For a diplomat, Genly Ai does come across as not quite being the sharpest knife in the drawer.
we like the epics long as the winter nights
"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
#Bookstodon #TheLeftHandOfDarkness #UrsulaKLeguin #Quotes #Borders
Leaving you all with this essay about the #ExistentialDread a lot of us are experiencing, and how one person found hope through #SolarPunk! (And I am another one of those people!)
It's been a record-breaking #SolarPunkSunday, and a great way to celebrate a year of #Resiliency, #SharingInformation, #Rewilding, #Mending, #Gardening, and building the foundation for the future we all need! I'll re-post a few articles from yesterday, and then will call it a Solar Punk day! ! A special thanks to @BrambleBearGrrrauwling and @MaQuest !
A Future Dream - How solarpunk helped alleviate my existential dread.
Solarpunk pushes against the bleak Blade Runner future of cyberpunk that centers urban dystopias dominated by corporations and technology. Solarpunk imagines an #inclusive, #sustainable, possible future, where #renewable #technology meets #ecological #enlightenment.
by Sage Agee, Art by Yuumei, Spring 2023
"LIKE MANY OF MY GENERATION, I have known dread nearly my entire life. In fifth grade, I was assigned a research paper on the topic of my choice. I had begun to spend my weekends with my dad, hanging out at coffee shops in downtown Salem, Oregon, and chatting with adults about the news. We had just witnessed the 9/11 attacks, and the adults in my life seemed to be waking up to global issues, their fear palpable even to a young child.
"This was not long after the release of #AnInconvenientTruth, and I decided to interview my dad’s friends about #ClimateChange and their predictions for the future. When I turned in the finished paper, which detailed mass extinctions and natural disasters, my teacher, Mrs. Stark, wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t believe in climate change, she said, and I needed to study a different topic.
"After that, I felt myself slipping from endless curiosity about the world into a mindset where I had to prepare for the worst, and trust no one. This helped me create the shield I needed to get through adolescence. By then, I knew that my gender and sexuality didn’t align with typical gender roles, but I kept that secret close to my tape-bound chest.
"Solarpunk represents a movement from today’s reality toward a gritty, pragmatic, better future.
"Before my parents divorced, we went to an Evangelical church every Sunday, and I learned to pray each night before bed. These prayers became a place for me to put every bad thought I would have during the day, to pass them along to God. I had already developed a deep shame for my thoughts of being more boyish, and I prayed for these thoughts to end, just as I prayed for an end to natural disasters. I prayed for a better girl-mask. I prayed for a better world. My compulsive thinking followed me into my teenage years. In the ninth grade, I started an environmental justice group, hosting letter-writing parties and taking part in local protests at the Oregon Capitol, but when anti-green legislation passed into law, or when images emerged detailing islands of garbage in the ocean, I blamed myself for not doing more.
"This kind of thinking kept me from coming out as transgender. Every time I had an intrusive thought about growing facial hair and passing as a boy, my self-blame returned. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to be a girl; maybe I just needed to date boys and straighten my hair and shave my legs and wear makeup; maybe too, I needed to do more about the environment, protest more, organize more, do something more. I kept making up versions of myself. I only talked about environmental justice around my dad’s liberal friends. I only downplayed my femininity around my queer friends.
artwork depicting someone reading in a futuristic setting
"The one place where I escaped from this constant masking and shifting was in the books I consumed. At 17, I read #UrsulaLeGuin’s series of novels, the #HainishCycle, for the first time. I was instantly drawn into the worlds she created, where gender was fluid, as in #TheLeftHandOfDarkness, where some worlds grappled with climate disaster just as some had overcome it, as in #TheDispossessed. The way she experimented with the utopian, which always included queerness and dissolved gender roles, was like nothing I had read or experienced.
"When I allowed myself to fall into these fictions, my dread would turn over into an almost hopeful outlook. I understood this as fantasy, though, and never considered taking what I had read in LeGuin into my real life. Instead, I spent years dreaming of alternate realities, where I hadn’t been born into a doomed world. To cope with the real world, I would make lists of everything I would need to survive a catastrophe, and I taught myself #SurvivalSkills, like how to build a friction fire in the backyard."
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/PHXNH
#SolarPunkSunday #Earth4All #HopePunk #BuildingCommunity #Resiliency
#TheLeftHandOfDarkness is one of the best understandings i've read on the institutionalization, sterilization, and vivisection of the extended family grouping organism.
My heart amongst the rubble of the skree of Old Karhide. My heart in the scope of attatchment dissordering, mandated and multiplied.
The Left Hand of Darkness is still a masterpiece - Elle Cordova
#ElleCordova #UrsulaKLeGuin #TheLeftHandOfDarkness #ScienceFiction
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Liam O'Mara IV, PhD
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