More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 12 - June 24, 2025
Utopia may exist only in signposts to Utopia, but that’s enough; it’ll do; it’ll have to. Just as long as we have those signposts.
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
the truth is a matter of the imagination.
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
What we perceive as truth depends upon how it is presented
Power has become so subtle and complex a thing in the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it is still limited, still visible.
“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other.
“Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, Lord of Estre in Kerm, by this order forfeits title of the Kingdom and seat in the Assemblies of the Kingdom, and is commanded to quit the Kingdom and all Domains of Karhide.
“Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.”
The ekumen is the church?
All the worlds of men were settled, eons ago, from one world, Hain. We vary, but we’re all sons of the same Hearth. . . .”
Like Dune
I don’t see why human beings here on earth should want or tolerate any dealings with creatures so monstrously different.
Metaphor for transphobia?
There’s nothing in between the stars but void and terror and darkness,
Karhides go afoot, mostly; they have no beasts of burden, no flying vehicles, the weather makes slow going for powered traffic most of the year, and they are not a people who hurry.
Fremen of the snow
As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Bene gesserit, utilitarian faux wisdom
He set his question to the Weaver Odren, and the question was, On what day shall I die?
Reverend mother / bene gesserit
Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.
So everything must accord to what is likely or directly evidenced
“Do you know the story of the Lord of Shorth, who forced the Foretellers of Asen Fastness to answer the question What is the meaning of life? Well, it was a couple of thousand years ago. The Foretellers stayed in the darkness for six days and nights. At the end, all the Celibates were catatonic, the Zanies were dead, the Pervert clubbed the Lord of Shorth to death with a stone, and the Weaver . . . He was a man named Meshe.”
Same as hitchhiker's gttg. Theres no meaning in the world. Brutalist nihilism
When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unself-consciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present.
Forced humanity. But I don't see humanity in most scifi
“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. . . . Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?” “That we shall die.” “Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered,
...more
Yes, and God cannot be proven or disproven, He can only be believed by faith. To believe in an objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite. What makes life possible is hope
“There’s one man thinks me no traitor; for he gave me this.”
Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
Abortion obviates men's parental responsibilities
There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive.
Funny that this dualism isn't the case even in reality, where there are two sexes!
to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or the opposite sex.
No gender norms
must say “he,” for the same reasons as we used the masculine pronoun in referring to a transcendent god: it is less defined, less specific, than the neuter or the feminine.
God is a Father and a Son
One is respected and judged only as a human being.
Not if being a human isnt enough to be a person in the womb
Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect? Or, like Tumass Song Angot, did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped? God knows. The fact is that Gethenians, though highly competitive (as proved by the elaborate social channels provided for competition for prestige, etc.) seem not to be very aggressive; at least they apparently have never
...more
Ah, so you're assigning a pattern to the male sex and postulating it as inherent to it?
The marginal peoples, the races that just get by, are rarely the warriors.
Is this true?
the parental instinct, the wish to protect, to further, is not a sex-linked characteristic.
Total diffusion of rapid communication devices, which is supposed to bring about nationalism almost inevitably, had not done so.
The only other means of mobilizing people rapidly and entirely is with a new religion; none was handy;
Why not communism?
There was nothing in the world for this man outside Estraven. He was one of those who are damned to love once.
To love one other person romantically is a great blessing
The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was “nationalized” several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths. There is no rank by descent. Private wills are not legal: a man dying leaves his fortune to the state. All start equal.
Communism
This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so.
It does not enforce laws; decisions are reached by council and consent, not by consensus or command.
Huh, let's try it because it sounds nice! Theory trumps pragmatics!
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Stupid self-righteous wisdom!
To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Radical agnosticism? Everything I oppose. "We can't know if there's a God in the abyss, so I shall not leap" is the same as to say "there is no God, so I shall not leap"--a choice against faith. But conscientious agnosticism claims impartiality, making it more false than atheism.
There is neither darkness nor death, for all things are, in the light of the Moment, and their end and their beginning are one.
Denying death
Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
These were Orgota, people trained from birth in a discipline of cooperation, obedience, submission to a group purpose ordered from above.
But it is not human to be without shame and without desire.
