In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, as part of our 2026 criticism special issue, Tristan Beiter introduces us to the Ursula K. Le Guin book club he’s been taking part in. The group discusses the book club as a forum for, and a practice of, criticism. How does it differ from the academy, from more formal venues, from fan spaces—and what kinds of critical activity and insight do those differences equip it uniquely to deliver? 

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 20: On Book Clubs

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be ceding the floor for some very special guests; but more on that shortly. 

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

In this episode, and as part of our 2026 criticism special issue, Strange Horizons reviewer Tristan Beiter introduces us to the Ursula K. Le Guin book club he’s been taking part in for a couple of years. Alongside its other members, they discuss the book club as a forum for, and a practice of, criticism. How does it differ from the academy, from more formal venues, from fan spaces—and what kinds of critical activity and insight do those differences, equip it uniquely to deliver? 

The group—which also includes Emma Pernudi-Moon, Tymek Chrzanowski, and Jude Beiter—discuss what it has been like arriving at a particular reading of Le Guin’s work in the round, how being part of a book club has affected and influenced their reading—and what they’ve learned about books, community, and even themselves in the act of group reading. 

I found the whole thing such an interesting discussion. I think you will, too. So, let me hand over to Tristan Beiter.

[Musical Sting] 

Tristan Beiter: Hello, everyone. I’m excited to talk to you about the Ursula Le Guin book club that we’ve been doing. Let’s start by having everyone introduce themselves briefly. 

So I’m Tristan Beiter. 

Jude Beiter: And I’m Jude Biter. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I am Tymek Chrzanowski.

Emma Bee Perudi-Moon: I’m Emma Pernudi-Moon.

Tristan Beiter: And we have, for the last two years, been engaging in an on and off, mostly over the summer, group read-through of the bulk of Ursula K. Le Guin’s work. 

We’d been talking amongst ourselves about the way that this book club has gone and how it’s shaped our experience of both her work in particular and speculative fiction more broadly. So where I wanted to start was by asking everyone to sort of chime in about what sense we have as a group about the book club as a thing that exists in the world, culturally and as an experience that we’ve been participating in. And how has that shaped how we’ve read Le Guin? 

I know one way into this is that, when we read The Left Hand of Darkness, we talked about our different experiences reading that book in a classroom setting versus in this setting. But I think we can address anything about how this has shaped our readings. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. I mean, for me, the first thing that stands out about this endeavor of a book club is that it’s very … it gives a very concentrated direction to the reading. Like, normally, you know, I read a lot of speculative fiction, but it can be somewhat diffuse and move between different things in different series at different times. We’ll take large breaks, but when we have this sort of concentrated book club, for the three months or so in the summer while we’re doing it, it’s very focused.

And we’re moving through a lot of this material in a relatively short period of time and focusing on it, which gives a very concentrated look into it and really engaging with it. And, by the nature of having to, of bringing things to, a discussion with other people, you—I at least—find myself pulling on things to remember and bring up and discuss, more so than I do in just my personal reading as I’m just, you know, enjoying the story on its own.

It gives a deeper level of engagement. Because I want to have something coherent to bring to the group.

Tristan Beiter: That makes a lot of sense. Jude, Emma, how has this affected your reading, do you think? 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think for me, as like the primary place where I engage at this point in my life with literature is still school, the kind of different environment that is the book club as a place—where it’s still reading together, it’s still a communal engagement, and there’s still real serious discussion to be had, but there’s no expectation of “solving” the text or figuring it out—it’s just a matter of like, we come together to enjoy and engage communally in like a de-hierarchized or non-hierarchized space, which is very different from my experience in the classroom as an environment, where there are like definitive power dynamics at play and there’s an expectation to perform intelligence as a part of your reading—as opposed to the opportunity to just have the sentiment of like, “This was really emotionally effective for me” be a complete sentence in the space of the book club. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I’ll agree with that. I feel like it, for me, feels similar to a lot of focused, seminar-style literature classes I’ve had where we’re, you know, kind of diving deep on one topic or author but again without the aspect of performing being good at reading book! And the fluidity between, “here are all the serious ways I think about this as a dramaturge, here are the patterns I’m seeing” and “I think there’s a motif here—I truly do not understand it!” or being able to join the discussion, like, “I actually have only read half the book!” But I don’t need to pretend that I have in fact read the whole book as one might feel the need to do in a university setting where this is like rated. 

It is much more about, for me, the pleasure of finding patterns in the work and how that can kind of come together communally with everybody’s observations. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. I wanna second what you’re all saying. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, this really came up when we were talking about The Left Hand of Darkness, which I know both Jude and I, at least, have read in classroom settings specifically. And in those cases, the classroom ended up feeling like a much more combative space than a collaborative one. There was this sense that, if people had differing readings, we needed to come to a class consensus of what the … maybe not the right reading, but the best reading was, in a way that I don’t feel in the book club environment. 

And also where I feel like it’s easier to engage with different aspects of the text. Like, I know when I was in that classroom setting, I was really excited to talk about The Left Hand of Darkness’ structure, and its use of documents as a formal object; but because of the formality of the space you needed a higher critical mass of participants interested in any given aspect of the book in order to justify talking about it. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And also, you kind of need to … there’s almost a justification for each book in a classroom setting. Like, “This is why we’re talking about this one.” And usually for Left Hand of Darkness, I feel like it gets overwritten as like, “Oh, this is … we’re talking about gender, guys! This is the sort of thing we have to get at from this book. This is the nut we have to crack of, like, how exactly is it working?” And also, interestingly for me, I feel like there’s an absence of worrying about or poking at the political efficacy of the book.

Of course, I’m very interested in looking at what the books are doing politically, but there’s less of a worry about is this strategy effective? And it’s more about kind of letting them be, I think, in a way—because they’re already, we have already chosen these books, they haven’t been chosen for us—to kind of follow the book club structure a bit. I think there’s something about it being one author that is also doing this, but I’m honestly not sure what that is. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely want to second what Emma just said about the classroom space kind of labeling The Left Hand of Darkness as the gender book, and then the expectation that we would decide as a class whether or not this was an effective representation of gender non-conforming people. And in that space for me, as a gender non-conforming person, there was an expectation of like, well, “What do you say? Um, like, is this an effective representation of non-binary people?” And that kind of expectation to decide is absent from the much less combative and demanding environment of the book club. 

And so we could just have the discussion of, “She is doing this thing with gender” without having to worry about whether or not this is the most effective way to do it. We could just talk about what was actually happening. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It’s interesting talking because, if I remember, as we talked about Left Hand of Darkness, we of course did mention genders—like, “Ursula is doing things with gender here”—but it was a fairly minor part of our overall discussion, as we followed threads as folks that are all fairly queer and enmeshed in gender as a construct and deconstructing that. Yes, this was written in the seventies. We see that there is something going there. She’s doing something with gender, but there are other things that are more interesting for us to talk about. So it did come up, but we didn’t feel obligated to focus on it in a way that a classroom might frame around it.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: That’s true. Like, the whole kind of pseudo Cold War vibe that’s going on in the contrast culture, I feel like it’s so easy to overlook. 

Jude Beiter: We talked a lot more about that and honestly, I think we ended up speaking about gender more in relation to books where there’s less stuff very clearly happening. Like, when we read Earthsea, we talked a fair amount about gender in that context, and I just think there was more freedom in the space to kind of follow alternative threads. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point—that by being outside of the classroom justification, where something needs to be the Whatever book, we were able to sort of track connections across different works. 

I think your point about tracking the gender and sexuality relationships of Earthsea, which on the surface are such a small part of what’s happening in those novels, but in another way are super essential—like, Tenar was her first female protagonist. And I think that that question wouldn’t have come up necessarily in the context of reading The Tombs of Atuan in, like, a survey of children’s literature. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think it also—the having it all be focused on one author—removes the pressure of each book to sort of justify where Ursula K. Le Guin is an author that you should pay attention to and read, and that has these certain themes in her work.

Like, you don’t have to pull out every theme from every work. It’s much more, “Oh, we can kind of see a cumulative process.” Especially when you consider how many years that these worlds are unfolding over within the fiction and also in her own life, you get sort of this longer, whole tapestry of these things that the author keeps thinking about and returning to that I found enriching as a reading experience. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. There’s a long time between works like A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness and the latest stuff, things like The Telling or The Farthest Shore. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Or even just like the big sort of almost-trilogy split in Earthsea and seeing the way that her … like, following this trajectory of these themes over the course of her career.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I wonder as a related question to this: You mentioned, Emma, about Le Guin as a valuable author who is worth reading, and of course you get that when you encounter her in a classroom setting as well, or when you notice that the Library of America has been putting out editions of all of her work. But I was also thinking about that in terms of the book club as an object—since speculative fiction book clubs happen, but I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, when I think of the book club, I think of like middle-aged people reading realist fiction as sort of the default model.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think about my local library where I can physically see the book club kits in the mezzanine, and also see the people coming in to do their book clubs—and it is generally middle-aged to older women reading famous, bestselling, like you said realist literary fiction. Somehow the prototypical book club book that I have in my head is Joy Luck Club, I don’t know why that is. When I hear book club, that’s what I think of. 

Jude Beiter: As soon as you said Joy Luck Club, I was like, yep, that is the prototypical book club book! And I think for me, part of the real joy of this experience—and also part of where it has so much like critical value for me as a scholar—has been in taking up this mode that is associated with kind of realist fiction and being, like, “What if we make it a space for the speculative, choose to use the modality in a new way? What can we learn about speculative fiction that way?” 

And I think one of the things that I feel like I have learned about speculative fiction by borrowing this modality to engage with it—at least what I have learned about Ursula Le Guin—is how like deeply communal her novels are in their plots and in their structure. Even novels which have a clear main character—which not all of them do—have extended casts and emphasize community in ways that I don’t know that I would’ve noticed if I was not engaging with it in this space that was all about finding a casual community in reading.

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: The communal reading and interpretation of these stories, and following a meandering path through them, feels very thematically appropriate for Le Guin. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I agree with that. And I feel like it also echoes with the idea of less pressure and performativity, the feeling of complete sentences—“Oh, I agree with that! I also noticed that!”—whereas in a classroom setting, that’s kind of not worth saying, that’s like taking up too much of your hour and a half—if you’re lucky!—discussion time. And, because of the reoccurring nature and the fact that we can have the discussions that kind of expand as we like, and we can return to material, as we focus on the book that we’ve just read, but we’ll often analyze previous works in the context of a new work. This creates this, I think, beautiful space for going-and-returning structure, which I think shows up a lot in her work. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, in the spirit of that, that sort of brings us to the other big thing that I wanted to make sure we talked about today, which is the beginning of the project—where we started not with The Left Hand of Darkness or with her first novels, but we started with Always Coming Home. Part of that—I was very open at the time!—was because I was hoping to find an excuse to read it, because it had been on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I knew it had all kinds of interesting formal stuff that I was really excited about. But I think that it’s shaped this project maybe more than I was expecting when I suggested that we start there. And what we’ve been saying just now about community and circling back feels really in line with the thematics of that novel. And so I was wondering if other people had thoughts on how starting there has shaped their experience of reading her work. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad … I literally was going to bring up, that we started with Always Coming Home. It, yes, it’s so thematic and I feel like, again, in a way that makes a lot of sense as we talked about each set of novels, of books, that we read.

I feel like the specter of Always Coming Home always came up because it’s such an encapsulation of her work in such a good frame, I think, for engaging with it. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I mean, I think that Always Coming Home was such a beautiful starting point for this project. And the way that she developed this society within that novel … almost like, in a weird way, I felt at various times when we were doing the book club discussions about later novels, that we were engaging, not unlike the Kesh: This sense of, “Well, we’ll simply treat everything as though it is real.” Which I think is a foundational part of both Kesh society and how her speculative fiction operates. 

It’s not even the suspension of disbelief—just, like, throw out the concept of disbelief entirely. Just think it is true. And if you can do that, then you can engage with her works more fully. This kind of mode of storytelling as something really fundamental to the way people connect with each other, I think, is something that I really felt throughout the experience of this book club—of reading together as an opportunity to learn from people, as scholars and as people, all at once just felt very connected to how Always Coming Home operates? Like, both thematically and structurally. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, and the freedom to pull in different things really easily I think also, yeah, mirrors that structure of Always Coming Home where it’s this sort of diffuse collection of things, this ethnologue with poetry and plays and longer narratives and little pictures of guinea pigs—where, you know, because we are a group of friends fundamentally communicating informally and over text, we can have like multi-threaded conversations where we’re kind of having multiple things going on at the same time. We’re referencing earlier works, but also completely outside things we wouldn’t necessarily pull on, pop culture connections, in a classroom or reference … talking about the internet posting  culture that exists around novels or characters. Like, I remember posting some things about, as we encountered them, memes of The Left Hand of Darkness and whatnot, and then having a larger conversation. That is part of what we’ve been doing in response to [the work] that feels very in line, structurally, with Always Coming Home. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And I didn’t join for Always Coming Home, but an exciting thing about the book club format is I can still feel its influence through all of your analysis of it, and of how it keeps coming up. So I feel enriched by this text, even though I haven’t had my own experience with it yet. But excitingly, it doesn’t feel like the classroom version of like, “You haven’t done the reading—quick, assemble something that looks like you understand it!” I can allow my partial understanding to be true. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I think, let me see if I can find my—there it is—my copy, as what you’re saying about partial understanding I feel like is also sort of endemic to both the book club form and to starting with that novel. 

I’m looking for a particular passage. If I can find it really quickly, early on, we get the very first bit where Pandora arrives. Pandora worries about what she is doing, and it ends, “Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.” And I feel like, because we’re all talking together, because we’re all building on partial understanding and acknowledging the partiality of our understanding—since, in real practice in the classroom, understanding is partial, right? In real practice, when you write or read academic work, it’s not this totalizing, absolute knowledge of something, but it pretends it is—I feel like the book club form doesn’t require that we pretend that, and starting with Always Coming Home in part is about that, but also it’s just a really hard novel.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Novel” in quotes!

Tristan Beiter: I definitely felt like it’s the one that, even after reading it really carefully and making notes and talking with everyone about it, I came away being like, “Yeah. Got some tiny fraction of what there is to get out of that book.” And I feel like that was also really empowering for me, having that right away be like, “OK, I don’t need to solve the book.” Because we started with an unsolvable book. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It definitely feels like the sort of text you could return to over and over and over again and not plumb all of its depths. 

Jude Beiter: And the format allowed us to … like, I think the way we kept coming back to Always Coming Home in order to theorize the rest of her work through the lens of that book was really indicative of the way that we hadn’t solved it, and there was more to discuss and we all knew it and could admit it. And that allowed us to keep returning.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Real travel is returning,” I mean, is the quote from The Dispossessed, yes?

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. I feel like I also really … I mean, I’ve had an an English Literature background. Jude and Tristan, you have as well, obviously. And then, Tymek, you’ve been in some, some English Literature environments, like a lot of us, but I dunno, I feel like your linguistics training comes out a bit. But having that even little bit diversity of perspective being held as an equal way of knowing, or trying to, I found very valuable. 

And it’s kind of come into our daily life in a way. For context, Tymek and I are partners that have been together for ten years, but now he will read me Ursula K. Le Guin poems, or talk about things from Always Coming Home, as kind of part of the fabric of our daily life and connection, in a way that I think wouldn’t have come about without the book club in the same way. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely feel similarly about the way that like Tristan and I as siblings talk about these books in a very quotidian, non-organized way. I feel like Ursula Le Guin and Always Coming Home come up constantly when we talk to each other about things in the world. And I think that this, that the informality of the environment of the book club, is part of what allows that seepage into really established interpersonal relationships—that she can just kind of like come in and join those relationships and those conversations and seep into daily life in that way. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. Because the book club ultimately … Like, a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is, even if you are very passionate about the academics that you’re pursuing—you’re, you know, you’re in a class because you want to be, and not because it’s a requirement—even in that sort of best-case scenario, the structure of the academics is a little bit of an abstraction. You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends and we can engage at whatever level we want to.

So, fundamentally, we’re here because we’re excited and passionate about it, which breeds this deeper connection where we’re doing it because we’re invested. So we’re pulling on all of the things that we find most interesting. I think that’s part of the value of it, because it lets us bring … it lets these conversations continue to influence and affect our lives and perspectives beyond what might be in the classroom.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. And I think related to that is that, even when we have given ourselves deadlines, right—like, “Oh, we need to have these books read by such and such date so that we can actually like meet and talk about them!”—it’s never work. For those of us in the discipline of English, criticism is work, right? It’s exciting work. It’s valuable work. It’s work I wouldn’t give up the chance to do for the world. But it’s still work. There are still these external pressures to produce a product that adheres to the rules of the university. 

And I feel like the book club has allowed us to sort of bridge fan excitement—because we’re all fans of speculative fiction—with a critical attitude that is certainly findable in fan spaces other than things like book clubs, but I find that when you go online and you’re on Bluesky and everyone’s microblogging, the way fan engagement works there are pressures that prevent criticism from the level of intensity it reaches when it’s work. And I feel like the book club, for me at least, has allowed me to sort of escape some of those tensions without making it back into work.

[Musical Sting]

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I really like the feeling of kind of living with and alongside these books that is created by the book club—and then the fact that it is a book club of friends, of people that know each other and interact outside of this—that makes them shared cultural objects in a way that can be, honestly, pretty hard to get with books outside of very popular children’s literature. 

Like, a lot of the time—Tristan, you may understand this—as a child who read many books, it could be sort of an isolating activity. There were all of these worlds and people and ideas that I was thinking about, then I had to find somebody else who had read the darn book! We’re definitely using some book club structure, but there’s also a way in which it feels to me like a friend/fan community similar to, “Oh, we all watch this TV show. We all kind of are trying to keep up with it in a certain way.” The ways that and movies are more readily shared in this kind of current media environment, and how it can be kind of hard to share a book because it can feel like a big obligation. Even if you read a book, you’re like, “Hey, I think this would be really meaningful to you.” You give it to someone and then they’re like, “Oh, I need to read this book. I need to commit to this project.” And this has a looseness to it that helps create a sharing, I don’t know. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I think both Tristan’s point about work and your point, Emma, about sharing and about the lack of obligation I really experienced through this book club—in part because there was always a fluidity of expectations. 

I happened to really dislike Le Guin’s short fiction in general, and so when we got to her books of short fiction, I was like, I very much felt like pushing my way through this would be work, and that’s not the point of this. I wouldn’t be sharing and engaging the same way that I have been with these novels. And so I simply won’t read them. I’ll step away from Tales from Earthsea, for example, and allow that space to exist uncorrupted by the pressure, by the sense of pressure and obligation, without me for a little bit. And then I’ll come back in when we get back into work that I want to read.

And I think that fluidity and that sense of “there is something about the enthusiastic engagement that is worth preserving,” even within the group, even at the cost of not actually participating myself, that I think really speaks to how resonant the community is.

Tristan Beiter: Mm-hmm. I wonder if that’s related to what I was saying about fan spaces. Like, larger fan spaces can be really energizing, but they also come with built-in FOMO, right? If you’re not going to the events, or if you miss the episode or what have you. And I feel like one of the things about the book club is that the intimacy of forming a book club and setting out to read things with a defined, relatively small group of people is that that stops being a problem. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. And there’s not the … In a larger sort of fan place, there’s an assumption that you will want to or have consumed everything and know everything. Like, you know, the way that the internet is, where we all have access to comprehensive wikis, so you can all know the lore, sculpts a very particular, I think, attitude towards those things. 

Whereas, you know, here, even if you don’t read Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin’s work and the work of the book club here is that you still can participate and understand—because you have this through-line of understanding the themes and vibes and the history of the both diegetically in the world and also of her career, rather than like, “Oh, I have all the details of the lore.” 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And she’s a very lore-resistant writer in the way that she builds her histories. 

Jude Beiter: I also think that the really rigorous critical engagement of the book club is part of what allows for that like fluidity. Also in that need to, that lack of need to, know all of the lore in the way of the larger fan space—because there’s not a distinction being drawn between the  serious and casual reader in the context of the book club. There is no casual reader and there also is no serious reader. There was just the book club reader.

Who steps into the space and for whom? “Here’s this really complex thought about the thematics of this book” and “that scene made me cry” are like equally valuable whole sentences, and that’s not always the case in larger fan spaces in my experience, where you can’t engage as deeply in the criticism. And so there’s an expectation to instead prove fanhood through literacy, through like lore literacy. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think that’s an interesting difference both against fan spaces, but also going back to academia. This ability to, as people have said, to be like honest of, “I don’t, you know, this one doesn’t interest me.” Or “I, you know, I tried and didn’t get through it.” And there’s not the shame and also kind of implicit—not implicit, often explicit!—failure to do the “proper thing” where you have like grades and things on the line. So that is another contrast with the academic there, is that it’s, you know, you can … this moving in and out is more accessible.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: It’s non-evaluative. In a fan space, when you choose not to engage with part of the work and say, “Hmm, this isn’t really for me,” you might be saying kind of implicitly like, “This isn’t worth considering. This isn’t the important part of the canon.” Sometimes, even if you’re not saying that, it can get kind of taken that way, like in academia—kind of these ideas around what is worth engaging with, what has value.

And here, I like that we can step away from something or partially understand something, and not be saying anything about its value as a work of art or as an analyzable piece of literature. It kind of already has that innately. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and it makes me think about the sort of recurring microblogging discourse about whether or not to be a science fiction fan you need to read whatever. Usually that means like the men of the Golden Age: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, et cetera. But sometimes you’ll see, more radically, claims that you do or don’t need to read anything older than five years old or what have you. 

Often, very often, on both sides of that argument you see things couched as like, “Well, Heinlein was a reactionary and so you can skip him, he doesn’t matter because he was bad” or “this novel can’t be skipped because it was so important to the history of the genre.” And you see these same logics in academia. 

Obviously Le Guin is a major author that has lots of scholarship on her and is often one of those names that people say you “have to read.” But I feel like, by forming it as a book club through this casual but intimate and intense engagement, we can sort of, as you said, opt out of those questions of value by saying, “We wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t have value, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to experience everything exactly the same way.”

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think there’s also something to be said, because we’re engaging with like big sweeps of her work—you know, last summer we did Always Coming Home and then just did all of Earthsea, and then this year we did most of her Hainish novels—we kind of avoid of that, like, “Oh, what you must read.” Because like when people talk about Le Guin, I think, what comes up is people will generally talk, in my experience, about The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. They might talk about Wizard of Earthsea, and probably, you know, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” will come up. But no one talks about Planet of Exile. No one talks about City of Illusions.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Which they should be because they’re wild, yeah!

Tymek Chrzanowski: But like, because we’re engaging with this in this … like, seriously, but also in this fannish way, and going in this broad sweep, I think we get to engage with some of these quote-unquote lesser works that are exciting and do interesting things, even if none of us were in love with City of Illusions.

But it does interesting things and you can see how themes in there and threads that get pulled on and plucked and mature across her work. Which is really interesting. Because you know, I think there’s a lot of the DNA of Always Coming Home in City of Illusions despite it not being, you know, I think nearly as comprehensively interesting, exciting, and innovative. The Prince of Kansas and his fortune-telling future loom is extremely Always Coming Home, and the Forest People, the Plains People that they encounter: They are really, I think, a prototype in some ways of the Condor People from Always Coming Home. And so you can see these threads and this maturation.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Mm-hmm. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Which is really neat!

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And I like doing that without the pressure to Understand Le Guin and put her together as a puzzle or, “Oh, we’re doing this to try to understand science fiction.” The lack of a larger goal like that is really useful to me. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. We’ve mostly actually answered the third question that I had about how doing the book club has sort of shaped our engagement with the rest of Le Guin’s oeuvre with the things that we didn’t sort of call out as touchstones. And so I guess I just wanted to see if anyone had any closing thoughts they wanted to wrap up with as we finish this up and also start thinking about next summer—if we want to continue doing this, since at this point we will have read most of her novels. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Try it out. You can, too! 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, I would say it has been very interesting and valuable.

I think, you know, like I said, you could do this with other people, I’m sure, but I think Le Guin is a really great place and has a lot of things to offer. Like, I’ve independently because of this, read through her poetry. Currently I live in Portland, where Le Guin lived and worked for most of her life. There’s currently a little exhibition at the Oregon Contemporary about her life and her work, which was really interesting and cool to visit. Yeah, it’s been very valuable. I’ve come to really appreciate Le Guin as an author through this process. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think that just having the … to kind of echo Emma, like, you can too! This is so valuable as a process method. No matter what your actual background in literary analysis and criticism is, just the work of sitting down and reading together has been such a valuable and engaging and caring activity. That has really been very enriching.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Also living in Portland, and with Le Guin’s relationship to Oregon as a place, I think that has also been very valuable to me. Because that’s not a thread I would’ve pulled or picked up on. But Tymek really got a lot of that, especially through the poetry, and how he’s been able to informally share that with me. So I think there’s something to … kind of getting specific with it in terms of place or cultural ties that you might share with other folks? 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh yeah. I would definitely say, if you have never read someone who’s really contemporary to where you are in space and time, this has been a really valuable experience for me as someone who largely grew up in Oregon and can recognize the particularities in Le Guin’s work that I think are connected to, you know, where she lived and grew up. It is worth looking for authors and also poets—other takeaway, more people should read poetry!—authors and poets and people that have done work where you are connected to, where you lived and grew up. I did not realize how exciting and powerful of an experience that can be before this.

Tristan Beiter: I definitely want to co-sign all of that and thank you all for talking through these thoughts about this experience with me. I look forward to continuing to talk about books with all of you. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yay!

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yay!

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. This is definitely a shout out for Tristan in particular for organizing this process and idea. It’s been great. [Laughter]

[Musical Outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. 

Do dig into the rest of the Criticism Special. I’m off to form a book club. See you next time.