Anyhow. Ursula Le Guin, in an essay about utopias, discussed the concepts of yin and yang as she understood them in the process of translating Taoist texts, and said that most utopias she had encountered are yang: loud, bright, centralized, technologized, warm, outgoing, powerful, read-as-conventionally-masculine, strong. She wondered what a yin utopia would look like, quiet, weak, decentralized, not culturally focused on technology, cold, dark, inward-turning, read-as-conventionally-feminine. The world, for her, is not complete without both yin and yang. Her Always Coming Home is an attempt to write a yin utopia. Engine Summer is the other thing I've seen which comes the closest to it.
... I'll shut up now, because I really could keep going, and it's late and I am exhausted beyond measure from Readercon, which btw had gender-neutral bathrooms this year, and openly genderqueer people who aren't me, and though the work there is not done it has been definitely firmly started, so that was nice to see.
Should I read Riddley Walker? Do you think I'd like it?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regna
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-15 07:29 am (UTC)Anyhow. Ursula Le Guin, in an essay about utopias, discussed the concepts of yin and yang as she understood them in the process of translating Taoist texts, and said that most utopias she had encountered are yang: loud, bright, centralized, technologized, warm, outgoing, powerful, read-as-conventionally-masculine, strong. She wondered what a yin utopia would look like, quiet, weak, decentralized, not culturally focused on technology, cold, dark, inward-turning, read-as-conventionally-feminine. The world, for her, is not complete without both yin and yang. Her Always Coming Home is an attempt to write a yin utopia. Engine Summer is the other thing I've seen which comes the closest to it.
... I'll shut up now, because I really could keep going, and it's late and I am exhausted beyond measure from Readercon, which btw had gender-neutral bathrooms this year, and openly genderqueer people who aren't me, and though the work there is not done it has been definitely firmly started, so that was nice to see.
Should I read Riddley Walker? Do you think I'd like it?