Prompted by Charlie‘s comment on my posting about science fiction books, I’ve been reading some Ursula Le Guin. Having really enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness, I immediately started in on The Dispossessed. That was three weeks ago; I just finished it tonight. Barely. Willing myself to complete it. Trying to summon up a little curiosity about how it might end.
I know it’s supposed to be a masterpiece, but these flat passages about these desiccated people on their minimalist world failed to grab me. (For hardscrabble life on the edge, give me Steinbeck any day.) And the more I read, the more I felt that these characters were all simply stereotypes representing facets of the sociopolitical debate that seized so many at the end of the 60s, from Paris to Berkeley. When the helicopter-borne troops moved in, and the strikers were hunted through the city, I could practically see the footnotes about Paris ’68 and Kent State. And the future, for all concerned, was so damned bleak that I almost gave up on it.
Oh, well. Can’t win them all. What next, I wonder? I’d like to find the first book in a nice space-opera series, with just the right kind of cynical… oh, wait: that’s DVDs. OK: give me something like Feersum Endjinn, or a new Neal Stephenson (but with an editor, please – not like the undisciplined ramblings of the Baroque Cycle).