On 3/7/22, Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
It's a great book, worth re-reading, even if written during Le Guin's sorta phase where (as she herself later critiqued herself publicly in afterwords, prefaces, etc.) she was putting male heroes into radfem-ish worlds (especially in Left Hand of Darkness, released same year as The Dispossessed iirc) and then she really broke free of all that with 1990's Tehanu, saying of Tehanu later something along the lines of, if she hadn't written Tehanu, her career would have ended. I have always
Sounds like she ran into the things she was writing about, in reality. Decades later, doing things like that has become the rage and many find it very healing.
really liked taking one author at a time, studying them and their career, and then moving on to the next author, studying them and their career, reading all their books especially the early ones or the later ignored ones, etc. Probably could have done better than hyperfixating on Peter Straub -- there's a really cool Publisher's Weekly article about him as a cog in the machine somewhere -- but he was kind of the not-quite-Stephen-King and it was sort of interesting to see in his books/publicity how that went down across his life. And why did I have to read Emma Straub's collection of short stories with all the shoes? It's kinda interesting to look at the Straubs as this brownstone literary dynasty, but I'd rather be listening to the Guns And Roses song about Mr Brownstone. Thinking too hard is sometimes not worth it!
I'm not familiar with your media references, I'm afraid. I'll privately send you a pdf of the book you mentioned in case you have trouble accessing pirate sites.