#(short story by THE uklg)

[aurpiment]

Learning about Boat also makes a lot of science fiction click. Since spaceship is a type of Boat.

#mt #like I knew the radchaai were British-flavored but WOW they are British-flavored. #of course you have purple eyes and teenage officers #and on the other end of the spectrum the Shobies story is a DELIBERATE rejection of naval command structure in SF #she said fuck off these are scientists operating at a level of tech that allows them not to need a big staff of subordinates #these seven people are making decisions by consensus. and they brought their kids to work. #imperial radch #(series by Ann Leckie) #the shobies’ story #(short story by THE uklg)

[omophagias]

thinking once again how much i love the sort of twist in lords and ladies that elves are Little Grey Men (appearance-wise beneath the glamour, and also the association w/crop circles and animal mutilation) because i firmly believe that the vast majority of ufo/lgm sightings and encounters are the exact same phenomena that would have been attributed 200 years earlier to fairies

#.txt #discworld #also honestly imo the best witches book & one of the best discworlds in general #one of my fave uklg short stories is semley's necklace. nothing if not consistent chez emery omophagias

[terramythos]

get to know you better game! answer the questions and tag 9 people you want to know better.

tagged by: @pillowfriendly and @gunkstateuniversity ... woag

last song I listened to: Requiem for My Harlequin by Poets of the Fall. It's stuck in my head big time u_u

currently reading: I juuuuust started The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. I have wanted to read it for a long time so I am stoked to finally do it! I think uklg is one of the smartest writers I've ever had the pleasure to read but have mostly read Earthsea and her short stories. so I'm excited to read her long form science fiction.

currently watching: I've been watching Dimension 20 finally and finished the first Fantasy High season a week or so ago. For more traditional TV shows I watched the first half of Bodies on Netflix with my sibling and am interested to see where the second half goes. It's certainly an interesting and twisty premise with a lot of storytelling stuff I like-- parallel stories and narrators, time travel. Etc

currently obsessed with: I'm always obsessed with ffxiv 😬 other than that I've been playing some Sunless Skies and have been enjoying that. The vibes are excellent even if I crash my train engine into giant leafs and encounter a weird eldritch fabric(?) creature from the mushroom dimension which chases me and screams, killing me instantly

tagging @heywizards @roughentumble @fantasticwolfpenguin @mistressofmuses (for fun lmao), @nonsubstantial @cooldogpics @runsforanime @hashtag-anthems @farewell-persephone and anyone else who wants to 💖

#my posts

[childhoodgrave]

trying to write out like the “stage” for the world in which fritzs story takes place but i feel like im just rambling incoherently. also i stole the usage of the real and unreal frm uklgs short story collection title bc i like how it sounds but they arent set in stone and will change eventually when i come up with some thing else

[theygotlost]

checked out some uklg short stories from da library maybe i will acrually read them who knows

#i still havent returned closing time even though i have next to no desire to keep reading it #i always thinking MAYBE one day i will suddenly wake up and read it again

[uovoc]

maybe A Fisherman of the Inland Sea and Solitude are my favorite UKLG short stories because they deal with the same thing but in opposite directions, one is loneliness as the unstoppable magnetic pull that sends you through time and space to rejoin the people you love, the other is the perfect satisfaction of indestructible solitude. Don't you want to nestle safely with your family in your very own heart of warmth? Don't you want to fuck off to the forest to live by yourself 10 miles from the nearest human? Yes, both, all the time,

#they have the range #ursula le guin

[androgynousblackbox]

Is no one gonna mention the irony of lindsay ellis titling her farewell on patreon "walking away from omelas"? (tldr for anyone who's never read it: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story by UKLG about people in a utopia called omelas, and when they come of age, they realize their lives are perfect because there's a child in omelas who must be tortured their entire lives. So, even though everyone knows about this child when they're adults, they live with it in bliss. few are ever the ones who walk away from omelas.) Because the name alone implies that she's aware she is not one of the people who is suffering because of the real issues (that she's previously dismissed). She just pulled a white woman hissy fit, a la taylor swift's "i'm removing myself from the narrative." So even when she's victimizing herself, she knows she's not really the victim of anything. lool

Can't speak for everyone else but at least on my case I can say I had legit no fucking clue what that meant. I saw that her post was behind a paywall, thought "I am not paying to see that" and fuck off. But now that you explained it it... makes no fucking sense why she would chose that reference for her "goodbye"? It looks to me like there could be only two interpretations: 1. She does know she is not the real worst victim on the whole situation and she is done being the responsible for so much damage caused to other people for her own profit. Who the hell is the person she is damaging on this escenario and that she actually recognizes as the true victim? Why not directly mention them? 2. She considers herself the kid that is being tortured for everyone's benefit, which is such a pretentious, self agradanzing and just fucked up way to see the situation. Like she is not only the victim, she is the ONLY victim ever, the MOST victimest of all and everyone should lament ever using her to fulfill their perfect lives at her expense. I don't fucking know, but it's such a fucking bizarre reference to make at that moment.

[elenajohansenreads]

I have three books left to read in order to finish Mount TBR 2020, and two of them are specific books to finish my 2017 backlog.

I’m starting The Regulators tonight, and the other is the UKLG short story anthology. I could be excited about either of these books--they’re both by favorite authors, even if Stephen King misses with me as often as he hits--but I’m just not. I don’t think I’ve ever been this burned out on reading.

I know why--I always get this way at the end of a calendar year when I’m down to a few specific books for a reading challenge or three, and of course 2020 is the year of Never Enough Dopamine to deal with the amount of existential stress we’re all facing, so of course I’m having a “bad” year for reading. (While I may have finished nearly as many books as a more typical year, without actually crunching the numbers I feel like I’ve both DNF’d a higher percentage, and been an exceptionally harsh rater/reviewer. Once the year is really over and I do crunch the numbers, I expect both of those things to be true.)

I’m more certain than ever that the only formal challenge I should do next year is Mount TBR again--I still do own many unread books, though I’ve made a HUGE dent in that this year by hardly buying any new ones. And I might scale back on that, too, setting it to 100 or 125 instead of 150.

/whining over, I’m just so tired, and reading used to be fun. It will be again, I know, it just isn’t right now.

#booklr #elena rambles #my reading challenges

[roxilalonde]

do you perchance have any book recommendations? im looking for things to read iver the summer and i absolutely adore your writing, so was there any book that particularly inspired you or just books you like in general?

it depends what you like! what i’m reading varies from month to month, but most recently i’ve been enjoying Glass, Irony, and God, a book of poetry/analysis by Anne Carson (who is also a classicist and great writer, i totally rec the rest of her stuff), and Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. i’ve also been rereading the Twilight novels, but that’s more of a critical exercise than anything else, since they’re a lot of fun to critique but really nothing i’d recommend for pleasure reading or quality lit in general.

i’m bad at analyzing my own writing, so i wish i could be more helpful when it comes to recommending stuff that resembles mine (although i’m really flattered!) generally, i consider Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Ursula K. Le Guin to be writing role models, and anything by them comes with a blanket stamp of approval from me. particular favorites include Good Omens (NG & PT’s collab novel), Neverwhere (NG), the Discworld series (PT, any novel by itself is fine, but Hogfather is one of the funniest) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (UKLG, a short story), and Left Hand of Darkness (UKLG). i’ve heard good things about The Ocean at the End of the Lane (NG), but i haven’t read it personally. 

i hope you find something you like!

#and thank you so much! <3 #Anonymous

[desertedvault]

I have that UKLG short story collection... read a bit of it but I really need to read Winter’s King, The Day Before the Revolution and of course Omelas

[terramythos]

It is so fucking funny to me that uklg made "some humans are dragons actually/they are maybe the same thing" a plot point of the very first Earthsea short story from like. The 1950s. Referenced it if you squint and really stretch the definition of "reference" like ONCE in Tombs of Atuan. Slept on it as a canon thing for FORTY YEARS. Then made it surprise relevant again in Tehanu as a plot twist near the end. 10/10 worldbuilding no notes

[terramythos]

Re: uklg there was something intensely comforting about reading a short story she wrote in the 90s/00s that had actual neopronouns in it treated entirely seriously. Also a character who starts the story as a woman and ends the story as a man, tho I know this was a re-visit of the people from The Left Hand of Darkness, which was from the fucking 60s. Like. MAN.

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2020

#173 - The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Mount TBR: 150/150

Rating: 3/5 stars

I generally liked the "unreal" stories and generally disliked the "real" stories. I don't think Le Guin is at her best when trying to stick too closely the real world--I've always enjoyed how she combines SF/F elements and her anthropological bent on writing to examine humanity through the "unreal."

The notable exception in Part I of the anthology was "The Diary of the Rose," which I loved. Other favorites: "The Fliers of Gy," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and "The Author of the Acacia Seeds," which might be my new favorite UKLG short story of them all, and unlike "Omelas," one I'd never heard of prior to reading this collection.

So why didn't I like most of the stories I didn't like? The Orsinian tales at the beginning were dour and stereotypically bland to me--they read like Orsinia was a predictable extension of Western thoughts on Eastern European countries, but without anything new or interesting to differentiate their fictional culture from its real-world counterparts. That bleak tone also cropped up in several other stories, and I didn't care for it. Another reason was that many of the shortest stories didn't go anywhere, didn't have much in the way of plot, and/or didn't feel done when they were suddenly over. I was reminded too often of that "what the heck" feeling I got earlier this year reading Cloud Atlas when the first chunk of narrative cuts off abruptly mid-sentence, because some of these stories felt similarly truncated and incomplete.

In a career so long and varied, I'm not going to like everything by even one of my all-time favorite authors, so I'm not particularly heartbroken, only mildly disappointed. And it's possible, even likely, that coming back to some of these stories in a few years will change my perspective and make me appreciate them more, because I've found rereading her work to be valuable in the past. But overall, and right now, there seem to be as many misses as hits in this collection.

#booklr #book review #the unreal and the real #anthology #Ursula K. Le Guin #favorite authors #book photography #my photos #my reading challenges