Me and Ursula Le Guin, but mostly me

When someone dies, particularly someone about whom one has strong emotional feelings, it's not uncommon to come across sudden things that trigger surges of these feelings. I started calling these things "Mom bombs" because stuff would pop up that reminded me of Mom, or specific things about Mom and, like an internal game of Jenga, it's hard to pull on one of these things without the whole edifice crashing down around me.

This "explains" (and I use the term loosely) why I found myself crying at Taura_g's and my break-up date when she ordered cheesecake. That being one of a very few desserts Mom made regularly. (I don't blame Shaz and neither should you; there was no malice or foreknowledge involved.)

Ursula Le Guin brought me another Mom bomb. I grew up in a sci-fi household. My father was a charter subscriber to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/). We had crates and boxes of the old issues stored away, most of which Dad gave to another collector who had lost theirs in a flood. But not before I read hundreds of them. There were also shelves of then-classic SF: Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and so on - the old white dudes who defined speculative fiction prior to the British New Wave.

Mom wasn't into any of that - she treated it with her usual loud scorn and vulgar insults. Imagine my surprise, then when I found that the small shelf she kept in the adults' shared workroom contained what was then the Earthsea Trilogy (Tehanu didn't come out until 1990 and remember I'm old). Also the Left Hand of Darkness.

I waited until Mom was in one of her good moods and asked if I could read them. Grudgingly, yes. But I was not to take the books out of that specific room, and could only use one of the prescribed bookmarks and no food and if I damaged them... well, you get the picture.

So I sat on the uncomfortable couch bench in there and read them. Once - I was never permitted to go back and reread them. I disobeyed her in order to reread Left Hand of Darkness again because it was something I couldn't wrap my adolescent brain around in just one reading.

I did ask Mom why she had them; to be honest, I forget what she told me about how they were acquired but I do remember she told me she kept them because they were "different" from Dad's preferred SF - even from the newer names appearing on Dad's shelves: Bester, Ballard, and at least one Moorcock. Dad wasn't much for Moorcock, but FSF published a lot of the New Wave authors and Dad would try to find at least one novel from people who got short stories there he liked.

Even from that, Le Guin was "different". That's all Mom would say; I'm not sure whether she'd ever read enough of the Dad stuff to articulate differences or if "different" was just her code for "I like it and I can't articulate why."

And there would end the story except I've now reread "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" twice in two days. It is one of my favorite short stories of all time, right up there with "Gernsback Continuum" and "We See Things Differently" for Things What Punch You In The Cerebellum and I had forgotten or buried one little thing.

Y'see, when I first read the story I wondered why people walked away from Omelas. Why not organize and try to right the wrong? Why didn't the people who thought it was wrong get together and at least protest? Forgive me, but my nightly television was filled with scenes of anti-war protests, Kent State, and eventually Watergate hearings. I never could get an answer - certainly not from Mom. But also not from other people.

I might be a troublemaker.