#the hainish cycle

[sparklywaistcoat]

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

[newnamesamecharlotte]

The king was pregnant.

The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

[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

[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

[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"

[spookyabuki]

Hi all! I'm planning on starting a TTRPG campaign for a setting I made called Shadow Protocol. Right now, we have three players and I'm looking for two more.

If you're a fan of: • Alien • Blade Runner • Citizen Sleeper • Ghost in the Shell • The Hainish Cycle • Murderbot • Signalis • SOMA

You'll probably enjoy it! We don't have a set meeting time yet (though currently, we're all in American time zones I think). I also haven't decided what system we're going to use, though it's between Carbon 2185 and Neon City Overdrive. We'll be using Roll20 to meet.

Anyway, if you're interested, send me a DM and I can hook you up with the Discord invite!

Also please be cool. No racists, transphobes, etc. We'll probably be dealing with some at least semi-serious themes, so if that turns you off, this may not be the game for you.

(Art by AlexAntropov86)

[hawkesque]

well i have officially finished all the hainish cycle novels and stories in the library of america collection and also The Telling specifically is going to make me throw up and scream and cry

[theeclecticlibrary]

[homospockual]

“the day before the revolution,” ursula k. le guin

[sparklywaistcoat]

I just finished reading "Betrayals" from Five Ways to Forgiveness, and just ... sigh. It's a beautiful story, gorgeously and gently written, but I could see the ending coming up Broadway from the first introduction of Chief Abberkam four pages in.

It's disappointing that for all her amazing work around gender and sexuality, Le Guin pretty much never could resist tumbling her characters into bed with one another, even if it takes her four whole books to get there, as it does in the Earthsea cycle. I mean, I get it--Le Guin was allo, the vast majority of her audience is allo, but all the same I wish she had given us some real ace stories.

(No, I do not count Left Hand of Darkness as a story about asexuality, because the Gethenians are ultimately allosexual beings who feel sexual attraction and a personal, biological, and social desire to fuck when they're in kemmer, even if outside of kemmer they don't have sex and their gender doesn't fit along a male/female binary, and even if they spend most of their lives out of kemmer.)

[beachgothgay]

Just finished The Word For World Is Forest and I sobbed. Please read the Hainish "cycle" they're such beautiful books.

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2024

#1 - The Day Before the Revolution, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Rating: 5/5 stars

I challenged myself to read all the novels of the Hainish Cycle several years ago, and did, but I certainly haven't read all the associated short stories and novellas, so I finally went back for one I'd missed. I was worried that it had been so long since reading The Dispossessed, which I didn't even like that much compared to much of Le Guin's other work, that I would have some sort of difficulty with this.

I didn't. It doesn't rely on much of its most closely related novel in the cycle at all--just that an anarchic revolution happened and that a woman named Odo founded the ideals of the culture that emerged. Because this is a brief window into Odo's life as an old woman on the cusp of that revolution.

For such a short piece of work, this can be interpreted as being about a great many things. Aging and ageism, certainly. Grief, too, because Laia Odo continued to try to define herself, at least internally, as the lover of a man who, at that point, was long dead. There's a sort of frustrated futility in Laia as well, that some things don't change no matter how aware she is that she has changed society with her actions, and that her legacy doesn't mean anything to her now as an old woman, because hero worship isn't a replacement for love.

It's deeply and beautifully sad, and I loved it.

[a-ramblinrose]

“I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

[wykart]

Me when I have to program using Ansible at my job