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Ursula K(roeber) Le Guin (1929-2018) |
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American writer of science fiction and fantasy, poet and critical essays. Ursula Le Guin examined large ethical, moral, and social issues. Her thought-provoking novels include The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did The Dispossessed (1974). The celebrated Earthsea books, written for young adults, have been compared to C.S. Lewis's Narnia chronicles and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Le Guin's fame extended beyond the genre boundaries "Oh, damn. She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of being on view. She learned from them, but they didn't learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument." (from 'The Day Before the Revolution,' the Nebula Award in 1974; first published in Galaxy, August 1974; 'Päivä ennen vallakumousta,' teoksessa Maailma mielen mukaan: yksitoista tieteisnovellia kolmeltatoista sci-fi -sarjan kirjailijalta, toim. Matti Rosvall, 1986) Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, the daughter of Dr Alfred and Theodora Kroeber Quinn. Le Guin's mother was a psychologist and writer of children's stories. Alfred Kroeber was the head of UC-Berkeley's Department of Anthropology, who published work on Native Americans. His first wife had died of tuberculosis before the First World War. Theodora, his second wife, had two children of her own earlier; there were four children in the family. Theodora's biography of a Yahi Indian, entitled Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), became a bestseller. Le Guin grew up both in an academic atmosphere, but her summers she spent in a ranch in northern California. The family had also an East Coast home. When Le Guin was a child, her parents taught her about myths and legends from around the world. "My father studied real cultures and I make them up," she once said, "in a way, the same thing." Le Guin attended Radcliffe College, receiving her B.A. in 1951, and
her master's degree in romance languages from Columbia University in
1952. Her thesis dealt with Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, particularly French. Le Guin studied on a Fulbright
scholarship in France. At that time she planned to be a college teacher of French and Italian language and literature. While crossing the Atlantic on Queen Mary, she met her future husband, Charles Le Guin, a historian. They married in 1953 in Paris and eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where they rised their three children. The imaginary central European country, Orsinia, she created when she was a sophomore in college. While it has the traits of real world Europe, Orsinia gave her an entry to the limitless realms of the imagination. Le Guin's other imaginary worlds and places include Earthsea, Hainish, and the West Coast. Before publishing her first works of non-fiction, Le Guin was an
instructor in French at Mercer University, Georgia, in 1954 and at
University of Idaho, Moscow, in 1956. In 1954 she was a department
secretary at Emory University, Atlanta. Le Guin's first short stories
appeared in the early 1960s. She had also written poetry. Partly
inspired by the stories of Corwainer Smith (pseudonym of Paul
Myron Anthony Linebarg Smith), Le Guin turned her attention to science
fiction. "The durable and mysterious power of Cordwainer Smith's
stories in not a matter only of their exuberant language and brilliant
invention and hallucinatory imagery; there is a deep ground to them, a
moral ground, lying in his persuasive conviction of the responsibility
of one being for another." ('Thinking About Cordwainer Smith', in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2004, p. 68) Both
Le Guin and Cordwainer Smith were interested in religious mythos and
archetypes. Moreover, Le Guin translated the Chinese classic Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu and Cordwainer Smith had a deep knowledge of China,
where he was born and where he spent long periods later in life. Le Guin taught writing at Pacific University, Forest Grove (1971), University of Washington, Seattle
(1971-73), Portland State University, Oregon (1974, 1977, 1979), in Melbourne, Australia (1975), at the University
of Reading, England (1976), Indiana Writers Conference, Bloomington (1978, 1983), University of California,
San Diego (1979), and Kenyon College, Tulane University. Her several awards include Hugos
(1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1988) and Gandalf Award (1979), Nebulas (1969, 1974, 1974, 1990, 1995, 2009),
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction (1986), a Pushcart Prize (1991), a National Book Award (1973)
for the novel The Farthest Shore
(1972), part of Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, a Newberry Silver Medal
(1972), Harold D. Vursell Award (1991), and the Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters (2014), which was presented to her by
Neil Gaiman. As a novelist Le Guin made her debut in 1966 with Rocannon's World, about a scientist who tries to save a colony from hostile alien invasion. Her first fantasy tale, 'April in Paris' (1962), was published in Amazing Stories. In the story figures from different historical periods travel to 15th-century Paris to meet and marry; the theme of journey was further developed in subsequent works. Rocannon's World was set in the Hainish universe, which is unified by her concept that an ancient
civilization "seeded" the habitable worlds. The descendants of people from the planet Hain, remotely
related forms of humanoids, inhabit our part of the Galaxy. However, psychologically and sociologically the
various sentinent races are very diverse. The series, which spans 2500 years of future history, continued
in Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), and The Left Hand of Darkness, which
the author herself had described as a "thought experiment."
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1997) was comprised of four Hainish
connected novellas. The fifth novel in the Hainish sequence, The Dispossessed (1974), is considered
among Le Guin's best works. Lavinia (2008), based on the last six books of Vergil's Aeneid, gave a voice to the Italian pricess, who married the hero of the Troyan war, but who never says a word in the epic. "As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all," says Lavinia, the narrator. "It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself..." In spite of being a historical novel, Le Guin argued that there is not a great difference between Lavinia and her scince fiction stories – both science fiction and historical novels draw on facts and imagination. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968),
The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972),
received a wide critical attention. The protagonist is Ged, also called
Sparrohawk, whom the reader meets as a young magician, then at the
height of his powers, and as the aging Archmage in the third part. The
imaginary archipelago of Earthsea is roughly circular and has a
diameter of some twenty thousand miles. The magic is based upon the
knowledge of true names of things. True magic is taught at the Great
School on Roke, in the heart of the Inmost Sea. After an interval of nearly twenty years, Le Guin continued the series with Tehanu (1990), Tales from Earthsea (2001), and The Other Wind (2001), a tale of dreams, aging, death, and the healing of old wounds. The story is set on an archipelago on an ocean world. Ged releases into the world a nameless shadow, an evil power from the realm of the dead, which he must chase and battle with to the ends of the earth. In the encounter he finds out that it bears his own name. In the second part Ged is seeking the missing half of a talismanic ring. He is captured and entombed in an underground labyrinth, where the young High Priestess Arha, also called Tenar, has devoted herself to death. Ged must persuade her to choose life to save himself and the world. The Farthest Shore depicts Ged's and his companion's, a future King, quest to find out why the power of all the magicians in the world is failing. They encounter a corrupt magician who has made a hole in the barrier between life and death. Ged closes the hole, but loses his powers as a magus. As in several of her works, the theme of journey becomes a metaphor for self-discovery and wholeness. Le Guin's work reflected the Taoist principle mutuality (as in yin and yang), interdependence, and ordered wholeness. She rejected a Freudian model of the psyche, in favour of a Jungian one. Before A Wizard of Earthsea, her first fantasy novel, Le Guin had not read Jung, but in this works she examined
Jungian concept of shadow, representing those aspects of the whole self which
have been denied. Also in her essay 'The Child and the Shadow' (1975)
Le Guin emphasized the importance of understanding of the other self,
which stands on the threshold between the consious and the unconsious.
In 'Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction' (1976) she wrote that we
don't have an isolated id, but a collective unconsious, "we have all
the same kind of dragons in our psyche". Her coming-of-age novel The Beginning Place (1980, published as Threshold
in 1986) illustrates many of Jung's ideas. The central characters are a
young boy and a girl, who have found a gateway to another realm, an
alternative barbarian universe, where the boy kills a dragon-like
creature; at the end the couple return together to the real world to
start their marriage. In Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
Le Guin abandoned the male centered heroism, perhaps as a result
of feminist critic. This time the central character is the aging Tenar.
She is fostering a damaged child, her adopted daughter. Ged's and
Tenar's relationship is developed further, and at last they consummate
their love. The writer Robin McKinley praised Tehanu's "recognition of the necessary and life-giving contributions of female magic – sometimes disguise as domesticity." ('Ursula K. Le Guin' by Millicent Lenz, in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, edited by Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, 2001, p. 66) The Left Hand of Darkness used ambisexual aliens to comment on humans' sexual mores. Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to a snow-bound planet, Gethen (called Winter by the Ekumen), whose people are androgynous. Normally they are neutral, but they have the capability of becoming either male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle. During a long journey across the ice with Estraven, whom he has regarded as a male, Genly Ai finally understands his Gethenian companion, and rethinks his attitudes and the nature of sex. In The Dispossessed the values of an anarchist world, Anarres, are contrasted with those of primarily capitalist. Anarres is a barren, small moon, from which the hero, an Anarresti physicist Shevek, starts his journey to Urras, the mother planet. Shevek's tries to develop a general theory of Time, which would re-unite the estranged societies. Shevek is not completely at home in either society. He finds that the culture of Urras is more alienating than on his home world. After finishing his work he returns to Anarres, seeing that its era of cultural isolation is coming to end. The high quality of Le Guin's work was praised even by critics,
who were not devoted readers of fantasy or science fiction. In her
writing guide, Steering the Craft
(1998), she challenged the
general opinion to conflate story with conflict, although the writing
process, discovering, finding, losing, could lead to it. The role of
the narrative sentence, Le Guin said, is to lead to the next sentence
and to keep the story going. sShe once sketched her ideal writing
schedule as follows: 5:30 a.m. - wake up and lie there and think. 6:15
a.m. - get up and eat breakfast (lots). 7:15 - get to work writing,
writing, writing, Noon - lunch. 1:00-3:00 p.m. - reading, music.
3:00-5:00 p.m. - correspondence, maybe house cleaning. 5:00-8:00 p.m.
make dinner and eat it. - After 8:00 - I tend to be very stupid and we
won't talk about this." (The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Ursula K. Le Guin, edited and with an introduction by David Streitfeldp, 2019, p. ix) "I do have a kind of basically bleak and tragic take on things," Le Guin once confessed. "It's hard not to. But that doesn't mean I don't want my kids and grandchildren and everybody else's kids and grandchildren to stay alive and lead a good life. Survival instinct is strong. And I think you don't survive unless you cultivate hope and the reasons for hope." (Le Guin in an interview with Amazon.com, 2000) The Telling (2000), which continues her Hainish cycle, is a story of a spiritual pilgrimage of a woman, Sutty, who studies the culture of a remote mountain region on a planet ruled by a dictatorial Corporation. "The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back at the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out!" (from The Telling) Sutty records much of what has been banned, trying to preserve the lost past. Again women are the preserving force, in a world dominated by male destructiveness. Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006) are parts of the Annals of the Western Shore. The third volume in the series, Powers (2007), about a runaway slave gifted with impeccable memory, received the Nebula Award. Although Le
Guin had said that she had no more the "vigor and stamina" for a new novel, she wrote
and participated in public debates until the last. In
2015, she launched an online fiction writing workshop
for aspiring authors at the site Book View Café; she called it
"Navigating the Ocean of Story." "I miss being in touch with serious
prentice writers," she explained. Le Guin died on January 22, 2018, at
her home in
Portland. She was 88. Selected works:
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