this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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I still haven't recovered from reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
I'm in the middle of the Dispossessed and I love The Left Hand of Darkness. I swear if these books were less sexual I'd want teenagers to have to read them. Left Hand to teach about cultural and gendered biases and the Dispossessed to teach that your ideology won't create a utopia, but that doesn't mean it won't make things better. It's an absolute shame that LeGuinn kinda requires nerdiness to be introduced to.
City of Illusions still haunts me as well and I keep bringing it up to my wife as we watch Three Body Problem. Its prequels Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile were good as the sci fi sword and sorcery followed by sci fi pocahontas (problematicness included) that they were. But City was a book about a Taoist against lies and liars and it hit hard for that.
Personally I found Omelas highly overrated though. It's a visceral depiction of a common thought experiment but a common thought experiment it was
Teenagers shouldn’t be reading about sex? Am I reading your intention correctly?
I'm not going to be the one to advocate for teenagers having to read about sex
Well I think it needs done. But like many things…no one asked me so here I am! Have a good day, Comrade.
Bro when I was 16 all I thought about was sex
I read those Dispossessed and LHoD in the 80s, and then reread them more recently, and I'm amazed at how well they hold up. So often stories and sensibilities feel dated when you get to many decades from when they were written, but those two books could have been written yesterday. Both masterpieces, for sure. I'm not sure who you feel they're inappropriate for teenagers though.
I never read City of Illusions - at least I don't think I have. I'll add it to my list. What do you think of Three Body Problem? I read the book and didn't really care for it (I know I'm in the minority there).
City of illusions is to a degree a sequel to Planet of Exile (which is the only book of hers I think doesn't hold up), which is kinda a sequel to Rocannon's World so I definitely recommend reading all three.
I'm enjoying three body Problem but not to the degree I'd recommend it to people. Well made and all that, but it has issues that I feel come directly from cultural differences and from the writing.
I'll put them on the reading list.
Yeah, I wondered if my problems with the 3BP book were culturally-based from the translation, though it was pretty universally lauded as masterful. The motivations and actions of some of the characters just seemed so unlikely to me.
Yeah I also just see a lot of the imperial propaganda that I had to learn to recognize being an American in it, but for China. It's very, "support for China doing bad things is morally superior to opposition to it". Like, you have a victim of the cultural revolution and you're telling me that she's wholly in the wrong for begging aliens to help saying that we cannot save ourselves.
The show leans away from some of it but the entire story revolves around the full villain status of people with reasonable criticisms and their blind faith that makes them to a certain degree uninteresting.