August Reading Thread

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Dave

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What are you reading this August?

I'm almost finished book 2 of Stephen King's Dark Tower series - The Drawing of the Three. This is a very good book and much better than the first volume. I'll most likely finish it today.

At the same time, I'm also reading Men Of Iron by M W Flinn, which is a historical non-fiction book (but quite an easy read) about Sir Ambrose Crowley III and the Crowley family, who owned the largest ironworks in Europe at the dawn of the industrial revolution and where many of my ancestors and distant cousins were employed.

I'm not sure what I'll read after those as my 'To Be Read' pile is increasing in size rather than going down.
 
Thoroughly enjoyed Worlds Of The Imperium by Keith Laumer.
Next up:
IMG_4627.jpeg
 
The Word for World is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin

It starts off sounding just like a regular SF potboiler. Captain Davidson is a space frontiersman twenty-seven light years from home and battling hard to extract raw material to send back to Earth. It’s wood that the planet he’s on has to offer, so he’s cutting down trees and getting them sawn up for lumber as efficiently as he can. It’s a tough job but he’s willing to give it all he’s got. It doesn’t help that cleared forest turns to mud in the rain and their crops are lost in the erosion. They’re short on manpower and all he has a for a factotum is a dumb, slow-moving “creechie,” which is quickly forgotten as Davidson turns his mind to the arrival of a shipload of women—prime breeding stock—and dissension from the scientific team about his methods.

The reader, then, doesn’t pay much heed to the native “creechie”, either. And here is the first instance of Le Guin’s skill. We have taken on board the genre-specific mentality of space-conquering mankind, its superior intellect and physicality, and Davidson’s view of the indigenous species as ignorant and inept.

That we come to revise this misconception as the narrative progresses, and go on to fully realize the subtlety and depth of the native Athsheans’ culture and psyche, reflects as well as any story I have read a reassessment and correction of the prevailing view of dominant white western man of the black people that they made slaves, and of the indigenous populations that they robbed and exterminated.

Le Guin deliberately makes the Athsheans small, furry beings that our prejudiced homo-sapiens-centric mindset might look down on and consider as lesser-evolved. They will turn out to have a civilization as complex as the forest itself, in and with which they live in tune. In doing so, she presents this race on another planet as people, but not as a version of humans that we might compare and find wanting. Their ethics are as true as any people’s, but their communities work in different ways and they have an interesting, dual, conscious experience of reality that moves between a waking dream state and world time: what we know as normal awareness.

Le Guin doesn’t make the mistake of idolizing the Athsheans, which would only be the reverse of the coin of prejudice, but treats them with more respect than that. Introduced to violence, under Selver they appropriate it and pay the “yumens” back.

If Davidson’s exploitative, might-is-right mentality points to the fear of the unknown that terrorizes the uneducated, ignorant mind and makes him despise beings that he sees as mere brutes, this same fear is evinced when confronted with minds, again from another race, that operate on yet another plane, but this time his superiors’ superiors. He treats the representatives from the League of Worlds (forerunner of Le Guin’s Ekumen) with what amounts to the same suspicion and hatred.

Fear of the other, which includes war on the natural, living home of which we are part, inseparable and interconnected: as always, the interesting science fiction is about the here and now. It also, with the development of the League of Worlds, for example, bears hope for a more enlightened future.

As I reread The Word of for World is Forest, Selver’s character brought strongly to my mind the figure of Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe, who, alone and starving, emerged from his native territory in California in 1911 expecting to be killed by the white man. He was eventually befriended by Le Guin’s father, the anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, studied and looked after, but never again at home. When he was close to death, Ishi was brought “home” to a sunny room in Kroeber’s museum with a view of eucalyptus trees. It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the man would have wished to die in the true, natural home of his ancestral lands.

Le Guin6.jpg
 
Just last night (after midnight, so it counts ;)) I started Nightside the Long Sun - the first book in the epic, 4-volume Long Sun saga by Gene Wolfe. Now OK, I probably wasn't the full shilling at 01.00 but so far I'm finding it surreal, to say the least! So many characters, all of them strange, all of them just sketched. I'm hoping bits of back story will be told and the world they're embedded in will start to take shape. All we know is that it's very old - old enough to be a bit broken and decrepit but still basically liveable. Might report back when I've found my feet!
 
Some things I'm just reading a little bit of from time to time, like Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither. But of things I read more or less everyday:

The Hundred Days, the penultimate finished novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin series.
About 50 pages of the main text left in Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. i.e. I'm up to the part about Isaac Newton. His material on Galileo was an eye-opener. After this book, Dava Sobel's Longitude, I think.
I've returned to Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon -- I mean to read it all even if I'm many months at it.
Maier's commentary on part of the Hebrew Bible book of Kings, i.e. 1 Kings 1-11. What Christians know as the books of 1 Kings and 2 Kings is just Kings in the original text.
I've been sampling a library copy of George R. Stewart's U. S. 40.
 
Still THE BEST HORROR VOL
.9,Editor Ellen Datlow.
NPR Interview with Sarah Silverman, and
Tom Parker Bowels.
 
I have just started The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning. It was serialized in Wonder Stories in 1933. My copy is a 1979 second printing of a 1977 paperback edition, apparently the first time it appeared in book form. Supposed to be a classic of pre-Campbell science fiction.
 
BASED ON A TRUE STORY, 2016,Norm
Macdonald.

Comedy memoir.

THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN ,2023,
Susanne Hoffs.
Comedy,Romance novel.
 
Just last night (after midnight, so it counts ;)) I started Nightside the Long Sun - the first book in the epic, 4-volume Long Sun saga by Gene Wolfe. Now OK, I probably wasn't the full shilling at 01.00 but so far I'm finding it surreal, to say the least! So many characters, all of them strange, all of them just sketched. I'm hoping bits of back story will be told and the world they're embedded in will start to take shape. All we know is that it's very old - old enough to be a bit broken and decrepit but still basically liveable. Might report back when I've found my feet!
I'd best not give my full opinion on this, but just to say as the biggest fan of TBOTNS I was rather disappointed with this series. The subsequent Short Sun trilogy was better, I feel.
 
The Word for World is Forest – Ursula K. Le Guin

It starts off sounding just like a regular SF potboiler. Captain Davidson is a space frontiersman twenty-seven light years from home and battling hard to extract raw material to send back to Earth. It’s wood that the planet he’s on has to offer, so he’s cutting down trees and getting them sawn up for lumber as efficiently as he can. It’s a tough job but he’s willing to give it all he’s got. It doesn’t help that cleared forest turns to mud in the rain and their crops are lost in the erosion. They’re short on manpower and all he has a for a factotum is a dumb, slow-moving “creechie,” which is quickly forgotten as Davidson turns his mind to the arrival of a shipload of women—prime breeding stock—and dissension from the scientific team about his methods.

The reader, then, doesn’t pay much heed to the native “creechie”, either. And here is the first instance of Le Guin’s skill. We have taken on board the genre-specific mentality of space-conquering mankind, its superior intellect and physicality, and Davidson’s view of the indigenous species as ignorant and inept.

That we come to revise this misconception as the narrative progresses, and go on to fully realize the subtlety and depth of the native Athsheans’ culture and psyche, reflects as well as any story I have read a reassessment and correction of the prevailing view of dominant white western man of the black people that they made slaves, and of the indigenous populations that they robbed and exterminated.

Le Guin deliberately makes the Athsheans small, furry beings that our prejudiced homo-sapiens-centric mindset might look down on and consider as lesser-evolved. They will turn out to have a civilization as complex as the forest itself, in and with which they live in tune. In doing so, she presents this race on another planet as people, but not as a version of humans that we might compare and find wanting. Their ethics are as true as any people’s, but their communities work in different ways and they have an interesting, dual, conscious experience of reality that moves between a waking dream state and world time: what we know as normal awareness.

Le Guin doesn’t make the mistake of idolizing the Athsheans, which would only be the reverse of the coin of prejudice, but treats them with more respect than that. Introduced to violence, under Selver they appropriate it and pay the “yumens” back.

If Davidson’s exploitative, might-is-right mentality points to the fear of the unknown that terrorizes the uneducated, ignorant mind and makes him despise beings that he sees as mere brutes, this same fear is evinced when confronted with minds, again from another race, that operate on yet another plane, but this time his superiors’ superiors. He treats the representatives from the League of Worlds (forerunner of Le Guin’s Ekumen) with what amounts to the same suspicion and hatred.

Fear of the other, which includes war on the natural, living home of which we are part, inseparable and interconnected: as always, the interesting science fiction is about the here and now. It also, with the development of the League of Worlds, for example, bears hope for a more enlightened future.

As I reread The Word of for World is Forest, Selver’s character brought strongly to my mind the figure of Ishi, last of the Yahi tribe, who, alone and starving, emerged from his native territory in California in 1911 expecting to be killed by the white man. He was eventually befriended by Le Guin’s father, the anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, studied and looked after, but never again at home. When he was close to death, Ishi was brought “home” to a sunny room in Kroeber’s museum with a view of eucalyptus trees. It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the man would have wished to die in the true, natural home of his ancestral lands.

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I like this book too. Most readers praise The Left Hand of Darkness, but I'm much more a fan of Rocannon's World and The Word for World is Forest. As a history buff, I'm much more interested in reading about conflicts between different societies than gender issues.

You've practically expressed my own thoughts on this great book, as if you'd read them in my head and then put them here, and much more intelligently and elegantly than I could have done myself. But if it's all right, I'd like to expand on some other ideas you've expressed here.

You compared the attitude of the Terrans towards the Athsheans to the attitude of "dominant white western men" towards "the black people that they made slaves, and of the indigenous populations that they robbed and exterminated", and I had the same association when I read this book.

Sci-fi and fantasy are such amazing genres that allow the talented author to take similar episodes from the real history of our planet and then put them together to get the quintessence of the same situation repeated in different countries and different times.

I don't know how to explain it, because I don't know how to express my thoughts as coherently and elegantly as you do. But in very large empires, like the Spanish or the Russian, it was often the case that governors and frontiersmen in very remote areas would do absolutely horrible things to the local population, taking advantage of their remoteness, and go unpunished. Sometimes decent men (like Raj Lyubov in this book) tried to stop their crimes and wrote to Madrid and Moscow about them, but their reports usually ended up in the archives. In some cases, the rulers tried to investigate the most horrific cases, but because of distance, bribery and bureaucracy, such investigations usually ended in nothing.

The story told in The Word for World is Forest is the imaginary quintessence of such a case, transposed to the future and to another planet. But unlike the sad past, the future has the League of Worlds, which effectively protects the Athsheans from new waves of Earth colonists. There's also the Ansible, which allows messages to be sent and information to spread very quickly.

One of the things I really liked about this book is that it has a kind of realism to it. Raj Lyubov foolishly died instead of defecting to the Athsheans and falling in love with a pretty girl with fluffy green fur. Good people die in conflicts and wars, and they usually do. After all, even those good Germans who secretly hated Adolf Hitler had bombs dropped on their heads during the Second World War. I also really liked that Ursula Le Guin did not glamourize and idealize the Athsheans. There are no perfect societies or cultures, and every culture is non-ideal in its own way. But no culture deserves to be wiped out.

When I read your post, I immediately remembered that book and thought about things I didn't think about when I read The Word for World is Forest in my early teens, because my father bought it years ago. Of course, that nasty Davidson reminded me of some kind of space frontiersman from the very first pages. His self-righteousness made me sick and I wanted to punch him in the face. But I didn't pay attention to some of his character traits.

Davidson behaves very cruelly and violently towards those he considers inferior, while at the same time suspecting both his Asian boss and the Hainites of a conspiracy. Silly suspicions are usually the children of cowardice, and it is obvious that he is very afraid of the Hainites. As I now realize, the combination of cruelty to those below and cowardice to those above is the typical sign of a scoundrel. So Davidson is the quintessential example of not just a frontiersman, but a true scoundrel.

As for Ishi in Two Worlds, I read it after I had already become a fan of Ursula Le Guin. I found out that her mother had written that book, and her main protagonist was a friend of her father's, and that's when I read that book. So the order of associations was different for me.

I apologize for writing so many words here. But I think The Word for World is Forest is very underrated compared to The Left Hand of Darkness.
 
@strawman and @Peppa or anyone else!

I keep hovering over buying The Word for World is Forest but keep thinking it sounds like it's just going over the same ground as H Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy and John Scalz's re-write, Fuzzy Nation. If anyone can convince me otherwise then I'll probably finally push the button on it!
 
I'd best not give my full opinion on this, but just to say as the biggest fan of TBOTNS I was rather disappointed with this series. The subsequent Short Sun trilogy was better, I feel.
@Stephen Palmer By 'TBOTNS', do you mean The Book of the New Sun? Until you mentioned it, I hadn't heard of it, though I read now that it's the series Wolfe is most famous for! :) ) I also didn't know of the existence of The Book of the Short Sun! But since that series is set after the stories in Long Sun, I reckon I'd better stick with that for a bit!
 
I have just started The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany, first published in shorter form as part of an Ace Double in 1962. This revised and expanded version (which seems to mean that the author put back in what Ace cut out) is from 1968. My copy is a 1972 paperback. So far it's quite a mature work for a first novel by a teenager.
 
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