thiccnick Gaagaagiins I bought October when it came out, but found the font size too small for the large pages of the book, which is a problem I’ve never experienced in any book ever! So I found a PDF (I bought the physical book, so I don’t feel bad) and plan to use my E-Reader for it and adjust the font size. Is this what getting old is like???
I would hope that Comrade China would understand if you had to pirate the book even without buying it! But yes, I would say that absolves you completely. I mean, even ROMs are at least sort of technically legal if you own a legitimate copy, right…?
If getting old means that you accept the e-reader is an exceptional bit of tech, then I am unequivocally an old person. Especially now that e-ink screens combined with backlights you can put low enough to read in a dark room means that you can get weeks of use on a single charge of its battery, and hold dozens if not hundreds of books, in something that fits in one hand.
As someone whose main method and motivation to read in a functional sense is to read until I am relaxed and sleepy enough to drop what I’m reading on my face, and who also has been primarily reading doorstopper sized genre fiction for the last 20 years, I will never, ever go back to reading physical books.
Also, I absolutely love Ursula K LeGuin. Left Hand of Darkness is also wonderful, radical in a way completely different from The Dispossessed, and fascinating in how it is science fiction but only just barely in many ways. Earthsea is also an extremely good series, especially with how almost humble the first book feels and where and how the series develops from that starting point. She has a great foreword in the edition of one of her books that I’d read where she talks about the limitations of calling things “genre fiction” or “science fiction/fantasy” that I hope you’ll come across if you read more, and how she felt “speculative fiction” was a more apt title in general, that I thought was very enlightening with how her works in those genres end up being like.
I think my favourite by her is the shorter novel The Word for World is Forest, forewarning there is some heavy subject matter (cw: extreme sexual violence, torture, extreme xenophobia as stand-in for racism) but in the way it makes sense because it’s a thinly veiled allegory on colonization. Brutal, but also poignant, and direct in its messaging but in a way that is distinctly unashamed of saying what it says with directness. Sometimes you don’t want things to be overly metaphorical, you know?
A great destination after you’ve read all you want of Le Guin’s works is from also dearly departed Scottish author Iain M. Banks and his Culture series, which has much more of a flair for post-scarcity utopia. The main point of interest there is how Banks thinks up ways in which a utopian civilization can still encounter interesting problems!