(no subject)

Ursula LeGuin keeps world-building at me. First she did the short story in the Tiptree anthology with the wholey gratuitous familly structure (That took 10 pages to explain and then had no baring on the plot) and now I've started reading "Always Coming Home" which is explicitly world building for its own sake with really gratuitious use of "alien" words just for the hell of it*. It has poetry and song and instructional tales for children and keeps talking about the dance festivals and all the things you have to write to really flesh out a semi-agricultural civilization (which had the utopia). I was starting to wonder if I was going to give up on reading it. Then! Suddenly! inter-village RAP BATTLE!

Unfortunately, their rhymes were not phresh, which may have been due to the utopia. Full marks for the inital conception, sadly it was stillborn.

I'll keep reading her books due to The Dispossessed, which was superb.


*He travelled 50 yomps** to the yatterstall*** and performed the havening****

**about 5 miles
***temple
****sacred dance, or a journay