“It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness(viafirstfullmoon)
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
—
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.
“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”
Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always
“We mourn the incomparable Ursula Le Guin, and it hurts. A writer of intense ethical seriousness and intelligence, of wit and fury, of radical politics, of subtlety, of freedom and yearning, Le Guin was a literary colossus.” - C.M.
“Those who see science fiction simply as a way of writing novels welcome the more Tolstoyan approach, in which a war is described not only from the generals’ point of view but also through the eyes of housewives, prisoners, boys of sixteen, or an alien visitation is described not only by knowledgeable scientists but also by its effects on commonplace people.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“It’s just as good as I thought it was going to be, if not better … the variety is tremendous, exhilarating. The book definitely won’t do that short-story-collection thing to you where all the stories run together into a sort of depressing porridge in your mind.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“We can’t call Ursula K. Le Guin back from the land of the unchanging stars, but happily she left us her multifaceted work, her hard-earned wisdom and her fundamental optimism. Her sane, smart, crafty and lyrical voice is more necessary now than ever. For it, and for her, we should be thankful.” - M.A.
“There is one thing I wish I could have told her, although she probably knew: that she has hundreds of daughters. All those teenage girls who also found her books in local bookstores or libraries and grew up to become writers. She taught them that women could write about other planets and political philosophy, with clarity, profundity, and grace. She gave each of us a little bit of her voice, and we are all better writers and human beings because of it.” - T.G.
“Ursula LeGuin was my first science fiction inspiration as a kid and she continued to inspire me throughout my adult life. Her stories are permanently installed in my mind.” - A.N.
“This was a subtle gift that Le Guin gave to a young person wanting to be a writer—the idea that there was more to writing fiction than ticking off plot points, that a rewarding story can be told without overt conflict, and that a world wide and deep can be its own reward, for those building the world and those who then walk through it.” - J.S.
“Whereas all my beloved P G Wodehouses and Philip Pullmans are neatly arranged on the bookshelves, my Pratchetts are strewn under the beds, in the bathrooms, the glove compartments. They have shopping lists, takeaway orders and Scrabble scores scribbled on the fly leaves. They were part of life.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Kelly Link has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as a “National Treasure”. If you don’t already know Kelly’s work, start here with her debut collection.
“She is willing to change the landscape of your head with her ideas and there’s such power in that. It is the power of … that things could be different.” - N.G.
“She’s a cornerstone of speculative fiction, and so much of our best storytelling traces its roots back to her. The more I write, and the more I think about fictional politics and societies, the more I find myself in awe of her singular powers. Nobody else can ever equal Le Guin, but many of us will spend our whole careers striving to build on her incredible legacy.” - C.J.A.
“And what a surprise it was to find as I grew up that the author of some of my favorite childhood fantasy novels was also a brilliant essayist, enlightened political commentator, a champion of feminism, and an activist for a more inclusive publishing industry. A true example of an artist who, both through her books and activism, changed the world for the better.” - J.K.
“It inspires me with pity, with terror, with awe at the mystery of human destiny, and the mystery of the art that can, for a moment, illuminate it.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“Of course if you haven’t read Kavalier and Clay yet, go read it at once, what on earth have you been waiting for? Then read this. It is even a little crazier, maybe. Crazy like a genius.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“I think she did a lot for science fiction and fantasy—not just for women and women’s roles because of her feminism but also legitimizing us as an art form. There are a lot of people who will read an Ursula Le Guin book and go, ‘Well, this isn’t science fiction, it’s literature.’ But of course, it is science fiction. A lot of times, she can be a gateway drug for people.” - M.R.K.
“More than anyone else, Le Guin showed me how to write SFF with an anthropological approach while interrogating the colonialist agenda and assumptions of the field itself. More than any writer of her stature, she constructed worlds in which I thought I could find and lose myself. I will miss her dearly.” - K.L.
“I’d definitely still be a writer if not for her, but I don’t think I’d be as good a writer. Le Guin is one of the writers who taught me that beauty and fearlessness go hand in hand.“ - N.K.J.
happy pride reccing some anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist books and texts
BOOKS
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2012)
“Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?“
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.
Transgender Warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (1996)
[Leslie Feinberg’s] book celebrated the resistance to transphobia and a vision of trans liberation articulated from the perspective of class struggle. It understood that no liberation from transphobia or any of the divisive and violent oppressions in class society is possible without the transformation of capitalism into socialism.
Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep. The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman (2010)
Today’s transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.
Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran (2004)
Made In India explores the making of "queer” and “heterosexual” consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism.
That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2008)
As the growing gay mainstream prioritises the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance or cultural value.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021)
Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and “climate fatalism” outside it.
On Connection by Kae Tempest (2020)
On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davies (2003)
If you know anything about Angela Davis—anti-racist activist, Marxist-feminist scholar—you know that her answer to the question posed in the title is “Yes.” This is a short primer on the prison abolition movement
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world.
Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson (1983)
Influenced by many African American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye (2021)
[Shon Faye] provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.
Burn The Binary: selected writings on the politics of being trans, genderqueer, and non-binary by Riki Wilchins (2017)
This single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected, from “Where Have All the Butches Gone,” to “Attack of the 6-Foot Intersex People”
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
“This brings us to the third problem with eschatological framings of the climate crisis: they overlook the fact that for many, the end of the world has already happened. In October last year, Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman, mother and leader, wrote a desperate letter to the western world reminding us that for Indigenous peoples, “the fires are raging still”.”
MISC
Manifesto: An Aromantic Manifesto by yingchen and yingtong
There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets. So many chairs so that no one is without one.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by scholars and philosophers, as considering happiness as a something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the sin of the artist: a refusal to admit that evil is dull and pain is boring.”
— Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Dedicated to Ursula K Le Guin, 21 October 1929 - 22 January 2018
I’m both extremely happy and extremely sad to be posting this episode. Happy because it’s such a huge milestone: the last Ribbon of chapter 3, and the final part of the first volume, which I’ll be collecting in print later this year.
Sad because Ursula K Le Guin, the author who I love the most, and whose work inspired me to create The Firelight Isle, passed away today.
I hope, if even for a fleeting moment, The Firelight Isle can move you as deeply as her work has moved me.
“People are always telling you that “we have always done thus,” and then you find that their “always” means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips, compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have “always” done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice…”
In my junior college creative writing class, we read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. I had read it before, years ago, and knew the shape of it, but at 20 I knew a bit more about hard choices and dark places and the difference between Doing What’s Right and Doing What’s Easy than I did at 9. So it hit me anew.
Even now, every time I read it, it hits me anew.
The professor was a man perhaps a little too satisfied with himself in the way fundamentally insecure people are. He was unhappy in his marriage, in a vague sort of way, and he insisted we call him Doc, presumably to remind us that he was both Cool (not stuffy like those other professors) and Better Than Us (he had a PhD). He was so on point as a middle aged English professor stereotype you would almost think it was on purpose.
In class, we eventually got to the discussion question you always do with Omelas:
What would you do?
The professor indicated he would not leave, and professed doubt that anyone really would.
I remember being mildly aghast that anyone would say they’d stay, that anyone would choose personal comfort at the cost of someone else’s blatant and obvious suffering. Firm in my knowledge of Right and Wrong and perhaps a little self-righteous, I declared that I would leave. Immediately.
“Would you really?” he asked, patronizing and amused at my naiveté.
“Yes!” I said. “If that was all it boiled down to? If it was really that simple? Yes! Of course I would leave!”
The discussion moved on, and I never trusted that professor’s opinion on anything again, because men who patronize young activist women ought to be eaten by hyenas but apparently feeding them to hyenas is illegal or something. But the conversation stayed with me. If that was all it boiled down to
If it was really that simple
Outside of the story, it is not that simple. I know too much about globalization and privileging profits over people on the one hand and the difficulty of setting up a working self-sufficient commune farm on the other to believe that realistically I could walk away from this society. I know too much about the history of this country, soaked in blood and writhing with unacknowledged hypocrisy, to ever be comfortable with staying.
My professor, I think, tried to make the story complicated, to make us students examine the dark and selfish parts that must be lurking just below our surface. But the beauty of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is that it is not complicated. It is simple.
When you realize Omelas rests on the unloved child, do you stay, or do you go?
The beauty of Omelas is that it winnows your choices down to this:
When faced with a society built on the suffering of fellow human beings, do you accept it, or do you do something?
In the world of the story, what you can do is walk away. Decide you will not be complicit to this anymore. Realize that comfort is not happiness, joy resting on the suffering of others is hollow, and a utopia without justice is no utopia at all. Walk away.
In the world I live in, the country I live in, I cannot walk away. There is nowhere to walk to. Everything is intertwined. Walking away is not a choice I have.
