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@trochee@dair-community.social
2025-07-11 05:43:25

Thinking for no particular reason today* about the peculiar genius of Stanislaw Lem
A Jew, a doctor, a Pole, in the resistance against Hitler & Stalin & capitalism, an SF legend, feared by PK Dick, lauded by UK Le Guin
…& one of the earliest AGI skeptics
>… held that information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information, and considered truly intelligent robots as both undesirable and impossible to construct.

Great quotes of the day:
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness -Eleanor Roosevelt
To light a candle is to cast a shadow -Ursula K. Le Guin
Listen to them squabble. Where's my food? -TskTsk, Ursula's Kitty
#Quotes #QuoteOfTheDay

@midtsveen@social.linux.pizza
2025-06-11 19:53:06

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. -- Ursula Le Guin
peertube.wtf/w/3BRv7a69sj3aPE3

@axbom@axbom.me
2025-06-10 14:27:48

Acceptera, lämna eller förändra det ohållbara.

Jag reflekterar över varför jag gör det jag gör och hur jag vill nyttja min tid. Mitt skrivande är mitt kall, och tillsammans med mina modeller och visualiseringar är det så just jag kan bidra. Nu kan du som vill och har förmåga också backa det arbetet.

"År 1973 skrev Ursula K. Le Guin sin prisbelönta berättelse De som går bort från Omelas. Denna korta science fiction-berättelse beskriver en idyllisk stad, Omelas, där alla mä…

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2025-06-09 16:48:12

"""
"[…] Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me."
"Why not?" Tenar demanded.
Taken aback, Moss said simply, "Why, what man'd marry a witch?" And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?"
They split rushes.
"What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside."
Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, "But if he's a wizard—"
"Then it's all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty." She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing."
"And a woman, then?"
"Oh, well, dearie, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark." Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?"
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu)

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-06-28 13:30:10

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading