/lit/ - Literature

Someone who's opinion I value told me Earthsea is worth reading. Should I? Is Le Guin worth picking up?

>>23427989
Ursula Le Guin and Chuck Palahnuik come to mind and I'm sure there's a bunch of others. I don't think it's as rare as you're saying

>>23425399
Le Guin had eyes but she could not see Mt. Tai

>Le Guin has got to be one the biggest douches in fantasy. She spends most of her time policing other writers for not being "responsible" with their fantasies (not enough women, poc, ect..)
LeGuin has been dead for over two decades and she was canceled for not being inclusive enough.

>>23425399
Le Guin has got to be one the biggest douches in fantasy. She spends most of her time policing other writers for not being "responsible" with their fantasies (not enough women, poc, ect..)
This is especially funny when she does this to writers who are leagues ahead of her, like Richard Adams and Kazuo Ishiguro. She writes these screeching polemics and they're just like "whose this bitch?"

>>23425272
>Le Guin
Should I read Earthsea?

Is he good? I was surprised to learn that Le Guin recommended pic related. Then again people suspect she gave a lot of other genre writers a "pass" out of solidarity.

>wah wah boo hoo
>retard hoover is a bad writer
try choosing good books next time
>Le Guin
>Highsmith
>Shelley
These are household names, you are a just a retard OP.

>>23419674
>>23419677
god you hipsters are so annoying it's always the same 5 authors, waiting for m john harrison and le guin, tolkien too if you're feeling catholic

>>23416397
>Easy Mode: Name one female fantasy author you enjoy
Melanie Rawn
>Moderate Mode: Who's 70 or younger.
Joanna Russ, Anna Kavan, Le Guin, Sheri S Tepper, Mercedes Lackey etc.
>Hard Mode: 60 or younger
Jacqueline Carey
>Nightmare Mode: 40 or younger
>Masochist Mode: 30 or younger
I...I will bend the knee...
I confess, i only read old female authors

>>23414109
>Tolkien's retarded sister Persephone, who needs a cork on her fork, maybe, and Buzz Feed Dostoevsky
ftfy

I hecking love good female authors: Carter, Mackillip, Le Guin, Jackson, du Maurier. And Joan is what Sanderson would be if he didn't get so rock hard nerding out over magic systems, and had a lobotomy with a kitchen whisk.

>>23412528
>glorifying in war
Its beyond hilarious that a lesbian whose never held a gun would lecture a man who fought on the bloodiest front in the bloodiest war(only eclipsed by WW2) in history on how he depicts war. Dunning Kruger to the nth degree.
>He wrote that the function of fantasy was consolation.

News flash. That is the purpose. Lovecraft said the same thing about horror. Same with Arthur Machen and Poe. I'm pretty sure Mervyn Peake(the best of the Melville's listed authors) held similar views. The reason we read made up shit it to escape from drudgery. To experience something grand something unlike the mundanity of daily life and politics. Be it a fantasy setting like Tolkien or a realistic setting like Dickens. Be the story dark like Poe or light like Dunsany. ALL great literature is relaxing.

People like Melville, Moorcock, and Le Guin are to self-important to appreciate this role the artist plays. Providing food for the soul is not enough for them. They seek power and thus infest their work with pretentious claims of social importance. This is why, despite having talent, their work will always be inferior to their forbearers. A total bigoted loner like Lovecraft loved his fellow man more then Melville. For Lovecraft, some lonely boy saying they loved his work was enough for him. Melville only cares if his fiction causes elites and those with power to listen to him.

>>23412104
Let's see your credentials then. Gaiman and Wolfe's used toilet paper is probably better prose than you've ever dreamed of writing.
Le Guin also famously called Wolfe "our Melville". Multiple people have called him "your favorite author's favorite author".
It takes more than a salty teenager on the internet to degrade any of that.

Ursala Le Guin is the most GOATed sifi author
Ice cold take, I know, but it deserves repeating

i finally bought a book published in the last few years. it's called the house of rust and it won the ursula k le guin prize in 2022. i haven't gotten around to reading it yet because i'm currently reading another book but i've bumped it to the top of my list.

>1800s-1970s
>jules verne
>lord dunsany
>cl moore
>edgar rice burroughs
>robert e howard
>fritz leiber
>jack vance
>alfred bester
>michael moorcock

>70s-90s
>le guin
>gene wolf
>william gibson
>orson scott card
>glen cook
>robin hobb

>00s+
>guy gavriel kay
>rs bakker
>joe abercrombie
>ml wang
>nnedi okorafor
>emma newman
>pierce brown

if you read maybe 200 pages from each of these authors you're mostly caught up on the genre. i would say avoid if you can stuff that is long for the sake of selling more books and building a big world, but it's very hard to avoid.

never read a book to its end if you're bored, skip through, and stick to things around 200-300 pages. there is nothing you can say in 800pages+ you could not have said in 300, brevity is the sign of a good writer. the short story is king ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A ZOOMER READING THIS DONT GET BAITED BY SOMETHING LIKE MALAZAAN

How are Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Wizard of Earthsea for comfy escapism? I just want to not be here and stuff I'm currently reading isn't doing it.

>>23368769
Roadside Picnic
Empire of the East
Dying Earth (Vance)
Book of the New Sun
Excession (Banks)
Blindsight (Watts)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin)
The Night Land (Hodgson)
Last and First Men (Stapleton)
Honorable mentions to:
Peter Hamilton
Alistair Reynolds

>incredibly based list from the old fag desu

>>23363119
I'll go a bit off the beaten path of Tolkein/Lewis and go, for young boys ages 8-12 (or younger if you vet the stuff carefully and read it aloud with your son):
Haggard
Stevenson
Richard Hughes
Kipling
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Baum
Kenneth Grahame
Pullman
Le Guin
That's the stuff I grew up on that I reread and still enjoyed, I think.
As an aside I'm fond of the Little Prince in particular

>>23361553
Le Guin, an atheist, actually writes about people accepting/overcoming their flaws and integrating well into society
Funny how it's atheists who push for kindness and atonement and redemption and not christians

>>23357114
Magic in LOTR is just the grace of god and/or the devil abusing the power god allocated to it
BECAUSE TOLKIEN WAS A CHRISTIAN FFS
You want a magic system that follows rules and stuff like physics go read fantasy by atheist authors like Le Guin

>>23359597
Nobody is going to read it. Even if you were to write catering to /sffg/, not a single one of us will read it.

You can have the ideas of Tolkien, the prose of Bakker, the length of Sanderson, the nuances of Le Guin, the incest.of GRMM, none of us will touch it and call it shit on day one.

>>23351886
>Whereas even Tolkien can ultimately be dismissed as childish stories about elves and wizards, Le Guin was writing about more important things, i.e. sex and gender.
>being sad about having a willy, or wanting to put it in another man's bumhole, is more important than the battle between good and evil
the absolute STATE of this board

>>23351847
I think The Left Hand of Darkness specifically enjoys an elevated position due to its reputation outside of the context of speculative fiction. Whereas even Tolkien can ultimately be dismissed as childish stories about elves and wizards, Le Guin was writing about more important things, i.e. sex and gender. Harold Bloom (who had a massive influence on the tastes of this board for years, though perhaps less now) praised the book and it's also important to the canon of feminist literature.

I read it years ago and didn't enjoy it very much myself, so maybe someone can tell you more specifically why they did, but that's my best guess as to why it would be recommended as the peak of sci-fi, especially by non-scifi types.