Anarchocyclist

although i’ve been neglecting the blog a bit, i’ve been out and about doing lots of other things. one of my goals for my time off was to do a lot of reading, so i thought i’d run through a couple interesting books i’ve read lately.

The Telling, by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve been trying to find more fiction to read lately, and decided to start with Ursula K. Le Guin. Last week i was browsing at Book Warehouse (which is actually a rather small bookstore, although there are several branches around town), and i found a copy of The Telling for cheap. It’s a short book, but very good.

it has a lot of commentary on authoritarian governments. The main character is a woman from earth who goes as an “Observer” to study another planet. She chooses the planet because she’s heard that there’s no gender hierarchy there, and no homophobia….but when she arrives after the long space flight, a science-obsessed fascist government has formed. she sees many parallels between this government and the religious fundamentalists that control the Earth that she left. She devotes her time on this new world to investigating the spirituality and culture that were wiped out to make way for the hyper-rational “March to the Stars” campaign of the fascists.

through the remainder of the book, you see the skill of Le Guin unfold as she presents an interesting look at a non-authoritarian religion and culture, which contrasts the fundamentalists of both stripes. At about 250 pages, it’s a quick read, but i found it very moving and insightful.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Another great sci-fi novel by Le Guin. This one is sorta set in the same universe as The Telling, but it’s not really that connected. In LHoD, a space traveller from Earth goes to the planet Winter to attempt to convince the inhabitants there to join an alliance of planets. He finds that the people there, although still human, are quite different; they’re all androgenous. Most of the time they have no distinguishable sex, but once a month they change to either male or female for a short time, and then back to neutral. There’s no gender hierarchy since anyone could be either male or female this month or the next, but most of the time everyone is neither. With an exciting storyline, Le Guin comments on the problems arising when different cultures attempt to make sense of one another, and also inspires us to think about what social relations would be like if we didn’t have a male-supremacist society here. Beyond that, how would you act if anyone was free to fall in love with anyone else? Or maybe you already act that way ;)

Humans, by Robert J. Sawyer

Humans is the sequel to Hominids, wherein a Neanderthal physicist from an alternate timeline uses a quantum computer to bore a hole (accidentally) into our timeline where neanderthals died out. In this book, we get more of a glimpse into how the neanderthal society works, with emphasis on their constant population, sustainable hunter-gatherer socialist-like economy, buildings grown from trees, etc. Some of their technology is far more developed and other parts less developed than ours, illustrating the idea that “progress” is not a straight line of inevitability. the path of technology is the result of our priorities as a society, and there are many alternatives. There’s also a lot of commentary on gender relations in our society. Neanderthal men don’t hesitate to show their emotions and express empathy with others. Also, everyone in the neanderthal world has both a male partner and a female partner, and they spend different times with each of them. Amusingly, a catholic woman from our universe falls in love with the neanderthal physicist who opened the portal, and gets quite bewildered by the bisexual polyamory going on on the other side.

While i found the book very interesting, just like its prequel, i thought Sawyer is a little too obsessed with hormones and pheromones. Although he doesn’t use them as such, these things are typically used by biological determinists to explain away any bad behaviour by men as “natural” and unchanging. I’d rather see Sawyer focus more on the childrearing practices of the neanderthals, perhaps to show how their social conditioning influences their society. Maybe if men here didn’t physically abuse and humiliate each other as boys and adults, it’d be easier for us to be more peaceful and empathetic like the neanderthal characters.

anyway, i enjoyed all 3 of these books, and i recommend them especially to people who haven’t really enjoyed sci-fi in the past. in the preface to Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin goes on a rant about the purpose of sci-fi, explaining that it shouldn’t be about technology fetish or just picking some technology and extrapolating the most extreme results of it. Rather, it should be a genre for social commentary; Sci-fi should be about the present, not the future. It’s a way of imagining how the world could be, or should be, or shouldn’t be.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 31st, 2005 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Front Page, Politics, gender, stuff to read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.