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I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?
China Miéville
I tried City and the City but struggled with it. Will try another one! Thank you.
Embassytown is my favorite but the whole Perdido Street Station trilogy (?) is much lighter/more plot oriented than city and the city.
Cory Doctorow. He covers some stuff like this in his books. I just read "Rapture of the nerds" and am currently reading "walkaway", both are pretty good.
"Cory" 😉 His name is Cory Doctorow.
Thank you, fixed it.
Last thing i read from Cory was "little brother," a YA book about democratically opposing totalitarian regimes. I was a bit out of the target market, but it read well and was actually a real guide about how to do the above. Basically a techno anarchist cookbook embedded in a novel.
LeGuin also wrote Earthsea, which was later labeled as YA, but IIRC she felt that was bizarre. It's not like she wrote it for YA. And as far as high fantasy, it is some of the best out there, in my opinion.
I generally prefer the term "light novel" to "YA". It seems to capture the target audiences more accurately.
It was also very much a specific moment in time, where it was possible to be optimistic that the Web 2.0 explosion of decentralized access to tools for users self-publishing and distributing content to millions of readers/consumers would democratize the exchange of ideas.
And then, over the decade and a half since, the old gatekeepers were replaced with new gatekeepers, where the wild west of the unrestricted web turned into a cesspool of spam/scams and clickbait, and people organized into walled gardens controlled by corporate interests. The internet as a whole is still somewhat decentralized, but it's getting harder and harder to meaningfully participate in public dialogue without first pledging fealty (that is, signing away rights in some Terms of Service) to some digital lord in this new feudal landscape.
That's also to say nothing of the power of corporate or governmental forces to influence the discussion on those platforms, through old and new propaganda techniques that leverage existing social and technical feedback loops.
Coming back to this two months later. Really disagree with the comparison after reading Walkaway. It was more Ayn Rand in style than Le Guin. The characters were mouth pieces for ideologies, the story was half baked at best, and a lot of the nuance is entirely lost to "but look, they're the bad guys and it went wrong for them!"
Not sure I'll try again. Thanks for the recommendation, but my search continues!
Gary Doctorow
Cory, right? I was an avid Boing Boing reader back in the day, but I thought Little Brother was YA and that ain't my genre so hadn't been paying attention! Will go pick up some of his work.