Remembering and celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin
(Header Photo Credit: Gorthian. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
The first book trilogy I ever read was Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant Earthsea series, where the young Ged (his Hardic name is Sparrowhawk) goes to wizard school and strives to equalize the balances of his world. I was in 7th grade, and Le Guin’s fully-realized island world captivated me. I read the series twice. I wandered around school with dogeared paperbacks in my pocket.
Although I was already a fan of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne (Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still one of my favorite movies), Le Guin’s Earthsea kickstarted my lifetime love of science fiction and fantasy stories. I spent many hours in genre book clubs throughout junior high and high school, enjoying novels and short stories by great writers such as Vonnegut, Heinlein, Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Asimov and, of course, Le Guin.
"Once I learned to read, I read everything. I read all the famous fantasies – Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows, and Kipling. I adored Kipling’s Jungle Book. And then when I got older I found Lord Dunsany. He opened up a whole new world – the world of pure fantasy. And … Worm Ouroboros. Again, pure fantasy. Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov, things like that. But that didn’t have too much effect on me. It wasn’t until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon – but particularly Cordwainer Smith. … I read the story “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, and it just made me go, “Wow! This stuff is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that. —Ursula K. Le Guin (“Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin,” About.com, Sci-fi/Fantasy via the Wayback Machine,, November 18, 2012)"
Born in 1929, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was a child of the Great Depression and a teenager during World War II, a woman whose early life was forged during two of the greatest sociopolitical upheavals of the 20th century. A daughter of anthropologists, Le Guin was fascinated by the functioning of human society, politics and culture. She wrote dozens of award-winning novels and short stories in addition to essays, poetry and children’s books. She received multiple Nebula Awards, Locus Awards and World Fantasy Awards. She was named a Grandmaster of Science Fiction in 2003 (one of only a few female authors to be given this prestigious title) and was honored with The National Book Foundation Medal for Contribution to American Letters in 2014.
One of Le Guin’s great strengths was her ability to use alien environments to tackle the knotty issues of human identity and culture. Myriad aspects of the human condition are investigated under her microscope, such as anthropology, environmentalism, anarchism, feminism, sociology and Taoism. She also wanted her main protagonists to represent the majority of humans, so most of them are people of color, though she told Salon that she felt this fact kept publishers from illustrating those characters on her book covers. Salon also states that “Le Guin has accepted a few labels over the years as ‘approximately accurate’: novelist, radical, feminist, Taoist and, more recently, Western writer.”
Le Guin passed away on January 22, aged 88. The outpouring of grief and respect was immediate, expressed in dozens and perhaps hundreds of tribute and in memoriam articles posted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, The New York Times, Strange Horizons, John Scalzi at the Los Angeles Times and many more. Many popular authors — Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Iain Banks and David Mitchell among them — have long hailed Le Guin as a major influence on their development and work. The New York Times hailed her as “America’s greatest living science fiction writer,” but she vastly preferred being called simply “an American novelist.”
"There’s some innate arrogance here: I want to do it my way. I don’t want to be reduced to being “a sci-fi writer.” People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and the hell with it. I won’t be pushed. … I published as a genre writer when genre was not literature. I paid the price, you could say. Don DeLillo, who comes off as literary without question, takes the award over me (at the 1985 National Book Awards) because I published as genre and he didn’t. Also, he’s a man and I’m a woman.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, interview with The New York Times."
The above homages and retrospectives are vastly more effective than anything I can muster, so I thought I would use this space for two purposes: to celebrate Le Guin’s fabulous literature and to introduce her to readers unfamiliar with her work. The well-known novels listed below are just the tip of the fabulous Le Guin iceberg–she was a prolific writer, and you can find a complete list of her novels, poetry, essays and children’s books in this bibliography.
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969)
My favorite after Earthsea, and perhaps Le Guin’s most famous sci-fi work, The Left Hand of Darkness introduces us to the planet Gethen, where people are neither male nor female, and the protagonist is androgynous. The story begins with a black emissary from earth on a diplomatic mission to Gethen and immediately cracks open a journey through all the things that make us human. On his Not a Blog, author George R. R. Martin says the book “ranks as one of the best science fiction novels ever written.”
In her farewell article to Le Guin in The Guardian, Canadian author Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) writes “Le Guin was always asking the same urgent question: what kind of world do you want to live in?” Atwood goes on to discuss The Left Hand of Darkness, a work she describes as “a book to which time has now caught up:”
"Consider: the planet of Gethen is divided. In one of its societies, the king is crazy. Cabals and personal feuds abound. You’re in the powerful inner circle one day, an outcast the next. In the other society, an oppressive bureaucracy prevails and a secret committee knows what’s best. If judged a danger to the general good you’re deemed persona non grata and exiled to a prison enclave, with no trial or right of reply."
When I first read this novel, I had never experienced anything like it. Considered one of the first feminist science fiction works and the first to involve major themes of androgyny, this classic blazed the way for innumerable works to follow. If you’re looking for sci-fi rather than fantasy, I’d highly recommend The Left Hand of Darkness. The original still has plenty of bite.
The ORIGINAL EARTHSEA TRILOGY (1968-1972)
This trilogy now includes three more books, but the original set is the one that launched me on a course of fantasy reading I’ve kept up into the present day. Le Guin’s deep and atmospheric world set in a fantasy archipelago follows the adventures of a unique young boy sent off to wizard school long before J.K. Rowling set pen to paper. The books are considered fantasy classics. Atwood offers a look at the themes of Earthsea as she bids farewell to Le Guin in the Guardian article:
"The Earthsea trilogy, for instance, is a memorable exploration of the relationship between life and death: without the darkness, no light; and mortality allows all that is alive to be. The darkness includes the hidden and less pleasant sides of our selves – our fears, our pride, our envy. Ged, its hero, must face his shadow self before it devours him. Only then will he become whole. In the process, he must contend with the wisdom of dragons: ambiguous and not our wisdom, but wisdom nonetheless."
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1971)
The Lathe of Heaven is centered around a character named George Orr, a draftsman whose dreams effect reality. An ambitious psychiatrist attempts to harness the power of Orr’s dreams but the resulting cascade of new realities becomes increasingly impossible to accept. In an interview with CBC Canada, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer says Le Guin is “a towering writer and a wonderful human being,” and his favorite Le Guin book is The Lathe of Heaven:
"As she told me when I interviewed her for CBC Radio’s Ideas series in 1985, a good science-fiction novel ‘engages both intellectually and ethically,’ a lesson that I took as a guiding principle for my own fiction. The Lathe of Heaven is a perfect example of her dictum. It deals with George Orr, a man dreaming of a better future — and whose nightly dreams actually become the next day’s reality, but with that reality always twisted to illuminate the unforeseen dark sides of his utopian visions. Ursula was a towering writer and a wonderful human being. I’m sad she’s gone."
THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA (1974)
A utopian novel set in the same universe as The Left Hand of Darkness (The Hainish Cycle), The Dispossessed is a journey through the ever-fragile nature of reality. It’s a thought experiment in many ways, and probably Le Guin’s most richly detailed novel, pitting capitalistic and anarchistic societies against each other. It’s also the winner of the sci-fi holy trilogy of Nebula, Hugo and Nebula awards.
In the new introduction to the Library of America reprint of The Dispossessed in 2017, Le Guin describes how the novel “started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it.” The author goes on to describe how she found her story:
"I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance … So, when I realised that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be."
In Galaxy Science Fiction, author Theodore Sturgeon described The Dispossessed as “a beautifully written, beautifully composed book … it performs one of [sci-fi’s] prime functions, which is to create another kind of social system to see how it would work. Or if it would work.”
And now, Le Guin is gone. Cat Rambo, president of the SFWA, expressed her sense of bereavement in the SFWA website’s in memoriam article: “This is a loss beyond words and it’s difficult to speak to even a fraction of the sadness in my heart. Ursula was one of our champions, who unflinchingly spoke truth, who led us forward with the strength of the lantern she carried, who showed us how heroes behave in both her stories and the way she wrote them. I feel as though one of the pillars holding up the sky has been kicked away.”
In Faith L. Justice’s wonderful Salon interview, Le Guin talks about her fame and influence, and how such things don’t affect at writer’s stories:
"Boy, it makes you feel fairly humble and it’s a little scary when you realize you influence people. But when I’m writing, nothing affects me, I’m just trying to do the story … These are human stories. I’m using the other worlds and the other races as metaphors. All I know how to write about are people and animals — and trees. Still, nothing that is alien."
“Nothing that is alien.” I’d like to leave you with Le Guin’s brilliant opening lines of A Wizard of Earthsea:
"The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. … Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made."
Le Guin’s mastery of the English language is masterful. We can hear the echoes of her voice in A Song of Ice and Fire, as George R. R. Martin acknowledges: “[S]he influenced a whole generation of writers who came after her, including me.”
Yes, Le Guin’s departure is a terrible loss. But we’ve been so lucky to have her.
If you’d like to learn more about Le Guin and her works, her author website/blog is loaded with maps, interviews and book discussions.
Next: George R.R. Martin bids a fond farewell to Ursula K. Le Guin