What Your Fav SFF Author Says about YOU!

[Mixa]

Mx

 

[Tonyblack]

Embarrassing how few of these authors I've never heard of.

 

[Ghost]

I sense some bias about his views on Terry Pratchett readers

 

[Who's Wee Dug]

Looks like he was wearing a knock off Discworld tee shirt (I could murder a curry)that was not an authorised one as far as I know.
I have a few of the books he mentioned, only one author I did not know and two vaguely I had a fleeting glimpse of, one of which I recognised the book title but did not remember who wrote.

 

[Molokov]

That's an official t-shirt - available here: https://www.discworldemporium.com/clothing/409-i-could-murder-a-curry-t-shirt

 

[Woofb]

Mx

Generally great--my favourite author bar none is Terry Pratchett, but you don't quite seem to get that Earthsea isn't just a comfort read. LeGuin was the unusual mix of the child of two anthropologists who rarely left her native Oregon. Earthsea asks questions all the time--Taoist questions about equilibrium, racial questions about what would it be like if the barbarian hordes were white and the civilised races were mostly red-brown (I didn't visualise this at all right when I was ten)--how could life have a meaning if the afterlife was more like the classical afterlife (where the shades wander eternally without passion or memory) than the Christian heaven--the "plot" of The Farthest Shore is that all knowledge, magic, intensity and memory begins to bleed away (from not only the inhabitants of Roke and passing traders but also her crazy-powerful intelligent dragons) because one mage was so afraid to die that he began to think any action was justifiable to stay alive, including losing everything that makes life what it is.
Then she came back with Tehanu and deconstructed the entire traditional gender balance she'd originally built into the whole set-up. I haven't read Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind yet.
Her adult SF in the Hainish Cycle shows similar traits, from The Left Hand of Darkness (aliens who only show sexual characteristics during oestrus, triggered by the other party (apparently set off by her desire to write "the king is pregnant", and which seems positively prescient in the present queer culture, where brains, bodies and chromosomes can be at odds, although she didn't foresee that the biological imperative leaves no space for actual homosexuality, although both homosexuality and heterosexuality would be considered perversions as they resist the oestral cycle.
Then there's sedoretu marriage, where people marry in fours and what counts as "cheating" is culturally-determined (forget which book).
There's The Dispossessed, where tiny anarchist moon Anarres (and its endless arguments about fairness with the little resources they have, set up by the revolutionary Laia Aseio Odo (an aside here: I love the way both worlds deconstruct a patriarchal naming system--on marriage, the woman takes his first name as her middle name, while he takes her first name as his middle name), sends physicist Shevek is sent to the large capitalist planet Urras, where (from his point of view) obscene amounts of resources are spent on pandering to individual taste--making furniture curve like a woman's body, producing tiny variations on simple things like food & drink or clothes or necessary medicines which seem to support vast edifices of salesmanship and support. And there's religion, probably. Because it's easy not to be paralysed by choice if nobody has very much (although covetousness is Anarres" version of original sin: I think there's a mention of Shevek aged four pushing another child out of a patch of sunlight and saying "Mine sun!")--even if something is a plentiful resource free to all, the Anarresti have to watch out for signs of individualism. Whether Anarres is "dispossessed" of physical resources or Urras is "dispossessed" of mental and spiritual resources as they wait for the next object of desire to drift down the pike is left as an exercise for the reader.
And there are a lot of "green" issues, particularly in The Word for World is Forest (which I have not read) or Vaster than Empires and More Slow (a bunch of ill-assorted types from across the Hainish Ekumen discover something that might or might not be sinister in woodland--but it's strongly implied that the implied darkness is magnifying the fears each crew member brought with them.