Conference noted::sf

Just about everything Ursula K. LeGuin (your spelling was correct)
has written is very good to excellent -- up to and including "The
Dispossessed". Some of her work after that has left me cold.

My personal favorite is her "Earthsea" trilogy, which is fantasy.

As for SF, I preferred her award-winning "The Left Hand of Darkness".
(Yes I know "The Dispossessed" won awards, too.)

	Yes, I don't know how you managed it, but you missed a biggie.
	I recommend "The Lathe of Heaven" - but it's all swell.

					double-M

  Actually, "The Lathe of Heaven" was the only LeGuin book I read.  I saw the
  movie on PBS first, then read the book, then later, saw the movie again.
  Loved it all three times.
                                        S-cubed

Some of her other works are:
	The Compass Rose
	Orsinian Tales
	Rocannon's World
	The Beginning Place

... and my favorite, "The Wind's Twelve Quarters".

-b

RE: .0

I thought "The Dispossessed" and "The Left Hand of Darkness" were wonderful,
but I was less impressed with the rest of her stuff.  If you're interested
in worlds of little or no government, try "Voyage From Yesterday" by James
Hogan.

JP

my god,  read Left Hand of Darkness, it is a masterpiece.  However,
    anything by her is worth reading.  Have you tried anything by Brian
    Aldiss or Chris Priest or the master J.G. Ballard?  They are by
    far the most important modern European SF writers.  Any reply
    appreciated.
     

    
    
    
    
    
    
         
     
    

I haven't been too impressed with Christopher Priest, but I think the
only books of his that I've read are "The Inverted World" and "The
Space Machine".  The first had some brilliant descriptive passages,
but the explanation at the end for the bizarre events of the story 
was banal.  I remember little of "The Space Machine", only that it was
a sequel to Wells' "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds".

Ballard, on the other hand, is brilliant.  You've probably all seen 
his sf books, but I also recommend his autobiographical
novel "Empire of the Rising Sun", which describes his childhood in a Japanese
concentration camp in China.  Although horrific things were happening 
all around him, the fevered imagination of a twelve year old boy 
turned them all into adventures.  The scenes of devastation that keep 
cropping up in his books were all witnessed by him as a child.  He 
even saw the glow over Hiroshima, hundreds of miles away, when they 
dropped the Bomb in '45.  "In that white flash I saw the end of the 
Second World War and the beginning of the Third".

/jlr

    I, on the other hand, haven't read much of Ballard, but like
    Priest's work quite a bit. To be fair to Ballard, I read one
    of his books (THE DROWNED WORLD) when I was a tender age and
    it wasn't to my liking. I keep meaning to give his work another
    try because I was probably just too young to appreciate it
    back then. Unfortunately, I never found the time to squeeze
    him in.
    
    Priest I wasn't especially fond of either until I read a novella
    of his in F&SF back about 7 years ago, "Palely Loitering". I
    enjoyed it so much I started to read other stories of his and
    enjoyed most of them. He has a nice surrealistic series of stories
    about the "Dream Archipelago" that I like.
    
    Sliding back into the topic, the same thing that happened to me
    with Priest happened with LeGuin. Didn't like her stuff much
    until I read "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow". Boom! Clouds
    part; sun shines down; light dawns on Marblehead; the fat lady
    sang. Liked her stuff ever since.
    
    --- jerry

    Being interested in both WWII and SF, EMPIRE OF THE SUN was
    a must read.  Since a movie is in the making, this adds to
    the interest.
    
    					Don

    An addition to an OLD topic, I know...
    
    My favorite LeGuin is "The Word For World is Forest", which hadn't
    yet been mentioned here.  Shorter than a novel, some very believable
    aliens.  A tragic imperialist bigoted buffoon, Captain Davidson;
    I mean tragic in a special sense.  This character is painted with
    such broad strokes that he seems a caricature at times.  If you
    think that such a character actually could exist, congratulations,
    you're a despairingly cynical realist.  As I am, whenever this book
    reminds me of some history I prefer not to remember.  What a book!
    (...hmmm.  I think it took a Nebula in the late sixties...)
    
    Doug 

    "The Word for World is Forest" (which, I agree, is a terrific
    story, but I still prefer "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow"
    -- I think; I haven't read either of them in a long time) won
    only the Hugo Award for Best Novella of 1972.
    
    --- jerry

    re .0
    
    Just to respond to the novel "The Dispossed".  This work is a tour de
    force. LaGuin has avoided the thickets of philosphy and gotten to the
    human crux of anarchism.  Anarchism is not chaos. The Odonians have a
    very well organized society which is extremely well adapted to life on
    a planet with very little in the way of material wealth.
    
    The real wealth of the Odonian world is its *people*.  The folks are
    not artificially separated from one another by the amount of property
    anyone posses for the Odonians are non-propertarians.
    
    Yet for all that Odonian society is *not* utopian.  There are still
    those people who do power trips and power games.  Anarchism in this
    novel is a way to get down to the *human* reality of society minus all
    the propertarian artifcacts.  
    
    I doubt if LaGuin worked out all the philosophical minutea of a non
    propertarian, decentralized society but she deals with the main issues.  
    
    The reason there is not true central government an Anares (the Odonian
    Planet) is because there are no property rights to protect.  The only
    possessions that the people have are stuff like tooth brushes, pens and
    paper.  The social capital is available to all on an as-needed basis.
    Since there is no surplus to redistribute there is an absence of the
    accustomed social conflicts such as who owns what and how much should
    every one get.
    
    Every one works, every one eats and the true wealth of the Odonian
    society is the company and good regard of significant others.
    
    The life is not easy but neither is it crazy.