because Gethen's people are reffered to with femenine pronouns instead of the generic masculine used in TLHOD.

You can find this story in The wind's twelve quarters, a collection of short stories by Le Guin, most of them being part of the Hainish cycle (which apparently is the universe where most of her sci-fi stories/books take place, and it's all about the ekumen and that stuff, it looks so interesting!).

Oh, and as a fun fact I also just discovered that there's another short story that takes place in Gethen called Coming of age in Karhide, which sounds so interesting!!! I swear, this woman's books are going to take my whole soul.

I also want to mention that I discovered this story through @evelasco-art 's gorgeous illustration of it, so go check their account out because they're trully talented!

[pathos-bathos]

Ursula K Le Guin I love you so much

[1000life]

wipeout: futurism (2024)

[vifetoile]

Health and good work, Courage, patience, and peace.

Hainish mantra, from "Old Music and the Slave Woman" by Ursula K le Guin

As a Hainish mantra, this quote is in the same 'verse as The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness

[emerald-truth]

one thing about Ursula Le Guin is she's gonna put something in her story about leaving and returning, about exile, and the significance of a home

[offslime]

[quietflorilegium]

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”

Estraven, Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

[earhartsease]

agh audiobook discomfort again - listening to someone read one of our favourite Ursula Le Guin stories, Vaster Than Empires And More Slow, out of her so-called Hainish Cycle (she didn't like that term)

and there are people known as Cetians, inhabitants of planets of the star Tau Ceti* - Urras and Annares from The Dispossessed - anyway this is all sort of incidental but we know you like background as much as we do

the point of this post is that we've been enjoying these books and stories of hers since the 70s, and in our head Ceti sounds like seh-tee (as it would in the classical latin we learned, and in italian too) so to us, Cetians sounded like Seh-tee-ans (like SETI)

but the audiobook narrator pronounces it to sound like see-shuns, perhaps inspired by Helvetians (so we get how that might have occurred to him) but it hurts!

ah and now we have another piece in the puzzle, because apparently the "official" way to pronounce Ceti is based on a terrible outdated academic rendering of latin, so instead of being seh-tee as it would be in classical latin, it's see-thai *shudder* - but at least that makes more sense of why he chose see-shuns

but it hurts!

*Tau Ceti is one of the stars in the european constellation Cetus (named after a mythological sea beast), though arabic astronomers knew the star as Thālith al Naʽāmāt (ثالث النعامات) "third of the ostriches"