massive.

didn’t mean for this to take as long as it took to read; still, perhaps good it did. there is something special in the opening of strangeness into understanding into knowledge, and the accompanying emergence of beauty that goes with it. love how emotional and fallible the inhabitants of this utopia are.

it’s lovely to see someone writing somewhere they know with such care and creativity. though i am curious to know le guin’s thoughts on anthropology as a discipline, over the years. now, when it sits in relative disrepute, it’s hard to remember what an open engagement with knowing it might have felt to the child of her parents. she seems to pick up the form uncritically, with unclear engagement with its othering (and often condescending, stereotyping, racist) tendencies. the othering, i think, might be consciously used — what is speculation, or fiction, if not the creation of another other — but the others, not so much, even though they haunt the form for me. still, it’s hard to imagine the book working as strongly as it does if it was written any other way.