A Definitive Ranking of the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

Note: I wrote this for the B&N SciFi & Fantasy blog in 2018 and it was one of my favorite pieces I wrote for them. They’ve inexplicably taken it down, so I’m putting it back up.

I’ve long referred to Ursula K. Le Guin my literary grandmother, a polestar of my understanding of fiction, fantasy, and the world itself. When I learned of her death earlier this year, I sat down and cried. Even though she passed at the respectable age of 88, I cried long, wracking tears. She is the writer I found at that specific age when I wasn’t so young that I barnacled and burnished her fiction with the obscuring mist of nostalgia, nor was I too weary and worldly to be above young adult books like A Wizard of Earthsea. Indeed, her work has kept me from succumbing to the fallacy that I will ever be too important to read books about that terrifying time between childhood and the adult world.

If you have read an Ursula K. Le Guin novel, likely it is A Wizard of Earthsea, or perhaps The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. But she wrote so many more books than those. She wasn’t as prolific as some science fiction and fantasy authors, but she filled a career of five decades with remarkable works that will long outlive her. Though weighing one book against another is always a personal process—and so many of Le Guin’s books are so, so personal to me—still I have endeavored below to place them in an order that makes a kind of emotional sense. It does to me, anyway. Hopefully to you too. Regardless, Le Guin’s body of work is a well that will sustain you, if you only drink from it. So drink. Drink long, and drink deep.

And so, from merely worthwhile to the most essential: a ranking of the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else
This slender young adult novel, written in 1976, doesn’t have anything wrong with it exactly, but it sure hasn’t aged well in the intervening 40-odd years. Owen Griffiths is a misunderstood teen—too smart, too weird, too short. He’s made peace with his differences, much to the chagrin and disappointment of his crushingly normal parents, and is working doggedly toward attending either Cal Tech or MIT. He’s going to get out of this town, this life, this normalcy. But he’s still a teenage boy, and when he strikes up a friendship, and then something more than friendship with his neighbor, Natalie Fields, he’s got to deal with the both completely usual and totally disordering effects of young love. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is a very sweet novel, with some bright patches of keen observation. Unfortunately, it feels so dated now as to read like a period piece, something like the (pun so intended) menstrual belts in Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret? but without the more relatable aspects of that novel.

Rocannon’s World
I have a fair amount of affection for this, Le Guin’s first published novel, but even I can admit it’s a mess. It was written as a postscript to the short story, “Semley’s Necklace,” which detailed and dispatched a fairly simple SFnal scenario involving both first contact and the time dilation effects of interstellar travel. After the events of “Semley’s Necklace,” the Hainish ethnologist Rocannon returns to her planet, and meets no less than four sentient species in his quest. There are flying mounts who must look like lions with wings, bestial creatures who look like angels, people who live underground like trolls, medieval-ish societies, and so, so much more packed into this short novel. Like I said, a mess. But it’s here Le Guin coined the term ansible—a device capable of instantaneous communication across the galactic void—and introduced us to the Hainish, the far-ranging culture we encounter in many of her novels. The ansible will become the lynch pin in her Hainish books, one of her broadest and most important canvasses.

City of Illusions
Another early Hainish novel, City of Illusions is the third published in that series. Its main character is a descendant of the people of Planet of Exile, but generations hence, on an Earth (or Terra, if you will) taken over and controlled by an alien protagonist called the Shing. Falk wakes up with no memories in a small, rural community of occupied Terra. Through his questing, his memories of his other self, Agad Ramarren, are recovered, and his Falk-self subsumed, until both can come to an equilibrium. Like Rocannon’s World, City of Illusions is pretty messy, with philosophy of the mind wrestling with the precepts of Taoism in a classic dystopia. The Lathe of Heaven ended up exploring these themes much more adroitly. That said, the descriptions of an earth re-growing after an apocalypse in a distant past are beautiful in their strange way, a post-apocalyptic pastoral.

The Beginning Place
The Beginning Place is another early oddment, about two young people somewhere in that liminal period between childhood and adulthood. Irene Pannis and Hugh Rogers both have small, mean lives in an unnamed American city. Both begin escaping to idyllic Tembreabrezi, a Narnian fantasy land. Irene has been coming to Tembreabrezi long enough to learn the language and culture, and initially views Hugh as an interloper. When a sickness of fear strikes the simple folk of this other land, Hugh and Irene set out together on an old-fashioned quest to kill the beast, which stands in harsh contrast with the intractable problems of their real lives; if only rent could be slain like a dragon. Sometimes people read escapist fiction because they have something to escape from. Le Guin twists escapism and realism in The Beginning Place, which is an uncomfortable thing to do.

Planet of Exile
During my research, I learned that Planet of Exile was often published together in something called the tête-bêche format with a Thomas A. Disch novel. (Now that’s something you know!) Planet of Exile follows Terran settlers on a planet called Werel. Werel has an orbital period of 60 Earth years, which means its winter lasts something like 15 of our years. (George Martin, eat your heart out.) We’re introduced to our Terran colonists at the beginning of this long winter, as they try semi-successfully to integrate into the indigenous population. While both the Werelians and Terrans appear to be descendants of Hainish settlers, there’s been too much genetic deviation, and the two populations can’t intermingle successfully. Planet of Exile both critiques and props up the anthropological model of contact with indigenous people. Because of Le Guin’s upbringing as the child of famous anthropologists, this is a concern that resonates through much of her work.

The Telling
I feel like a jerk for listing so many of Le Guin’s Hainish novels in the bottom dozen of this list, but the Hainish novels constitute a huge part of her catalog, so maybe it’s just statistics. Despite the tenuous threads linking one Hainish novel to another, most of them feel standalone, and Le Guin never did much fuss with strict continuity. That said, The Telling feels apart from the the other Hainish novels, off in an eddy. Sutty, an Anglo-Indian Ekumen observer, is sent to the planet of Aka. Aka’s indigenous cultural expression is called the Telling, which, like the Tao or Confucianism, is a practice more than a religion, a folklore more than a mythology, but nevertheless deeply ingrained. The autocracy of Aka has outlawed the Telling, and Sutty dodges her government minder while trying to immerse herself in this forbidden lore.

Voices
Voices is the second novel in The Annals of the Western Shore, one of Le Guin’s young adult series. The novel follows Memer, who lives in the city Ansul. Ansul is an occupied city, and Memer herself is a “siege brat,” the daughter of an Ald soldier who raped her mother early in the Ald’s conquest of the city. Like all of the Western Shore novels, Voices takes on very serious issues, especially for a book ostensibly aimed at the young adult. (But then Le Guin never viewed writing for the young as a lesser form of writing, or watered down writing for adults.) Le Guin does not vilify the occupying Ald, nor romanticize the people of Ansul overmuch; this is not a simple tale of overlords and resistance written in black and white. She deals quite seriously with the conflict between a monotheistic society and a polytheistic one, and the inequities of a society both broken and built by violence. Still, there is something arm’s length about Voices. I feel like it is better considered than felt, more structural than emotional. Certainly, a reader with other predilections might sort this novel higher, but for me, I feel like the other novels in the series strike a better balance between heart and head.

The Word for World Is Forest
The Word for World Is Forest is the closest thing to a polemic Le Guin ever wrote. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, it is set on forest world of Athshe, which has been colonized by the resource-hungry Terra. (Terra is Earth; this is another Hainish novel.) The indigenous people of Athshe have been enslaved to help the Terrans deforest their world. Athsheans practice something like lucid dreaming, but on a collective scale: they all dream together. When the Athshean Selver’s wife is raped and murdered by a colonial commander named Davidson, he wakes up, in a sense, learning to resist the Terran conquerors, sometimes by violence. He tells Davidson at one point that Davidson has given him the gift of murder. (When James Cameron’s Avatar was released, the comparisons with The Word for World is Forest were inescapable.) In this novel, Le Guin’s anger is very close to the surface: for the cruelty of colonization, the pillaging of the natural world, the treatment of people as resources.

The Eye of the Heron
The Eye of the Heron follows the conflict between two groups of Terran settlers on an otherwise unpeopled world. One group is the descendants of a penal colony, and the other the children of pacifist political dissenters. The pacifists, who are largely farmers, are planning on starting another farming community further inland. The other group, who see themselves as the oligarchical rulers of the planet, are unwilling to let people they see as subject go. The Eye of the Heron feels very shocking because (spoiler) halfway through, the pacifists’ hero figure is dead in the street, killed by oligarchs. Le Guin wrote later about this death:

“While I was writing The Eye of the Heron in 1977, the hero insisted on destroying himself before the middle of the book. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that, you’re the hero. Where’s my book?” I stopped writing. The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women. […] It taught me that I didn’t have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman, and feel liberated in doing so.”

Le Guin is rightly lauded as a feminist writer who wrote sensitively about gender, but her career started way back when; her early novels were written back before women were invented (to use Le Guin’s own comic phrasing on the matter). The Eye of the Heron is a turning point for her, opening up the narrative possibilities of writing about the concerns of women. It also touches on themes, like the practice of non-violence, that will come to full fruition in her most influential works, novels like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Searoad
Searoad is one of three short story collections I’ve included in this ranking, as I believe they constitute a novel-in-stories: shorter narratives tied so tightly thematically or geographically (or both) that they read like a novel. Like Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, which is an early exemplar of this form, Searoad takes place in a single locale: the fictional seaside town of Klatsand, Oregon. The stories largely focus on the lives of women in this tourist economy, and involve multiple generations of the town’s citizens over decades. Though Le Guin is primarily known as an SFF writer, Searoad is one of many of her fictions that defy that label. My favorite story here is about the proprietor of a run-down motel who naps in the unoccupied rooms, sleeping away the time she always means to use improving the property. Her inadvertent eavesdropping on a young man sobbing out an unknown grief in an adjoining room completely slayed me. This may give you an indication of how melancholic and glancing these stories are, focused so keenly on the everyday, but dreaming larger.

Powers
Even though Powers was awarded the Nebula (which is, along with the Hugo, one of the two most prestigious SFF awards in the States) for best novel in 2009, I don’t think it’s the best of the three novels in The Annals of the Western Shore. (That was a weird year for the Nebula; despite the establishment of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult novels two years prior, two of the six nominated works for best novel were young adult novels: Powers, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.) Powers follows Gavir, a young man and slave who is trained to be teacher and tutor to the noble family who owns him. His upbringing is quiet and insulated, almost bucolic; his owners are “the good kind” (never mind that there is no good kind of slaver). It is only after the brutal murder of one of his fellow slaves that he understands the true parameters of his inequity. He escapes to a hard wandering in the wilderness. Powers tackles necessary and vital themes, and Le Guin is as the height of her powers as a wordsmith.

The Farthest Shore
The Farthest Shore is the third in the original trilogy of Earthsea novels Le Guin wrote, one after the other, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They are all set on an archipelago of islands in a vast, uncharted sea, in a place with magic, dragons, and wizards. Each novel at least touches on the life of Ged, who becomes the arch-mage of all of Earthsea, though he’s not always the protagonist. Earthsea is a place with a word-magic, where if you can speak the true name of a thing, you can influence that thing. At the beginning of The Farthest Shore, there’s a malaise on Earthsea: not only is magic faltering, but even non-magical crafts are suddenly forgotten, even by the most adept. The archmage Ged leaves his seat of power on Roke Island, and travels with a minor prince, Arren, who came to Roke first to plead for his people in these devastating times. Magic in Earthsea is dying because a sorcerer has sought to kill death and become immortal. This throws off the entire equilibrium of islands, one Ged and the boy who will be king must reestablish. The Farthest Shore is a beautiful and fitting conclusion of the original Earthsea trilogy. It is also so, so sad.

Lavinia
Lavinia is something of an oddity in Le Guin’s career. It can’t rightly be called fantasy or science fiction. It’s not one of her Orsinian Tales either, set in a central European country of her own devising, but nevertheless in a recognizable European history. Lavinia is fairy tale, of sorts, but grounded in the prosaic; a story of a simple life lived in the margins of epic poetry and the national founding myth. Lavinia is the story of Aeneas’ second wife, a princess of Latinum, with whom he was prophesied to start an empire. In Virgil’s Aeneid, she doesn’t utter a word. In that lacuna, Le Guin tells the story of a devout daughter of her homeland, married off to a warlord. But Lavinia’s marriage to the scarred Aeneas, hero of the Trojan war, is strangely soft and tender, and so much more sweet for its brevity. I’m not ashamed to admit I burst into tears at the end of this novel, though I couldn’t tell you rightly why. There’s a slip there, in the end, from the lived life to the mythic, and so much is both lost and gained in that transmutation. Lavinia is a strange novel, to be sure, with a sense of day to day life that’s often missing from myth, even while it stretches its dark wings and soars into the mythopoeic.

Malafrena
Malafrena is the only novel-length narrative in Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, which take place in an invented central European country over the last century and a half. (The name of the country, Orsinia, is something of a joke: Le Guin’s first name, Ursula, means bear, and Orsinia takes its name from the same word roots; it is Le Guin’s own country.) Malafrena follows Itale Sorde from his bucolic beginnings on the eponymous lake Malafrena, out into revolutionary politics of the capital, and then back again to his humble beginnings. “True journey is return,” she wrote in contemporaneous journals. When the Library of America sought to publish Le Guin’s works—a serious literary honor—they began with her Orsinian stories, at her behest. To me, Malafrena feels old school, like an expert ventriloquism of late 19th Century and early Modernist novels, from its concerns to its historical situation. It’s good, but it’s not good in the ways Le Guin is good when she’s writing in the worlds she creates herself. It’s funny that a country she named for herself doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in her voice.

Gifts
Gifts is the first of The Annals of the Western Shore. The novel follows two young people, Gry and Orrec, who live in an insular and somewhat backward region, the kind of place where grudges are nursed for generations against neighbors. The family groups in the area also have hereditary powers, which are exulted. Orrec is blindfolded at the fairly late adolescent discovery of his gift, forced to live without his sight, due to his father’s insistence that his wild gift of “unmaking” is simply too lethal to allow. That this wild gift coincidentally aligns with his father’s petty concerns that Orrec has dangerous gifts (or is known to have dangerous gifts) is well more important than Orrec’s sight. Gry is the daughter of a neighboring hold with which Orrec’s family is often violently feuding; her gifts involve a communication with animals, one she refuses to use for hunting, to the irritation of her people. Orrec and Gry come of age in a small, mean, vituperative community, and struggle to live with gifts that seem like anything but. Their relationship is tense and sweet, both difficult and easy, and their rough world is richly drawn.

Four Ways to Forgiveness
Four Ways to Forgiveness is written as four interlinking novellas that concern the planets of Werel and Yeowe. (The planet that is the setting for Planet of Exile and City of Illusion is also called Werel, but they are not the same place; Le Guin simply forgot she’d already used the name in novels written decades previous.) The largest government on Werel, Voe Deo, practices a form of chattel slavery, even into an industrial revolution where the slaves become known as “assets”, leased out to the factories. Voe Deo also uses its slave population to colonize the otherwise uninhabited planet of Yeowe. The stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness largely center on the period when Yeowe began its fight for independence (and the larger abolition of slavery) and the period directly after, when the people of both Werel and Yeowe have to learn how to live without slavery. Though there’s something hopeful about these narratives—they are “ways to forgiveness” in the end—these are uneasy stories about deeply traumatized people. It’s a way to forgiveness, but not the end.

The Other Wind
The Other Wind is the last of the Earthsea stories. The first three, written altogether in the late ’60s and early ’70s, share a certain narrative unity. Le Guin returned to Earthsea in the 1990s with Tehanu, which she called, at the time, the “last book of Earthsea.” As it turns out, Earthsea wasn’t done with her, and she wrote two more books in the world: Tales from Earthsea, a collection of short stories that deepens the lore of the history of magic, and The Other Wind. The Other Wind comes to terms with and explodes a number of fantasy conventions. A simple man named Alder, who is adept at mending, is visited by his late wife in dream. She seeks to tear down the wall between the living and the dead in his dreams, but in ways that seem to alter his living life. He seeks out the former archmage, Ged, who poured out his power in The Farthest Shore, and is now just a man, and Lebannen, who is now king. Like most of the Earthsea stories, The Other Wind is story of a journey, both on the water, and into the self.

Guardian review written at the time of its publication said it best: “Gradually, in a masterpiece of chilling narration, the whole living world becomes unable to sleep. And to fix that, the world has to become like our own, to become like our un-magical selves: to grow up.” The Other Wind is a strange, sad, melancholic narrative about childhood’s end, and the exhilarating possibilities of death’s revival. It’s a young adult novel that drops the young, which hurts an exhilarates as much as that always does.

Changing Planes
Changing Planes is another novel-in-stories, where a collection of shorter stories feels like a novel. Changing Planes feels especially novel-esque because it’s a frame narrative, where an introductory story is told to set the stage for other stories that exist somehow within that framing device. (A widely known frame narrative, one that many of us encountered in middle school, is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the folk on a pilgrimage in 14th C. England tell each other stories.) The frame in Changing Planes is based on a pun in the story “Sita Dulip’s Method.” Sita discovers that the boredom, discomfort, and low grade anxiety produced by the forced inactivity when you’re changing planes (or otherwise stuck in waiting rooms) can cause a person to change planes of reality. A myriad of other worlds open up to the casual traveler. Some of the stories about these other worlds are in the vein of ethnographic studies; others are deeper dives into lives lived. Every world Le Guin details in this collection could easily be a stage for an entire novel, or series of novels. Instead, she gives us this this almost casually masterful collection of thought experiments and cool ideas, a waiting room that opens to a larger world of imagination.

Always Coming Home
It’s generally true that when an author writes about their hometown, what they end up saying has a strange, hard to define depth. Though Le Guin is strongly associated, as a writer, with the Pacific Northwest—she made her home both fictionally and in reality in the temperate rainforests of Oregon—she’s a California girl, born and raised. (Fun fact: Le Guin and Philip K. Dick both graduated from Berkeley high school in 1947, though they never interacted.) The setting of Always Coming Home is a California peopled by the peaceable Kesh, who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” The first half follows Stone Telling, a daughter of a Kesh mother and a father from the more rigid, expansionist Dayao. The second half is the field journal of an ethnographer called Pandora who describes the culture of the Kesh through poems, stories, recipes, site maps, and even music. (Some early editions included a cassette tape of this music in a box set.) As befits the strange future/past tense of the novel, this California feels like a post-apocalyptic pastoral, taking place generations past modernity in a place aware of such a thing, but not beholden to it; modern America is just another set of folk stories.

Many years ago I had a conversation with a fellow Ursine devotee, and he called Always Coming Home her most deeply felt work. I was surprised by that at the time; this is not a novel one sinks into. I have since come to understand what he meant, and wholeheartedly agree. The sense of retrospective—the way both halves of the novel turn back to consider a childhood (in Stone Telling’s narrative) and the larger cultural milieu (in Pandora’s notes)—feels like Le Guin considering her own childhood using the cultural tools she learned during that childhood. Her parents were both well-regarded anthropologists, and there are strong similarities between the Kesh and the Native American myths and history recorded by her parents. Her childhood, and its Northern California setting, therefore exist in a half-place, something like a mythic past that that nonetheless tells tales of contemporary America. It is considered at something closer than arm’s length, and further than memoir. Always Coming Home doesn’t hew to anything like a traditional narrative structure; it is more like the cultural detritus we all haul with us out of our home towns, laid out with the most careful hand.

Tehanu
The three original Earthsea novels are the kind of young adult stories at which fantasy literature excels, set in a pre-industrial place where people have all the trouble of growing up, without all the ornament of modern life to molder and grow dated as the fiction ages. Two decades later, Le Guin returned to Earthsea, and found it changed, as she had changed as a writer. Tehanu finds Tenar, the once child priestess from The Tombs of Atuan, now living a quiet life as a solitary grandmother on Gont, the childhood home of the archmage Ged. Tenar has taken in the child Therru, who was sexually assaulted and nearly burned to death by her father and the vagabond band she was born into. Therru is treated as bad luck and bad omen: the lore of Gont maintains that the damaged deserve their bad luck; that is how they came to be damaged. Worse, bad luck can be catching.

Tenar and Therru travel to see the wizard Ogion on his deathbed, and there intersect with Ged, once archmage, who has poured his power out to seal the breach between life and death in The Farthest Shore. Ged and Tenar renew their acquaintance, which was begun so, so long ago, and deepens to something more. Ged is deeply traumatized by the loss of his powers, and Tenar gives him room to grieve. All of the principle characters of Tehanu are hurt in some way, struggling to rebuild lives that have been burnt to ashes. The ending, where Tenar, Ged, and the child Therru must confront the violence that has so changed their lives, is exultant: a beautiful, burning awaking of Therru’s true nature. Tehanu doesn’t feel much like a young adult novel—it’s too grim, and too violent in places—but its earnest, heartfelt, and soaring portraiture of a burned child coming into her fiery power feels like a necessary tale for both the young and the old.

The Left Hand of Darkness
Published first in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness was a stunning novel at the time. Genly Ai, an envoy for a loose galactic confederation called the Ekumen, is sent to the icy planet of Gethen as something between an ambassador and an anthropologist. The people on Gethen are ambisexual: at their times of sexual fertility, their bodies shift to one sex or the other, but otherwise they have no fixed sex. They are unique in the known worlds in this way. Genly Ai’s primary relationship is with Estraven, the prime minister of the constitutional monarchy of Karhide, the country that Genly is embedded within. Interstellar travel and the concept of extra-Gethenian humans seem unbelievable to the Gethenians; Genly is seen as either a slightly mad curiosity or a dangerous disruption. Due to Genly’s Terran ideas of masculinity, his distrust of Estraven’s mercurial sexuality, and his misunderstanding of the cultural practice of shifgrethor (which is something like a code of conduct more instinctual than codified), his sojourn in Karhide is near-disastrous. Estraven makes very real sacrifices for Genly in their halting, political, and personal relationship, one colored by both the conflict of empires and the simple mis/understanding of two people. Ultimately, the other envoys from the Ekumen kept in stasis above the planet are allowed to awaken and speak for the Ekumen’s goals.

In the intervening decades, aspects of The Left Hand of Darkness have become antiquated or essentialist—Le Guin herself first somewhat defensively justified her use of the default pronoun “he” for all Gethenians, but later acknowledged that “he” need not be the default. Overall, the ways the novel grounds itself in character study keeps it from being a period piece, read for its important contribution to SFF, and not because it’s a relatable novel. When the members of the Ekumenical team touch down on Gethen, their binary sexuality seems so remarkable to Genly, who has spend the whole novel struggling with Gethenian ambisexuality. Le Guin does such a good job of immersing you (and Genly) in fluid sexuality of the Gethenians that the intrusion, at the end, of people who embody a sexual binary seems truly strange.

The Dispossessed
Le Guin’s Hainish novels are all bound together by a specific technology (a plot device, if you will): the ansible, an invention that allows instantaneous communication across interstellar distance. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia tells the story of the ansible’s invention, by the physicist Shevek. The novel also, as its subtitle indicates, takes on the interactions of various political systems. The setting is the planet Urras and its colonized moon, Anarres. The people of Annares are anarcho-syndicalist dissenters from one of the countries of Urras, having colonized the moon two centuries previous. They are largely perceived as naive dreamers by the various political factions and countries of their planet of origin, which is belied by the incredibly harsh conditions on Anarres. You have to be tough to survive life on the colonized moon.

In chapters that shift back and forth in time, the novel follows Shevek through his childhood and education on Anarres. When he runs afoul of political dogma in his scientific work on Anarres, Shevek travels to a university on Urras to further his study. His experience of the traditionalist, capitalist society he encounters on Urras is tragicomic at times—there’s a depiction of a faculty party where Shevek is several leagues out of his depth which would not be out of place in a campus novel. Although the university on Urras allows him to complete his General Temporal Theory (which provides the theoretical framework for the invention of the ansible) the political structure and society of Urras is repellent to Shevek. The novel is a story in ironies and dialectics: the scientist who could only be produced by this society, but could only complete his life’s work in that. The interactions between the various countries, societies, factions, and parties of the populations on Urras and Anarres are a direct refutation of the skiffy trope of The Planet of Hats, where fictional worlds resolve to the most simplistic economies; I find it difficult to encapsulate all the political maneuvering in the story of Shevek’s great invention. But The Dispossessed is also the story of a single person. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, the focus on the personal grounds a novel of ideas into bedrock.

The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven tells the story of George Orr, a young man who is plagued by what he calls “effective dreams,” or dreams that change the nature of reality itself to conform to the dreamscape. George is the only one who is aware of these changes. He’s remanded to the psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber, due to his abuse of drugs to try to stave off the effective dreams. Haber begins tinkering with Orr’s effective dreams, trying to improve reality through his manipulations of Orr’s dreamscape. This results in escalating dystopias. When Haber pushes Orr to dream of a solution to world overpopulation, a plague kills billions. When he tries for a world without racial strife, everyone turns grey, and Orr’s social worker, friend, and sometimes paramour, Heather, who is biracial, ceases to exist. Like a series of wishes in folklore, each effective dream seeks to solve the problem of the last wish, but then creates another.

The Lathe of Heaven is a beautifully written novel, an almost perfect example of Le Guin’s compact and insightful prose. She never much went in for poetic prose or the extended metaphor —her observations tend to be grounded very closely in material culture. The Lathe of Heaven opens with the metaphor of a jellyfish: “Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.” This image pops up again and again, a metaphor for her conception of the Tao, for the tides of dream, for the eddies of history. (The name of the novel was taken from a line by Taoist writer Chuang Tzu, though, amusingly, Le Guin discovered later that this expression is a mistranslation.) The intensity of the relationships in The Lathe of Heaven—George and Haber and Heather in almost claustrophobic proximity, set against the changing canvass of history—and the beauty of the language Le Guin uses to tell their stories set this novel apart.

A Wizard of Earthsea / The Tombs of Atuan
I’m going to cheat and place both A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequel, The Tombs of Atuan, as Le Guin’s best. A Wizard of Earthsea is regularly (and rightly) called out as one of Le Guin’s most important and influential novels; less so The Tombs of Atuan. But I feel like, considered together, the two books form a vital dialectic, a duology that is greater than each individual novel. A Wizard of Earthsea tells the story of a boy’s growing up, an almost perfect iteration of the Western fantasy monomyth slash bildugsroman. This sort of story—one of a boy growing into a man—is a mainstay of fantasy literature (sometimes frustratingly so). Le Guin tells it so sharply, with such an important twist, that alone it would be her best.

“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”

So begins A Wizard of Earthsea, a slender young adult novel with a most common theme: a talented boy’s journey to becoming a great man. The talented boy in this telling is Sparrowhawk, born in obscurity on Gont, an island on a archipelago known for wizards and pirates and not much else. The magic of Earthsea is word-magic, a language of making and unmaking that can be learned by people, but is native to the dragons of the world. (Dragons can lie in this true language; humans can’t.) During his education on Roke Island, Sparrowhawk attempts forbidden magic (like many matriculating heroes, Sparrowhawk is something of an arrogant jerk) which backfires, conjuring a gebbeth, a shadow creature that is tied to Sparrowhawk. The archmage gives up his life to repel the shadow, and Sparrowhawk is scarred and grievously injured.

Nonetheless, Sparrowhawk, whose true name in the language of magic is Ged, eventually receives his wizard’s staff, takes a position as wizard on a neighboring island, and does battle (largely through language) with the dragons of Pendor. These are the events that will make him famous, the things he will be remembered for in song. But the shadow still haunts him, and Ged leaves his posting in order to either find or escape his shadow. At this point, the novel becomes a picaresque, traveling almost haphazardly through the waters and island of the archipelago of Earthsea. In the end, Ged and his dear friend Vetch sail clear off the map, onto shifting near-material sands, and he and his shadow name one another. Like the confrontation with the dragon, Ged’s final conflict with his shadow isn’t one of brute strength or some blinkered concept of “goodness,” but one of balance and equilibrium, of empathy and understanding. I name you; I know you.

Le Guin’s simple tale of matriculation stands out in its simplicity. She packs in a wizard’s mean upbringing, his boarding school days, his exhilarating successes and embarrassing failures, into a novel that never feels rushed, even while it tells a tightly constructed tale. And the twist: Le Guin reveals, after the getting-to-know-yous of Ged’s important life, that he has black skin. In fact, most of the people of the archipelago range from red-brown to blue-black. Early covers elide this important detail; even a miniseries produced in 2004 got it horribly wrong, much to Le Guin’s irritation. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the skin color of fantasy characters is, but if it really doesn’t matter, then why are they always white?

The Tombs of Atuan is set in the Kargish empire, where people indeed have white skin. Though part of the larger archipelago of Earthsea, the Kargs set themselves apart from the Hardic people (who are Ged’s people.) Where the rest of Earthsea hews to something like a Taoist appreciation of balance in magic, the Kargs are beholden to the Old Powers. Their society is based on a theocracy of squabbling god-kings. Tenar is taken as a young child to be a priestess of one of these Old Powers, in a cloister built on a labyrinth. She’s referred to as Arha, the Eaten One, and is raised in a suffocating convent peopled by women and eunuchs as a god-child (or goddess-child), the reincarnation of the previous Eaten One. Her experience is one of frustrating enclosure, hemmed in by the parameters of duty and expectation, in addition the the physical constraints of her isolated cloister; there’s literally nowhere to go.

She finds freedom, ironically, in exploring the undertomb, the underground labyrinth, a place only she, as Arha, may enter. It is there she finds Sparrowhawk, the archmage Ged, injured and diminished by the effects of the Old Powers. He’s come to retrieve (or steal) an artifact, but he’s failed and failing. Ged’s intrusion into Arha’s structured and bounded life is a shock; he puts everything about her life into question. They enact a series of conversations in the dark of the undertomb, conversations which feel dangerous to Arha.

While A Wizard of Earthsea gives us an almost comforting coming of age story, The Tombs of Atuan sails right off the map, giving us a monomyth scrambled by the vital and necessary aspects of race and gender. Ged is a surprise to Arha; The Tombs of Atuan is a surprise to the reader. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan function as a dialectic, as call and response about gender and power, race and culture. They are beautiful, careful books that tell essential stories in Le Guin’s quick, clear prose, and are filled with the themes most vital to her storytelling. They are everything I love best about the writer I love best.

What is your favorite Ursula K. Le Guin novel?

Review: Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

I think it’s generally true — though of course there are exceptions — that mystery novels tend to be about a city. The murder is a wound on the body politic, a blister where something imperfect about the social system rubs. The detectives then move through the various socioeconomic layers of the community, and often find submerged and surprising connections between this sub-culture and that, between families, between the powerful and the powerless. The city can be a small town, or a farming community, or a section of a larger metropolis, but mysteries move through a tight geography, the social layers stirred up like blood in water. The old saw is that the personal is political, and the mystery turns this inside out, in the very oldest senses of the words.

The apocalyptic novel, by contrast, tends to be about something bigger than a city: the nation, or, if that schema is too vague and high-level, the region or country. (I mean this last not to mean nation, but more broad area: north country, back country.) The Road is a Western. The Reapers are the Angels and This Dark Earth are both Southern Gothics. Station Eleven details my Northern Midwest. Parable of the Sower moves through California, and also Black America, a region that is not defined by geography, but nonetheless exists. There are dozens of apocalypses that detail that vast region of America — both the cityest of American cities, and a whole microcosm unto itself — New York: the elegiac Zone One, the chilly millennial Severance, the trash poetry of Monster Island. The writer destroys everything they know, and then sets to scrying the bones, throwing them down to see the immutable characteristics in the cant of ash. The apocalypse strips everything down to essentials: Rick Grimes clings imperfectly to his notions of family and the constabulary; Candace Chen hides behind a camera documenting it all for an Internet that’s blinking out; Mark Spitz relies on the law of averages; some found religions; for others, the play’s the thing. Each acts out their most basic instinct, culturally speaking, as they do the needful of water and food and safety.

One of the most pervasive modes of the apocalyptic novel is that of the road trip: if you’re going to get the pulse of the country, you have to cover some ground. During the road trip, the protagonist finds all the signposts marred and twisted, the roads empty and menacing, snarled with cars, overgrown, rotting. During the road trip, the destination is an illusion; worse, in the apocalypse, so is the road. It is here we first meet Orpen of Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive: rolling a wheelbarrow through a quietly destroyed Ireland, with a dog called Danger at her side. (This name is occasionally unintentionally comedic.) One of her more uncomfortable parents — her Mam’s Maeve — is in the wheelbarrow, shaking out with sweats and so silent you mistake her for dead. Maybe Orpen talks to her like a superego, like Job’s unhelpful friends in his blackest hour. But she’s not dead: Maeve has been bitten, about to turn into one of the skrake Orpen has been trained to kill her whole life. Orpen holds onto her childhood by keeping Maeve alive; when Maeve turns, something like Orpen’s childhood will have to die.

When I read The Bray House by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, it seemed to me that when the Irish kill their homeland, the result in fiction is more autopsy than spectacle, a long landscape pan instead of a detonation. Ní Dhuibhne nukes Ireland to a hard nuclear crust, and then lays out the debris with a cold hand. (Lord, but her main character is chilly.) The cataclysm in Last Ones Left Alive is similarly remote in time from the events unspooling, and much of the novel is spent detailing an Ireland in a green dishevelment. The events of the novel move forward and back in time from Orpen and her wheelbarrow, moving from her upbringing on the secluded island of Slanbeg off the west coast of Ireland, out onto the mainland and into Orpen’s matriculation. Though there are some interactions with the skrake — zombies in everything but name — it seemed notable to me how quiet this novel was for a zombie novel. In her youth, Orpen — named after the Irish painter best known for his depictions of WWI soldiers — often ditches her mothers to scratch about in the ephemera of that lost world in their island enclave. (She’s especially take by the graffiti and old newspapers referencing the Banshee: a fighting troupe comprised of women only.) Orpen has been raised in a safe kind of danger, drilled fairly mercilessly (especially by Maeve) but still protected from the real dangers of her world. There are no skrake on Slanbeg.

On the mainland, Orpen is pushing east toward the semi-mythical Phoenix City, where maybe her Mam and Maeve were from. (She doesn’t know much more than that; Mam and Maeve were always very closed mouth about where they were from, and why they left. She’s not Maeve’s biological child either way, and both Orpen’s parents drill her in the dangers of men.) She’s got the hyper-vigilance of the traumatized, spooking at every movement and worrying about the sound of the barrow’s squeaking wheel despite her enclosed upbringing. It’s an interesting mix: her safe upbringing that is nonetheless steeped in so much terror that she exhibits the earmarks of post-traumatic stress.

This reminded me of Colson Whitehead’s coinage of PASD — pronounced past — post-apocalyptic stress disorder. This neologism made me smile when I encountered it in Zone One — how clever — but I’m beginning to think it might be a real thing. Last week my son asked me to come out for a “porch talk” — he does this because he can find me smoking and I’m captive — and he burst into tears about the burning Amazon rain forests, the burning arctic, the geologically fast moving apocalypse we can find on the planet right now. I’m not going to be able to grow up and have children, he said to me, as he wept. I tried to soothe him, but I don’t like lying too much: There’s no reason it’s going to be “okay”, that blandest of reassurances, and the global environmental situation is well out of my control. I’d almost welcome just having to drill him in how to kill a reanimated corpse, because that is a concrete and discrete problem in the world: Either you kill or you die, but you don’t linger on in a worsening world, watching your possibilities narrow to ugly survival.

I was always irritated by religious fictions that brought down the conflict between good and evil into a fist fight. (I’m slagging, here, on C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.) It always seemed like a cop out, even though I get the structural satisfaction of just punching evil into the floor. I’m a huge fan of punching Nazis — they fucking deserve it — but no country defeats them by individuals punching them one at a time. But I’m beginning to get why, beyond mere narrative catharsis, we write the apocalypse this way: half a generation past the panic, in a regrowing world swallowing up the vestiges of modernity.

The apocalyptic novel is about a country, not a city. In a city, your interactions with strangers might be colored by ties of consanguinity. I know I play the Name Game whenever I meet someone in Duluth, and though I wasn’t even raised here — my father was — it only takes minutes to find a connection. But the in the country, this won’t work. You’re going to rely on the broader cultural playbook between strangers, the one full up with the subtle gestures only the acculturated will understand. (Of course, those gestures are still going to fail as often as not. The Ireland she was raised in was right there off the coast, but she has never quite lived there. ) So yeah, it’s a fistfight, the kind we find between Orpen and people she finds on the road. It can come down to a fistfight once all the other fights have been lost. There’s something almost comforting about pushing past the world where children despair of a future bleaker than their past into one where everyday survival is a victory.

Davis-Goff is maybe a little too light in her allusions to the larger Ireland Orpen is moving though and into. I wasn’t quite clear how exactly the Banshees fit with both Maeve and Mam, and the ersatz family she encounters on the road. Is Phoenix City a Handmaid’s Tale style nightmare, or its opposite in sensibilities, if not particulars? But whatever, this is fine. Last Ones Left Alive is a credible sounding of the Irish apocalypse. It’s nowhere near as brutal as Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s, but then that’s an impossible standard. The horror of Last Ones Left Alive ends up being a comfort; Orpen abides, like Ireland always has, and in Ireland’s particular way.

Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower: The Opera

Maybe two months ago, I became aware of a musical version of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower which was being staged at the O’Shaughnessy theater on the St. Kate’s campus in St. Paul. I pretty much blacked out and bought tickets on the spot, figuring I’d find a way to the Twin Cities for the show somehow. That show was last night. What an altogether moving staging.

I feel like Parable of the Sower has been popping up again and again for me. I write a series for B&N SciFi and Fantasy about the Nebula awards, reading through the nominated books and trying to handicap who’s going to win. A book I read for that series recently reminded me of Parable — reminded me that Butler took home the Nebula for both Parable of the Sower AND its sequel Parable of the Talents. I wrote a listicle about religiously motivated missions to the stars, and included Parable of the Talents, because of Lauren’s Earthseed. (The never-published third in that series, Parable of the Trickster, which takes place on the alien planet, would have been a better fit … but of course it was never published.)

I read both books years ago. Reading through the plot summaries to jog my memory bolted me down, ran a wire up my nerves: the camps for reeducation, the separation of families from their children (often permanently), President Jarret’s Make America Great Again rhetoric as he perpetrates the most inhuman cruelties. Butler was a godamn prophet, and it’s a cold feeling to read her warning while the dystopia is in full swing.

The opera version is fully aware of the icy inevitability of Butler’s classic, but wraps up the narrative in a warm call-and-response, in a call to arms. The staging was less like a traditional stage play — I’m fairly sure if I had no familiarity with the text, I would have been at sea. Instead, the character beats of the novel are jumping off points to explore the various ideas — and characters — in song.

This didn’t really register for me when I read the novel because it isn’t my lived experience (an altogether precious way of saying I’m white), but the opera centers the religious dialogue between Lauren and her father — which of course is centered in the church in Black America. Much of the first section — in the walled neighborhood before the walls are breached — is staged like a pulpit and pews. Her father preaches, and then Lauren responds. From him: “God don’t never change.” From her: “God is change.” The music touches gospel, the rhetorical style of Black preachers, old spirituals.

Oh, but another thing: the chorus. I don’t necessarily see this that often in either film or theater, because it is weird and old school, but: Parable of the Sower kinda had a Greek chorus. The chorus in Greek theater kinda functioned as a social superego, like an intrusive narrator who interjected on the events of the play, or ran the gloss, or gave you whatfor.

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Romeo and Juliet

You can find choruses in Shakespeare, real minimally, but that was almost half a millennium ago, which, even factoring his long shadow, was a long ass time ago. In Parable of the Sower, there are three people noted in the liner notes called “The Talents”: two singers, Helga Davis and Kenita Miller, and one of the writers, Toshi Reagon. I’m going to go ahead and presume that “talents” refers to the sequel — The Parable of the Talents. (There’s a pause here where I go to brush up on Jesus’ parable, and find that it’s one of the messy contested ones where different gospels have different takes, which is altogether perfect.)

The talents in the play are a modern take on the chorus, especially when Toshi Reagon — folksinger, writer, singer, musician — cut in. Near the end of the first act she broke through the music just to talk to us, to tell us about her vision of Butler’s vision and her place in the world. At the end she called us to action. It takes as voice as strong as Octavia’s own to sing her story, and Toshi Reagon has it.

World War Z: The Movie

Of course when I started seeing trailers and reading descriptions of the film adaption of Max Brooks’s journal of the zombie apocalypse, World War Z, I immediately jumped up onto my high horse and started penning angry screeds in the comment sections of Reddit. (Just kidding. I don’t use Reddit.) Why in the hell were they even calling this movie World War Z if exactly nothing was taken from the book but the title? The book World War Z is nerdy and wonky, very much what a serious military history geek would write about the zombie apocalypse with CNN on mute in the background. So, maybe the individual voices were a little same-same; Brooks’s take was refreshing in its long, global pan, broken out from the locked room scenarios of so many zombie narratives. Instead of the usual how will we survive tomorrow, it was a consideration of how society – societies – would respond to such a threat.

Admittedly, the book is a little bloodless – the snap gone out of recountings because we know the raconteur has survived – and I was expecting changes. Much of Brooks’s book simply wouldn’t work on the screen. I did have some fantasies about the film being about the soldier’s narrative. He pops up at least three times in the book, moving from the Battle of Yonkers – which is actually beautifully narrated, and a pretty biting criticism of the ways military tacticians refuse to adapt to changing realities – to a West Coast enclave, and then back out through the flyover states, reclaiming this grand America. The zombie herds like buffalo, the consideration of the in-fill towns and the feral domestic animals, the drudgery and mud-covered victories: all this would have worked on the screen. Alas, no mas.

World War Z, the film, opens with a languorous morning flipping pancakes and only occasionally tense domesticity. Gerry Lane is an ex-CIA investigator, clearly still in the recovery phase of adjustment to stay-at-home dad and unemployment. His kids are moppets, and while I think it might be indicted that his wife is a professional of some kind, this isn’t lingered on. The New York setting and the traffic snarl action pieces reminded me of Will Smith’s I Am Legend, but the New Yorkiness and generally elegiac tone is absent from the movie. Pitt’s Gerry Lane seems like someone who would be better played by Tom Cruise, whose asshole Ethan Hunt routine from the Mission Impossible movies might register stronger than Pitt’s surfer insouciance. Much as I generally like Pitt, here he lacked an edge that made his supposed backstory anything but narrative justification. I was in the CIA, like, I guess.

From here, the movie bops around the zombie apocalypse, running set pieces with the thinnest of narrative fiber between them. Some of the set pieces were honestly thrilling – like the zombies swarming over the Israeli wall, or some of the stuff in North Korea. Some of them felt like hey, what about an outbreak on a plane??? I felt twitchy about a wasted David Morse vamping through a toothless mouth prosthetic about Jews and how they never forget, although the chatty Jurgen Warbrunn – one of the few characters (sort of) from the novel – explains a little better what looks like unvarnished antisemitism in Morse’s explanations of the Israeli response. I liked the look of the androgyne Israeli soldier tasked to escort Lane out of Israel, but there wasn’t much more than a look to her character. All in all, the movie was the kind of contentless flash-bang that can be fun in the dollar theater on a Sunday, but will likely diminish on the small screen to the point of boring.

Rather than just complain about fast zombies, because honestly, that’s maybe the lamest criticism one can level at the zombie narrative, my complaints more have to do with the lack of viscera. (Seriously, I’ve been trolled one too many times by people exclaiming that fast zombies aren’t really zombies, like the taxonomy of imaginary creatures isn’t flexible enough to include a little sprinting.) But really it was the lack of guts that got me, because whatever other societal jibber jabber zombie narrative might capture, they can thrill because of entrail-rending zombie bouquets, the mob ripping someone limb from limb. They’re about physical fear, body horror, our fear of the inevitably declining meat-sack we all live in. It’s not about the fear of death, but of decomposing life. Blood splatter was notably absent in World War Z, which seems a crying shame.

But that’s not even what I want to note about this movie. What I want to talk about is Gerry Lane’s wife. I’ve noted before that zombie stories deal with domesticity in a weird way, and the housewife, as the embodiment of domesticity, ends up bearing the brunt of the weirdness. And maybe I should just take a minute to define terms. Yes, obviously, Lane’s wife is working outside the home, and Lane himself is playing emasculated parent to her harping worry. There’s a quelling quality to their marital interactions: you shouldn’t want to go back out into that manly, war-torn landscape, Gerry. No, no, of course I don’t. I’m using housewife as a shorthand term for the straight, white, middle class momming set, working or not, who regularly are the focal point of the Mommy Wars, the cultural wars, and apparently, now the zombie wars. The housewife is a category more mythic than actual, but she’s got teeth like any other monster, and sometimes she sprints.

But when the fit hits the shan, it’s Gerry’s war skills that nurture domesticity. Gerry mansplains to the Hispanic family that they have to move to be safe in crisis, and they don’t listen, bringing moppet count up to three when their son takes the advice they don’t. By the time the Lane family makes it to the aircraft carrier, Mrs Lane is in full on helicopter mom mode, hissing at Gerry and the UN dude that they should take their conversation about zombies outside lest they upset the children. I punched my husband at this point in the film — in the arm, jeez — why wouldn’t she want to know wtf was going on? Fair enough, don’t freak out the kids anymore than you have to, but given that they were pretty much unconscious in every scene from here on out, maybe you have a shred of curiosity about anything but making sandwiches? Why would a professional woman just wring her hands and push her sleeping babies’ hair out of their eyes? You’re in danger of getting chucked from the relative safety of the carrier, why don’t you offer up whatever hastily sketched skills you have?

Mrs Lane’s story reaches a nadir when she calls Gerry in a panic while he’s on a dangerous op in North Korea, the squeal of the phone alerting the zombies to their locale. Life pro tip: set your cell phone to buzz when in the zombie apocalypse. (Also: cell phones work?) His world-weary decision not to tell her that her domestic panic got a lot of good men killed – good men! – just exhausted me. Broads, man, amiright? Don’t text me right now because I’m in a v. important meeting. Mrs Lane ends up as this tragic impetus for action, inert and often interfering, but without agency or motivation beyond the cheesy invocation of family. Someone smacks down Gerry near the end when he invokes it right back — I watched the thing that became my wife kill my children — but this is a weird conversation, bros ruminating on their obligations that are little more than luggage. Think of the children! Because that’s all we can do!

I don’t know. It’s late, and I’m tired, and maybe I’ll be back to bloviate tomorrow. I thought WWZ: the Movie was fine when people were running and screaming, but it wasn’t much more than that in the end.

Oh, and also, the scene where Gerry pops open a Pepsi machine and the cans all rolled with their labels out cracked my shit up. Pepsi: The Choice of the Undead! Pepsi quenches your thirst for brains.

Capitol Girls: Hunger Games Make-Up

My daughter and I ditched over to the Walgreens on Lake St in Minneapolis to get a gift for a birthday party she was to attend. I’ve always liked that drug store, despite it being down heel and over-stuffed. Even though my neighborhood is very mixed – residential and commercial, foreign and domestic born, poor and maybe not rich, but certainly middle class, different races – the clientele for businesses tend to sort by class or ethnicity. White girl that I am, I don’t frequent the botanica two blocks down; that store is not for me. I also don’t go into the punker store (too old), nor the saddle shop (too not a cowboy), nor the various halal groceries (too…atheist?) Even within our mixed neighborhood, we sort.

But the Walgreens on Lake cuts this really cool cross-section. Some of this is, admittedly, the fact that it’s a drug store, and the need for microwave popcorn and some $2 novelty socks at 11pm cuts across all socioeconomic and racial divides. But still, even then, when you compare that Walgreens with the CVS just blocks up, which has roughly the same kind of 2-for-1, as-seen-on-TV kind of endcaps, the Lake St Walgreens has a decidedly more broad clientele. And really garrulous employees. I was in there getting a prescription filled for my husband a couple of weeks ago, and the pharmacist browbeat me into getting a flu shot, at which point a young woman in a hijab stuck me efficiently, and then gave me a sticker.

So I was just jaw-dropped when I saw the following spinning display rack right smack in the middle of the make-up section.

spinning display of Covergirl ads using the districts as themes.  The idea of Hunger Games district-themed make-up was bad enough, but to be confronted with it in one of the few places I can think of in my city that don’t exemplify the (admittedly simplistic) divisions of Collins’s dystopia, well, that was another thing entirely. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself here, because when I posted this image on facebook, those who hadn’t read the books didn’t get how egregious this ad campaign is.

So, a little back story on the country of Panem, where Collins’s story unfolds. Panem is a post-America America, occupying the same landmass, but there are hints this a post-peak-oil and/or other post-apocalyptic environment, but centuries past whatever crisis changed the US into Panem. The political/economic system has been reordered into twelve districts controlled by an unnumbered district known as The Capitol. Each district is defined by a primary industry: coal-mining, agriculture, small electronics, heavy industry, etc. Due to a rebellion by the districts 75 years earlier, each of these districts offer up two teenagers to the Capitol as tribute every year to fight to the death in the Hunger Games. Out of 24 tributes, only one will survive. The whole event is televised.

fan generated map of Panem's districts, which takes up large swaths of North America
map of Panem

Now, I’m the first to admit this political/economic system is ridiculous, and it wouldn’t take more than a minute to rip it apart as unrealistic in concrete terms. But when you’re dealing with dystopia, and to a lesser extent young adult literature, strict realism isn’t the point, nor should it be. I was bowled over by Collins’s country of Panem because she captured a certain emotional reality that we live every day. My neighborhood is a Capitol sorted by districts. It is a microcosm of Panem, a country which makes manifest our American economic disconnects into the rigid structures of barbed wire and geography. Collins turns the economic, political, racial divides into someplace clarified and concrete, and then she has our children fight to death within it. Sure, it’s unrealistic, but it’s also happening every godamn day of the week.

But what does this have to do with make-up? Lemmee tell you. The plot of Hunger Games deals with Katniss Everdeen, a teenager from District  12, the poorest and least populated district in Panem, and her experience as one of the tributes in the Hunger Games. The main industry of District 12 is coal mining. Mum and I took a tour of the coal mines in the coal districts of Wales, and what I took from the experience was that mining is the most out-of-sight-out-of-mind of the heavy industries. Men disappear underground to bring up fuel for the capitalist fire, and when they die in cave-ins and of suffocation or eaten by machinery, their bodies are often not recovered. Like fishing towns, the graves are predominantly for women, because the men just disappear into a pit. The labor movements roil underground in thousands of unmarked tombs. (At this point I highly recommend doing a google for “pit ponies poetry” and just freaking out at the poems you’ll find. They were brought down to work until they died. I won’t put a fine point on the definition of “they.”)

very old black and white photo of a pit pony in a British coal mine
Pit pony

One of the things I love so fiercely about Hunger Games is how it has this nuanced engagement with things generally seen as girly frivolity, things like fashion. Katniss is brought from her district to the Capitol, and denuded and perfected according to the beauty standards of the capital city. The sequence of her bodily perfection reads like an assault, almost a sexual one, her body flensed and bitten, her poverty stripped and removed. The Capitol takes away the marks of poverty in order to kill her with spectacle. She wakes up to the the gentle tutelage of Cinna, who will be her fashion consultant through the Hunger Games. He knows what she’s gone through, and he has a game plan. While Katniss, rube teen, wants to reject all the trappings of her assault and the cruel spectacle of the Hunger Games, he sees the subversive utility of playing the game to other ends. He reads it all against the grain.

As a completely unacculturated teen, Katniss can only see her engagement with the Capitol in all-or-nothing ways. She will wear black and combat boots and scowl. She will act the part of her resistance because she cannot look the part of her resistance. But the character of Cinna shows the beauty of subversion, the ways you can twist things designed to oppress you to uplift you. It’s not as simple as “looking pretty makes you stupid”, but something weirder like “looking like you have authority means you have authority” or maybe “take seriously the deliberately unserious” or maybe “not everything is as it seems.” To misquote Elizabeth Bishop: sometimes we are living in imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Panem is an imaginary garden with real toads.

After the first movie came out, I was confronted by a Katniss Barbie doll in the toy aisle, and I really had to consider whether I thought this was a nightmare or not. After a ton of searching my late-model feminist soul, I eventually decided Katniss Barbie was okay. It’s kind of perfect, in a way, because the Hunger Games series can be consumed as just addictive pop fiction, this present tense hurtle to finish all about love triangles and teen tragedy and the like.  It’s a Barbie, totally all about consumption, which you watch, glued to set just as surely as any Capitol citizen.

Two racist ethnic caricature Barbies, Katniss, and Holiday Barbie.

I’ve seen a lot of teen reviews of the series that seem to have zero idea that there’s a deeper message to the Hunger Games series, training their attention on love triangles and pretty dresses. But one day those kids might wake up, bolted out of sleep that, wait, omigod, I’m living in the godamn Capitol. That’s the power of the series. That’s the power of the Katniss Barbie: something you play with until you realize that play is action. It’s practice, and it’s a subversion.

But, boy howdy, is the Covergirl Hunger Games campaign completely message-deaf. Dressing up as a coal miner, with “flamed out” eyeliner and mascara, with nails black and blue like bruises or coal is the kind of horrible poverty porn that every single person in Panem who doesn’t live in the Capitol hates about the Capitol, and with good reason. Don’t play dress up with the inescapable economic hardships of other people, people who on some level live and die so you can swan around in the comfort you so richly deserve. Accessorize with black lung, and malnutrition, and infant mortality, and short lives that don’t matter to anyone but those who lived them. Accessorize with injustice.

This isn’t even getting into the model marked “livestock” from District 10, with a feather headdress and a fur collar, animistic eye make-up fanning out over her stark blue eyes. It’s almost too easy to rip this easy equation of female bodies with cattle for the slaughter, the invocation of bestiality, the dehumanizing furriness. Or the dreary Orientalism of the model for District 3, all made up like some cyberpunk fantasy, denuded of hair, even her eyebrows replaced with sharp triangles. When I think cheap electronics, I think Asian woman, amiright?

Or the District 1 “luxury” model whose look invokes Marie Antoinette. Which, okay, maybe that’s hilarious. Maybe that’s the only look here that isn’t repulsive, that gets on some level the symbolic structure of the districts to the Capitol. I don’t even know what to say about the model for District 4: Fishing, which dresses up a black woman as a fish.  Or the District 2: Masonry look which puts Kabuki slash Mod make-up on a white woman. I just…my feminist background has no ways of dealing with this mess.

I’m kind of getting rage fatigue thinking about these looks, and the fact that probably dozens of people, maybe hundreds, were involved in their creation; that thousands, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars went into this campaign, and not one person said, “You guys, we should be ashamed of ourselves.” These aren’t, presumably, teens who have an excuse when they miss the point completely, but grown ass adults. I’m not even trashing the models or peons – we all have to work, and eat – I’m trashing all the damn people with the power to greenlight such a complete disaster. Who have no sense of irony. Who can’t even read.

 I’m not even saying I’m not a Capitol dweller myself. I am. I’m not even saying that shame is enough of a political act to counter the wrong in the world. It isn’t. The wrongs in the world are staggeringly large and crushingly intractable. But compounding them by playing poverty dress-up is disgusting, and worse than that, it’s the wrong kind of subversion. 

Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. 

But I’m not buying it this time.

David Gilmour is a Bad Canadian

I’m not interested in reading books by David Gilmour. In an interview with Random House two days ago, Gilmour stated:

“I’m not interested in teaching books by women,” he says, making an exception for one female writer.

“Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories,” he says. “But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love.”

Instead, Gilmour says, “[w]hat I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

CBC

Now I know what you’re thinking: here goes another one of them Feminazi queer-loving bra-burners trying to impinge on this man’s free speech. So he doesn’t like the squawk-talk and jibber-jabber of female writers, gay writers, or Chinese writers? What’s it to you? Fair enough, imaginary Internet commenter.

But he’s said something much worse. You might want to sit down for this. David Gilmour, Canadian author, doesn’t like other Canadian authors.

Now, I’m not Canadian, but I’ve played one on tv, and some of my best friends are Canadian. My accent is in the ballpark, and if I drop in a couple “ehs” and “take off, hosers,” I can pass for one. From my intimate knowledge of the Canadas, I know that it is Canadianly constitutionally mandated that every time you have a conversation about any subject, you are required to note which famous people are from Canada. Talking to nerds? You know, Shatner is Canadian. Doing the chicken dance from Arrested Development? Michael Cera is Canadian. People with huge boobs? Boom: Pamela Anderson.

But that’s not all. The Canadian constitution requires that you don’t ever shittalk whole classes of Canadian citizens in front of Americans. You just can’t even do that, or Mounties will triangulate your location and force you to eat a bowl of moose cock and a case of Molson for your reeducation. I presume that right now, Gilmour is being very politely set upon by men in really hot red outfits while they prize his mouth open to accept the ungulate tumescence. (Oops, I started slipping into some of my Due South fanfiction. Is it hot in here?)

Promo photo for the tv show Due South: a Mountie stands net to a guy in a trechcoat with a white Siberian husky sitting at their feet

So there you have it: David Gilmour has committed treason. Now, I know that I’m not allowed to write reviews based on author behavior anymore, but I think maybe Goodreads should make an exception in this case. I’m not dismissing Gilmour because he dismissed all writers who have a vagina, or are homos, or them Chinese. Obviously, that’s his right as a professor of literature who has been entrusted with educating Canada’s tender youth. That’s just table stakes for the Western Canon. But when you mess with the Queen, you get the horns, David. Who’s that knocking on your door?

Dial H for Hawt: Miéville Writes a Comic

Netgalley, y u never approve me on Miéville titles? Maybe if you had approved me for Dial H, Vol. 1: Into You, I wouldn’t be months down the road after twice unsuccessfully requesting this from the library, unsuccessful because they blew up my local library branch, and it’s sometimes tough to get down to Central. (See also: The Shining Girls, which just got sent back because I didn’t make it in time. Sob.) Anyway, once something turns into an epic quest, I’m half-expecting the payoff to blow my circuits, which this, alas, did not. 

I’m not saying I didn’t like it, just that it’s all over the place and uneven. In that, it reminds me a little bit of the first of the Sandman collections, The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes, which spent a fair amount of time sorting out how Morpheus of Gaiman’s work was related to the Sandman of the 30s serial and hat-tipping a bunch of DC properties like John Dee and John Constantine. (Everyone to be named John, I see.) Which is one of the reasons I find comics so fucking frustrating: all these connections and referents, this huge world spanning decades with re-starts and blind alleys everywhere. How can the casual reader be expected to get into this sprawling inside joke at all? It’s very rewarding, of course, if you know all that stuff. So a little like the Western Canon, but, like, with more pictures and spandex. 

Some of my bitching being the point, undoubtedly, of Dial H, which takes a playful tone in regards to the powers of superheros and the like. Overweight, unemployed slob Nelson Jent is being returned home by a friend after a heart attack when he and his friend argue about his general lack of care towards his life and person. The friend takes off; Nelse follows to apologize; the friend is beset by knee-cappers. When Nelse goes to call the police in an old timey phone booth, he instead is transformed into Boy Chimney and saves the day, transporting his friend to the hospital. There’s a plot involving a bunch of people who didn’t make any sense to me, but it turns out any time Nelson dials H-E-R-O on the sketchy phone, he turns into a different comic hero, characters like Captain Lachrymose and Chief Mighty Arrow.

After a fair amount of confusion on my part in the beginning – who are these people, and how are they related? whatever, moving on – the plot shapes into your usual origin story with your usual surprises and the like. Maybe I’m being jaded, because maybe the usual reversals aren’t nearly as usual as I expect, superhero comics being the last refuge of the lame, heteronormative boyfest. Making the ersatz hero a big, bumbling bumblefuck maybe is a pointed commentary about the self-insert or something. I felt stronger about the reveal of Maneau’s true identity, because who she is a stranger animal to find in superhero comics, except as a wise aphorist. She’s still sometimes a wise aphorist though, straight up. Nelson has some real identity problems with his swirling changes into the myriad of oddball supes, and Manteau’s covering of her supe-identity with yet another mask was honestly a cool choice. There’s a baddie who has a typically Miévillain (get it? GET IT??) esoteric weirdness, and I dug the head-spin thinking about nothing fighting nothing. 

Later, when things begin to make more sense, and Nelse is kicking it sidekick style with Manteau, Dial H gets into some pointed criticisms of the racism and sexism that often punctuates superhero comics. Nelse turns into a hugely war-bonneted Indian chief, and Manteau is like, you are NOT leaving the house like that. Then the Hi-Yo-Silver-like horse eats her yard. Dang you, horse! I dug that immensely. The last episode has that what-the-fuck-is-happening vibe with a shift to an ancient Mesopotamish locale and a cuneiform dialer that was cute, but also began to deepen the mystery of how the dialers work, and what kind of universe(s) we’re living in. 

So, like Sandman, it’s possible this uneven plot will settle down into something truly game-changing, but for the moment, things seem a little…rote is the wrong word, but something like that. Comics are about mid-season payoff, once they’ve found their legs and start really messing around in earnest. Origin stories are necessary, I guess, but they feel, to me, like placeholders until the writers can finally get something done. And I wrote myself out of this observation, but I’m not sure that the comic format plays to Miéville’s strengths as a writer, as he tends to go in for verbose, profane sidebars, and, frankly, his abilities in the punchy humor department are lacking. So I’ll check out volume two, for sure, but I’m not overwowed at the moment.

The Price of Spring: Well Paid

This is an impossible review to write. I don’t even feel like I can go with a simple plot description, given that the events in The Price of Springby Daniel Abraham are so dependent on the ugly climax of the last book, a climax I do not want to spoil for those readers who eventually might get around to this series. I guess I’ll just blather a bit about the general trends in these novels as a group. 

So, high fantasy, yeah? The Long Price Quartet takes place in a mildly medieval mildly Asian setting – farms and courts and no electric lights. (But no elves or dragons.) You just kind of accept this, as a reader, because, hey, why not? And the costumes are sweet. But there is this very tiny piece of magic in the mix, a very careful, deliberate magic, so careful and deliberate that it blows my mind here in the last book. The magic is embodied in creatures called andats, who are called into being by poets; the embodiment of concepts. Once a concept has been bound – and this binding takes physical form in something that looks human – it cannot be bound in the same way again. In the beginning, many, many generations before the start of this book, poets bound and released andats almost playfully not realizing there would be a cost down the road. A binding gone wrong – one that is too close in grammar to one already done – will result in the death of the poet.

So that’s where we are at the start of A Shadow in Summer, which details the plots of some failed poets, some not failed poets, women, and empires. I said this in the review for the first book, but the magic, the andat, is an almost-allegory for technology, a sort of nuclear power that can light up a thousand homes, or murder an entire culture. Take, for example, Seedless, the only andat we meet in Summer. He (and this pronoun is off – these are not gendered humans, but more on that later) can be called Removing That Which Continues, and this bound idea mostly works to remove the seeds from cotton – a cotton djinn. (Ba-dump-tss.) But he can also remove a gestating child, and he could, through his magic, cause every woman to miscarry in the enemy state of Galt, who, unlike the city-states of the Khaiem (in which these events occur), have to rely on the more mundane magic of steam ships and clever technology.

But the stories of these four books mostly follow the fortunes and misfortunes of two men, Otah and Maati. I’m sitting here staring at the cursor, trying to will an easy encapsulation of their relationship into being. These books occur at roughly 15 year intervals, so Otah, Maati, and all of the other players age and change, not just in the books, but in the interstitial periods between them. We met them as boys, and here they are men, old men, dealing with their failures and horrible successes, trying to salvage their lives, their legacies, and the inescapable fact that more of the candle has been burned than not. A lot more. 

The last book dealt with a war, and while it was not a civil war in the strictest of senses, it has become intimate in the aftermath and reparations. Civil in the sense of of or relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state. Again, I’m not saying this is Tolkien’s dreaded allegory, but this last book got me thinking abut our own American civil conflict, and the Reconstruction period just after. The andat – and these creatures view themselves, and are, slaves – are out of the world, the books burned, the poets put to the knife. The societies in question have to put the world back together, have to build an economy and a shared civil identity that isn’t predicated on that slavery, and they don’t like it at all.

And why would they? I sat there, as a reader, wanting to shake everyone. Maati, oh god, what you are doing is going to end in tears – and what he is doing is trying to build a women’s grammar to bind a new andat. (Of course, in this semi-medieval setting, women’s rights do not figure, and poets have always been men, which is dealt with so amazingly well that I amaze.) I mean, this is a personal tick of mine, but I believe strongly that fantasy, and especially high fantasy, almost always trades in nostalgia of one stripe or another. That nostalgia often works out to this faux medievalism where the ladies wear dresses and are chattel, but it’s okay, because harvesting grain and being pretty is so rewarding, yo! Not here. Abraham is so much better than this, and he addresses the gender imbalances, calls them into question, makes gender both the question and the answer. The good ole days were good because of slavery, so they weren’t good for everyone. It’s seriously awesome. 

As much as I wanted to shake Maati, at least when I wasn’t covering my eyes knowing that what he was doing was going to end in horrors, I was wanting to shake his friend/enemy, Otah, for doing things that have a terrible, necessary purpose on many levels, but were absolutely sickening. Otah, oh god, you get to take the high road in your own mind, but that’s such total bullshit. And the worst part? He even knows it. They all do. And they do what they do anyway because it makes sense. Because people are people. Because we all pine for lost countries, ones we even lived in, and want to make our perfected memories into perfect futures. The whole thing is bananas. 

All this blather I’ve been making about society and gender and stuff – ignore this. This is not why you should read this. You should read this because it has some of the most careful, beautiful character sketches, sketches that move through time, that build, that allow characters to make bad choices and be assholes, characters that try to do the right thing, who fail and burn and regret. I love that we see whole lives in this series, from young lovers to regretting widowers with bad knees. 

And another thing I say about fantasy: the land is character, the cities and places. There’s a moment in here where some characters (no spoilers) are in a ruined city, and they have this reverie about the food carts that used to ply the overgrown streets, how with your food, wrapped in careful paper, you would also receive a collection of seeds in a twist. After eating, you threw the seeds on the ground, and the birds that came to eat the seeds were a divination tool: a thrush for luck, a crow for bad omens. It’s throwaway, but it’s beautiful, and it’s careful. It’s a moment for a place that never existed, but never existed in a way that had its own customs. Omigod. Go read this series now.

(And the previous book, An Autumn War, and this can be found in the omnibus edition called The Price of War. So good.) 

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An Autumn War: Anvils

I’ve realized something about Abraham’s writing. He shows you the anvil he’s going to drop on your head. There’s a sussurus of silk as he slowly lifts the cover away, a hint of jasmine in the air as you sip tea, growing cold the way everything warm does. You consider the anvil, the way it is dark and sits, anvil-like, unassuming as the inevitable. You watch it lift, slowly, and the servant that moves the pulleys pulls hand over hand, one fist in front of another. It’s beautiful, the way the lines stretch taunt, and then go slack, and then stretch taunt again. It’s like life in its consideration, a bowl going cold because you are too busy living to drink, and then you drink and it’s cold and regretful. 

And then the fucking anvil hits you on the head, and it’s not about how unassuming the anvil is, or its color or shape, but about how the expectation is not the same as the experience, and the experience is not the same as the aftermath. There are birds and little arcane symbols tweeting around your head, and you can’t understand how that damn black and metal thing hit you so hard because you knew it was coming. You saw it unwrapped, like a stiptease of your coming mortification. 

It took me forever to get through An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet). I cheated on it with several other books, because I could feel that coming shock. This series is stagy like nobody’s business, and that is intentional, deliberate, one foot in front of the other, a chess move that moves the other pieces like a diagram. I don’t like military books, as a rule, because I’m a squirming girl who can’t handle glory. There’s no glory here, just ash and pain and a thousand bad and completely understandable choices that end in the worse and the incomprehensible. Good Lord, this anvil. It is hard and dark and made of metal. I will grope my way through the next book, but not right now. I’m going to lie down and consider the patterns on the insides of my eyelids for a while.


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A Betrayal in Winter

It pisses me off how good a writer Daniel Abraham is. It pisses me off more that you lot don’t seem to be reading him at all. I’m going to start buying his books and mailing them to you for your birthday, L. Ron Hubbard style. This is not an idle threat. 

 A Betrayal in Winteris the second in the Long Price Quartet. I always feel a little weird writing reviews for later books in series, because I’m going inevitably to drop spoilers from the first book. With that in mind, there may be mild spoilers for A Shadow in Summer, but that can’t be helped. (As an aside, I keep having to look up the names for these books as I write this review, which is a pretty serious problem, I think. I get how they work together thematically, or whatever, but they do not marry to their content well and are pretty forgettable. I never know who to credit/blame with titles – bad titles can be the fault of either writers or publishers, for different reasons – but these are straight up bad.)

A Betrayal in Winterstarts roughly a decade after the first book, in another city, with some cast changes. I really feel the absence of the character Amat at first, with her mashalled, gendered anger, but she’s found her corollary in Idaan. Maybe corollary is the wrong word; Idaan is more a cautionary tale. I keep getting surprised by these books, because they have this really sly, cutting gender commentary, and fantasy, Goddess bless it, often doesn’t. Come to think of it, books that deal with fantasies of one stripe or other often fall into gender ghettos. Fantasies for women play out one register of stereotypes; fantasies for men another. (Arguably, Fantasy with a capital F is fantasy for men. I do not say this to start fights.) When either kinds of fantasies play out in semi-medieval settings, I think you get a lot of sexist play-set action. Not so, here, at all. 

The plot is almost Shakespearean: the king is dying. There is no primogeniture; his sons will have to kill one another to determine succession. His daughters, well, they do not count. All of them are too old to start the killing game, but one of the four sons dies suddenly, of poison, in an opening gambit blamed on our Otah, our upstart, from the first book. This would probably have more frission with an Elizabethan audience, having just gone through the whole mess with, um, something historical that I have forgotten about? Scottish succession and what a total mess it was? Anyway, um, back to my point, which is that if I spend much more time outlining the plot, I’m going to make it sound like one of those court intrigue jobs that I have mixed success with. No. My Dad is fond of quoting the following aphorism: all politics are local. Then he winks and says: No, actually, all politics are personal. Sometimes I fall asleep when I’m reading court intrigue dramas because they forget the actors are people, and not just widgets in a system. At some point, one of the characters says, “We are all men under our robes,” which is beautiful and perfect, because they are, of course, when they are men. But sometimes they are women, and that makes a difference. That difference fuels some of the plot. 

There’s other loves for me in here. The first book set forward some fantasy mechanics that have deepened here. There’s the poets, who call into being andats – semi-living embodiments of an idea who are something between a metaphor and bound god. We met one in the first book, Seedless, and here we meet another, who changes our ideas of how the andats work, how metaphors work. There is still the gesture-language, not as fully utilized as in the last book, but one that puts a spin on the statements of characters in this book. And then there is the continuing metaphor of the sleeve, where people keep their correspondence, or have it spill on the pavement; the cloth that covers the wrist also conceals the heart, or reveals; the difference between the mask and the person, the clothes and the man. Or woman. Ah ah ah. 

I think this book could almost be read as a stand-alone text, something that makes me quake. I blame Tolkien’s editors for breaking LotR into three books when it should have been one, and giving later fantasists license to write a bunch of narratives that never culminate, never complete. I mean, sure, I like how Fellowship ends, with it’s downbeat incompleteness, but I can’t remember the break between Two Towers and King, and King is mostly appendix, and OMG, I’ll stop nerding out here. This book does not ramble to its end, to be begun again where it finished like after a nap. That said, there are things in Winter that tighten into the next arc, a late moment when I realized that the library is at the heart of the metaphors in a way that makes my booknerd soul become incandescent with glee. I’m really impressed, and you lot should get up off your asses and start reading Abraham right now. Now. 

(And this, and the previous book, A Shadow in Summer, can be be found packaged in an omnibus called Shadow and Betrayal. Get on that shit.) 

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