Ursula K. LeGuin is dead.

Ursula K. LeGuin is dead. And Ursula K. LeGuin will live forever. "Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light."

I never could decide between her and Asimov when it came to the question of who is my favourite writer of all time. I still can't decide. Maybe this, too, can be expressed in one of those dualistic terms that LeGuin would have loved? Maybe the Foundation is the means, and Anarres is the ends? Hmmm. Or maybe not.

I'm just going to quote from The Dispossessed - a book which I would rate as the best work of political fiction I have ever read. I don't fully agree with the message of the book, but this quote is really on point:

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.”