#paradises lost

The birthday of the world and other stories is a collection of short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. All of these stories are about gender rols, and they specially talk about women, and most of them are part of the Hainish Cycle. Let's talk a bit about each of them:

Coming of age in Karhide was probably my favourite one. I might be biased because I love The left hand of darkness and this story is also set in Gethen, but it was trully amazing. It's about how a young Gethenian goes through their first kemmer and loses their virginity. I just love this world so much and the cultures in it, and this is a great story to learn about their society and how sexuality works there.

The matter of Seggri is set in a world where the male population is significally lower that the female, which leads to segregation and a reversion of gender roles. Men are just seen as trophies and only have reproductive purposes. That's it until some Ekumen mobiles arrive to Seggri and everything starts to change. It was so good, it had various points of view and deals with such interesting topics!

Unchosen love and Mountain ways are set in O (same planet as A fisherman of the inland sea, which I have yet to read), where marriages or sedoretu involve 4 people. The first one's about a couple between 2 boys looking for the rest of their sedoretu. One of them, tho, feels a bit trapped in the relationship and doesn't know what to do. The other story's about a sedoretu formed unconventionally. Both of them were so fun, I really enjoyed them and they made me want to know more about O.

Solitude's narrated by the dauhter of a mobile from the Ekumen, who talks about her experience growing up in a world where men and women are separated. I found this one a bit more boring than the previous ones, but it's still really interesting.

Old Music and the slave women was also so good. Old Music's a mobile from the Ekumen living in a planet where slaves have rebelled against their owners. He meets some slave women who are still working for some government officials and tries to protect them and survive through an incoming war.

The birthday of the world wasn't really for me, I didn't like it than much. This one's set in a world ruled by God, which is actually a couple between a man and a woman. The male part is dying, so two of their children will have to marry and become God themselves.

The last one, Paradises Lost, is actually a short novel. It's the only story which isn't part of the Hainish Cycle, and is set on a spaceship traveling through generations to a planet safer than Earth. Some members of the last generation that will live in the ship before its landing will have to deal with the members from a religious group that don't belive the ship's actually going to stop. This one was really interesting. The main characters were really cool, and I loved how the story changed from just showing you the everyday life in the ship to a much bigger conflict. It was great.

The first is Space Mutiny, which you might know of if you're an MST3K fan. Basically, a generation ship 13 generations out has a mutiny break out when a faction tries to divert and land it prematurely. The bones of a good story are there, but are hard to see under the crappy writing, flat acting, and rented highschool band uniforms.

The second is the show The 100. Basically, nuclear war renders the surface of the earth uninhabitable; the (alleged) only survivors live on a cobbled together space station until the planet is deemed safe to live on again. Most of the plot takes place after the first group of people lands (and I slept through most of the first season and panned the others) but what really fascinated me was the portrayal of life on the space station, this sense of closed-system survivalism.

Both works had their issues, in my opinion. Space Mutiny failed to examine the experiences and motivations of people living in the middle generation of an interstellar voyage. The 100's portrayal of the Ark Station was built on driving a Hollywood plot, not on the practicalities of living in a flying bomb shelter with whatever your ancestors packed in 200 years ago. I've often thought about trying my hand at the genre, but I don't think I will, at least not for a little while. I've just finished a short story by Ursula Le Guin and I'll be chewing on it for a while. Paradises Lost is exactly what I wanted those other works to be: thoughtful, practical, respectful of the effect the environment of a space ship would have on the culture developing within it.