Letter to The Oregonian, published February 1, 2017:
A recent letter in The Oregonian compares a politician’s claim to tell “alternative facts” to the inventions of science fiction. The comparison won’t work. We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real – all invented, imagined — and we call it fiction because it isn’t fact. We may call some of it “alternative history” or “an alternate universe,” but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions are “alternative facts.”
Facts aren’t all that easy to come by. Honest scientists and journalists, among others, spend a lot of time trying to make sure of them. The test of a fact is that it simply is so – it has no “alternative.” The sun rises in the east. To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or “alternative fact”) is a lie.
A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact. Lies are told in order to reassure oneself, or to fool, or scare, or manipulate others. Santa Claus is a fiction. He’s harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous. In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible. — Ursula K. Leguin
I’m so old, my introduction to LeGuin was a third or fourth printing of the Ace Double Rocannon’s World, which I picked up because I was a major Andre Norton fan. When I discovered sf fandom in college, there were still malefen ready to explain that LeGuin wasn’t really an sf/fantasy writer — just a nice older lady who wrote “safe fairy tales for school librarians”. That was before The Left Hand of Darkness became… canon.
Ursula K. LeGuin, outside category, walked away from the sanitized, “civilized” communities of every literary genre she touched. She never explicitly set out to lead the rest of us away from those settled mental landscapes, but anyone walking with such determination and sparkle will always attract a following among the curious and the discontent…
She taught me that age was experience and not something to be afraid of. So much so that I wanted to be in my 40’s even then, living a life of creativity and adventure.
— Beth LaPensée (@odaminowin) January 24, 2018
From the Grey Lady:
… Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”
In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers…
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”
The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”…
An Ursula K. Le Guin quote from 30 years ago, from her commencement speech to Bryn Mawr in 1986:
"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains."
— laura olin (@lauraolin) January 23, 2018
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, in the Washington Post:
When I finally got the brilliant and renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin all to myself on a stage in Portland, some years ago, I asked her the question I’d always been longing to ask: “Where do the ones who walk away from Omelas go?” Tricky question! She changed the subject…
A wealthy city sustained by the mistreated — this is what the ones who are walking away from Omelas are walking away from. My question was therefore: Where in the world could we find a society in which the happiness of some does not depend on the misery of others? How do we build Omelas, minus the tortured child?
Neither Ursula K. Le Guin nor I knew, but it was a question that Le Guin spent her lifetime trying to answer…
Lovely little memento from John Wray, also in the NYTimes:
Four years ago, on a midsummer Sunday, I rang the doorbell of an unassuming Victorian perched on the north slope of the Forest Park neighborhood of Portland, Ore., and waited for Ursula Kroeber Le Guin to come to the door. I’d grown up with — and in no small part, because of — her writing, from “Earthsea” to “The Left Hand of Darkness” to “The Dispossessed” to “Lavinia,” and the moment felt appropriately otherworldly. Not everyone is lucky enough to find himself ringing the doorbell of one of his literary heroes, let alone with a decent chance of being let in, and I was somewhat dumbstruck at the privilege. My host, when she came to the door, was decidedly less solemn.
“Come on in, Wray,” she said. “You get here all right? Good. Watch out for that [expletive] cat. He’s a terrorist.”…
Fittingly for a writer of speculative fiction, Ms. Le Guin’s house seemed larger on the inside than it was on the outside. I entered cautiously, and not only because of the cat. I was there to spend a long weekend conducting an interview with her for The Paris Review, the highbrow literary journal known for its in-depth conversations on the craft of fiction, and I’d had to lobby the editor for a month to get him to consider featuring a writer whose work was so tinged with genre. Ms. Le Guin, however, was distinctly beyond caring what literary New York thought of her — if the thought, in fact, had ever crossed her mind…
From Buzzfeed, back in December, “13 Pieces Of Indispensable Wisdom From Ursula K. Le Guin”:
… “I got a questionnaire from Harvard for the sixtieth reunion of the Harvard graduating class of 1951 […] Question 14: ‘Are you living your secret desires?’ Floored. I finally didn’t check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in ‘I have none, my desires are flagrant.’”…
“I began quite a while ago to resist declarations of literary greatness in the sense of singling out any one book as The Great American Novel, or even making lists of the Great American Books. Partly because the supposed categories of excellence omitting all genre writing, and the awards and reading lists and canons routinely and unquestioningly favoring work by men in the eastern half of the United States, made no sense to me. But mostly because I didn’t think and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured […] Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now — and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”…
Ursula Le Guin turns down an offer to blurb an all-male sci-fi anthology. #InternationalWomensDay https://t.co/rz6Q0jSwWT pic.twitter.com/Z8PQBKaYYV
— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) March 8, 2017
At io9, “Scifi and Fantasy Creators Share Memories of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Woman Who Changed the Literary World”.
Ursula felt very strongly about the importance of Indigenous voices in science fiction, and she gave my mom validity in academia by contributing to her first anthology, which later led to her being able to put together Walking the Clouds. https://t.co/7a0wUpZCE6
— Beth LaPensée (@odaminowin) January 24, 2018
Mnemosyne
Steering the Craft, her book on writing, is still only $2.99 on Kindle (they lowered the price after she died).
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I used to teach Omelas in my CC lit courses. It was one of the stories that I always knew would generate discussion and interest.
cokane
Important to remember that she wasnt just a scifi/fantasy writer, but also has a number of solid regular fictions, one of the most widely gifted writers of her time
Luthe
Well, fuck, I graduated from Bryn Mawr 21 years too late…*had a terribly boring trustee as a commencement speaker instead*
Matt McIrvin
If she’d only written The Lathe of Heaven, she’d be a major writer for that. And that’s not even generally considered in her top tier.
Wag
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
My roommate at CC introduced me to The Lathe of Heaven. Amazing book.
dmsilev
Thank you, Anne. A great tribute to a great writer.
Also, re: Margaret Atwood’s question.
I’ve always thought that was a question that’s not supposed to have an answer, or at least not an answer that we can know.
RSA
@Mnemosyne: Snagged it. Thanks.
mapaghimagsik
@Mnemosyne:
I have that book,and loved reading it and working the exercises. She was such an influence on my reading and my life. I’m sad she’s gone, but stand amazed at the incredible legacy she left behind. A life truly well lived.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
And, appropriate to this space, Le Guin’s cat blog.
Sab
I haven’t read the comments yet. Thank you for this post. I am devastsed by her death, and yet my husband, three years older than me (both in our sixties) had never heard of her. She has been my favorite author since I was in my early twenties.@Matt McIrvin:
chris
1993 CBC interview with LeGuin. I heard it for the first time this afternoon as they reupped it in memoriam and now I wish I had known her.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Also, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Little-Known Space Opera.
Mnemosyne
(Moved to the Open Thread immediately above this one.)
NotMax
@Wag
Which provides an opening to repeat that the movie version which aired on PBS nearly 40 years ago is available in full on YouTube. (Not to be confused with the 2002 attempt at a film.)
For working within an obviously limited budget, solid end result which stays true to the book. Not the greatest video quality at the link but more than passable.
Sab
@Matt McIrvin: I love the Lathe of Heaven. My personal favorite is The Left Hand of Darkness. I also love The Dispossessed. She wrote three or four books that were so perfect thst if I had written any one of them I would have quit writing, since my job would be done.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
My introduction to her, as to many other authors, was in the Harlan Ellison-edited anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, in which authors were solicited for new stories. LeGuin’s was called “The Word for World is Forest”. I vaguely got the impression that many of the writers in that collection, including a number of women I hadn’t heard of (Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm also made big impressions on me) were new voices. I was wrong of course.
Sab
@Matt McIrvin: So you are a male guy. My husband does’t like ‘ chicklit’ which substantially limits what he reads. Which of her books do you think I should suggest that my male spouse read of hers. Lathe of Heaven? Dispossesed.
Brachiator
I never read much juvenile fiction, nor much other stuff that was age appropriate. Early on, I liked comic books and SF. My love for SF intensified when I discovered that some SF books in my local library dealt explicitly with sex and other adult topics, but these books never got the adults only stamp because someone assumed that all SF was Flash Gordon level kid’s adventures.
Also, a good amount of this stuff was written by women and nonwhite authors. It never made sense to me that a genre defined by the wildest flights of the imagination had so many fans who insisted on rigidly conventional boundaries.
randy khan
@cokane:
Sorry, but this makes me want to scream.
She was a science fiction/fantasy writer. She was unapologetic about it – in fact, more than unapologetic about it. (Watch her National Book Award speech.) She did incredibly strong work as a SF/fantasy writer, some of the most beloved, deepest work of the last 50 years. It was where her muse took her, and she was glad of it. Do not diminish that work by saying she wasn’t “just” anything.
divF
My relationship to Le Guin’s writing is quite personal. The Dispossessed came out at a time when I was coming of age professionally as a mathematician as well as personally. I read her description there of the moment of insight (inspired by Poincare’s famous essay) right around the time I first experienced that moment, and her meditation on commitment and marriage inspired me (and Madame) at the beginning of our own (now going on forty years).
Her fascination by the remote places of the Earth, whether reimagined on a planet called Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness, or of real places as in her short story Sur about a women’s expedition to the South Pole, resonated with me because of my mother being from a fishing outport off the coast of Newfoundland.
She wrote about the West Coast, both Oregon (Lathe of Heaven,
Searoad ) and California (Always Coming Home) with a profound and precise sense of place. I always take ACH with me on vacations on the coast. It was only many years after it first came out that I read her mother’s biography of her father, and found that the setting was a real and specific place, a ranch on the west side of the Napa Valley where the Kroeber family spent their summers while Le Guin was in high school. If you look at the map of Shishan, side by side with Google maps around St. Helena, it is pretty easy to find the exact location. More generally, she loved maps of places both real and imagined.
Then there is the Tao. It first appears in City of Illusions, and winds as a theme thoughout her work. Falk and George Orr and Estraven, among others, inspired me to look for balance. When her translation and commentaries of the Tao Te Ching came out twenty years ago, it provided the skeleton key to her thinking.
Finally, there is her ongoing engagement with the meaning of life, and of death. The afterlife in Earthsea is not meant to be an imagining of an afterlife, but an attempt to understand how we as human beings with a finite lifespan, can understand the meaning of life with death as the endpoint.
As she said in her essay about Tolkien after his death, it is difficult to grieve for a life lived so well. But I still grieve.
randy khan
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
For the Dangerous Visions books, Ellison chose writers he admired. It actually was something unusual that he was willing to include women writers at the time.
Anne Laurie
@randy khan: Keep in mind the words of Kurt Vonnegut (from memory): “The problem with being a writer filed in the sf drawer is that critics keep mistaking it for a urinal.”
Also, a quote from the Wray piece linked above:
J R in WV
And people some day may wonder why James Tiptree Jr. wrote under that name, instead of her real name, Alice B Sheldon. Or maybe not. She worked in the intelligence community, and then for fun did a Ph.D. in psychology, so maybe that was why. Her full name with titles was Major Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon, Ph.D.
Oh, hell no! She wanted to be taken seriously, and knew that in the ’60s she wouldn’t be as a female! One of the transformative authors of the Sci Fi world. Like Ms Ursala K. LeGuin, before her time.
I wish I had lived in the northwest where I may have had a chance to meet Ms LeGuin, who impressed me greatly even as a callow youth. I can’t pick a best or favorite at all, they were all so different and creative and interesting. I’ll miss her, though I never met her. I read that many fans who wrote her received hand-written letters in return, and many have framed them to hang on their wall with pride.
RIP Ursula, where ever you are.
Wag
@NotMax:
I will look forward to watching it.
Dev Null
“Andre Norton”, ZOMG.
I remember her books from my jr. high school years.
That’s 50-60 years ago.
I am at a loss for words.
cokane
@randy khan: ehh, i think this attitude diminishes her work. needing creators to fit within subgenres is actually what Le Guin protested AGAINST.
From someone who knew her: “But she still has one unfulfilled ambition: to be discussed not in genre but in literary terms. She told me recently, ‘I would love to see somebody, somewhere, sometime, just talk about me as an American novelist.’ ”
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_12_019664.php
She repeatedly rejected throughout her career the idea of genres or artists of certain genres. Scream if you want, but you’re ultimately screaming at her too. She wrote copious amounts of non-fiction and fiction set in her contemporary world. Facts are her “muse” took her to various places. I was only pointing out a simple fact that’s been overlooked in much of her obituaries. And personally, I find her non-scifi works on par with any “literary” writers of her time.
LongHairedWeirdo
I hate that my disability makes reading difficult. But I do love that LeGuin has a sound, thoughtful definition of a lie – a “non-fact” spoken as a fact.
People sometimes point out that Trump doesn’t so much lie as bullshit – he says *whatever* he thinks sounds good, and if, by random chance, he says something tainted with truth, well, he’s not deliberately trying to *avoid* it.
But that doesn’t make him less of a liar. To present a non-fact – an untruth, or a simple “I dunno, but I like the way this sounds” as a *fact* is lying.
One of the nastiest bits of this is, honesty requires careful wording. “I believe Donald Trump is taking bribes and giving out favors for them” is true – but were Trump a Democrat, “I believe” would be not be spoken by the GOPpies and the most ridiculous of coincidences would be hailed as proof. “X_Nation spent hundreds of thousands in his hotel, prior to meeting with him, and that nation wants him to keep alive – AND HE IS STILL BREATHING(!!!!!!!!!1!!) which is conclusive proof that he is TAKING BRIBES which is WHY he had VINCE FOSTER KILLED!”
Kirk
@Sab: Dunno about Matt, but I’d drop /Omelas/ on his reading stack. Then after about a week I’d drop /Wizard of Earthsea/ on it. About a month after that drop Dispossessed on the stack either on top of or under a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Or I might just stop with Omelas. I’ve met very few people who finish it and seem unfazed.
randy khan
@Anne Laurie:
@cokane:
Le Guin’s point was that it was wrong to stick her in a cubbyhole because of her choice of what to write about. I am 100% confident that she would have viewed a comment that said, and I quote “but also has a number of solid regular fictions” as a way of justifying the quality of her work with contempt.
As someone else has said on this thread, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are such towering works that writing even one of them would have been a career for most writers. Her “solid regular fictions” are not remotely the reason she is being mourned.
Anne Laurie
@Dev Null:
Fondly, I hope!
I still have a whole bunch of Norton books. She was not in LeGuin’s class as a writer — how many are? — but at her best (Night Mask, The X Factor, Beast Master) she was better than most.
And Alice Mary Norton would be one of sf’s greats even just for the assistance and encouragement she offered so many other writers over the course of many decades. (Including some of the most unlikely ones, not all of whom returned her tolerance… lookin’ at *you*, Harlan Ellison… )
Sab
@Kirk: Thanks. I will report back if he reads any of it.
Kirk
@Sab: One thing to note. I think of Le Guin as a great writer and I’ve read a great deal of her work. But very few of those works are in my personal list of favorites.
I don’t know if it’s style or focus or what, but while I’ll gladly shove /Ormalas/ at everyone I’m unsurprised at people leaving Left Hand of Darkness half-finished. If you’re just getting him to read these so he’ll read Le Guin, don’t be surprised to be unsuccessful. If on the other hand you’re trying to get him reading female authors or tales in which the protagonist doesn’t succeed with a series of sharp bloody conflicts you’d probably be better served by seeing what books he likes and asking what he thinks “chick lit” is – and finding the inevitable places reality the reality differs from perception.
cokane
@randy khan: Again, I wasn’t picking “the reason she’s being mourned” but whatever, you clearly desire some weird ownership of her. I was merely pointing out a fact that maybe would allow non-sci-fi fans to love her too. And we don’t know which of her works will live on in the long run. In the world of literature, 50 years isn’t a long time.
cokane
@randy khan: lemme just add that your quoted text excises the line “one of the most widely gifted writers”, which was my whole point. She had broad success in a way few writers have ever had. This exclusion reveals what you’re really up to.
Omnes Omnibus
@cokane: Yes, he has a nefarious motive, but you caught him out. Clever you.
MoxieM
She spoke to a Women’s Lit class I was lucky to take at Wellesley…I brought my battered copy of The Dispossessed. And she signed it, “In Solidarity”. She was amazing, as a writer and a person.
Omnes Omnibus
@MoxieM: I think that any writer would take pleasure in signing a book that was obviously well loved and read often. Not to diminish your moment – just saying I would guess that signing it gave her pleasure as well.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Can I ask how do rigidly conventional boundaries ever make sense? Isn’t that just bigotry? And when has that ever made sense?
James E. Powell
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
I’ve used “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” in high school. I’ve had mixed results. Not every class wants to get into big questions in literature.
oatler.
I’d loved LeGuin since Earthsea in the sixties though some of her later stuff bummed me out. “The Lathe of a Heaven” actually had a woman being turned on by character’s Taoist quietism.
Tehanu
I really cannot understand the mindset of someone who would stop reading The Left Hand of Darkness in the middle. I don’t say there’s something “wrong” with someone like that; I just don’t understand how they can think like that. When I read it for the first time, I was so astounded and thrilled by it that I turned back to the first page and read it again, right then and there. I mentioned in a thread over at LGM that City of Illusions is not, IMO, her “best” or “greatest” book, but it’s my favorite for reasons I don’t think I can even explain — but then there are also The Lathe of Heaven and The Tombs of Atuan and The Dispossessed….
There are other authors I’m fonder of, more comfortable with, but as far as I’m concerned LeGuin’s only peers are Tolkien and Mark Twain. Damn, I’m sorry she’s gone.
Betty Cracker
Excellent post, and great comments, everyone. As befits a truly important writer and cultural figure, Le Guin’s passing takes time to process and fit into its larger context. I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s take on it here over the past week.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
When Tanith Lee left this plane, it hurt so bad. My bones hurt. This is even worse. It’s as if she took a part of my soul with her when she went to The Farthest Shore. The pain is tangible; I feel it in the air. The world has changed, and not for the better. My chest hurts; sometimes it’s hard to breathe.
David Evans
@Tehanu: “Not her best, but my favorite.” I feel that about several of her books, in particular The Lathe Of Heaven. There are things that grate or could perhaps have been done better, but taken as a whole, the book just reaches in and grabs you.
Connor Cochran
Less well-recognized than “Omelas,” but equally amazing (and more deeply personal in what it makes a careful reader examine) — Ursula’s “Direction of the Road.”
piratedan
well, I can understand why she’s not more “popular” its because she does such a collectedly awesome job of coercing the reader to self-examine while in the process of telling her story. Not everyone is comfortable with that if they’re simply looking for escapism. Which is the very reason she’s so incredibly talented. She embodies concepts and ideas of the mind and the soul. I get why the boys club don’t like her, she’s all about the evaluation of self, items that can’t be explained by a simple equation. She complicates the lives of her characters with the questions of life itself.
Miss Bianca
OK, I obviously have a lot more LeGuin reading to do. I blush to confess that the “Earthsea” triology (which I loved) and some of her essays are the only works of hers I have read. I’d actually like to start with some short stories, since I’m in a short story reading/writing mood. Long dead thread, but anyone still reading have a recommendation on a collection to start with?
Anne Laurie
@Miss Bianca: I’m very fond of Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, which seems to be out of print just now, but I’m sure you can track down a copy, quite possibly through your local library.
There are also three more books in the Earthsea Cycle, written long after the first trilogy, starting with Tehanu, which is a personal favorite.