URSULA K. LE GUIN & HER COHORT
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, was born in Berkeley, California. After an education in the East (Radcliffe ‘51, Columbia M.A. in French ‘52, post-graduate work), travel and study in France, marriage to Charles Le Guin in 1953, she and her husband moved to Portland, Oregon in 1959. There they remained and raised a family, and there Ursula would die in January 2018. Over a five-decade writing career, however, Ursula would travel the universe, travel time, and travel into worlds of her creation that would shape worlds in other writers’ and readers’ hearts and minds for generations. She wrote short stories, poetry, novels, essays, and writing guides. She translated the Tao and other works. She wrote introductions to classics being revived, to works of foreign writers who she wanted known in the English-language market. She gave commencement addresses and award acceptances that made international news. She wrote letters of commendation, endorsement, protest, activism. She thrived as an anarchist, a lover of cats, a mentor to writers.
Ursula wrote with a graceful clarity. She was observant in a glancing and peripheral way, reporting to the reader not only what happened but more importantly why it happened and what it meant and what reverberations may ensue, all of this simultaneously. Her writing is not dense, but it is so fluid, so mercury-like, so Taoist in its course over and through barriers, that second and third (and lifetime) re-readings are productive. She is simply one of the best writers of her century, and the list of other writers influenced by her is too long to elaborate, but you may begin with J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon and Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and Iain Banks.
Be prepared to be surprised. Be prepared to be re-taught how to understand the world. Le Guin was a remarkable artist, and her legacy is to entertain, to provoke, to bless, to confound, and to inspire those fortunate enough to read her.
Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two
Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two
This second volume of Le Guin’s complete Hainish novels and stories opens with the Hugo Award–winning The Word for World Is Forest (1972), set on the colony planet of Athshe, where Terrans have arrived to strip its rich natural forests for a depleted Earth. To do so, they enslave the peaceable indigenous population, until the Athsheans rise up in a desperate act of defiance that will leave them and their planet forever changed.
Of the seven stories gathered here, three concern the invention of a new technology for instantaneous interstellar travel—an advance that brings with it unforeseen dangers—and three explore the complex matrimonial arrangements on the planet O, where unions consist of four individuals in both same and opposite sex pairings.
Five Ways to Forgiveness presents for the first time the complete story suite previously published as Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). These five linked stories tell the history of the planet Werel and its slave planet Yeowe as their peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain revolutionary future.
In The Telling (2000), Sutty, an observer of the interplanetary confederation known as the Ekumen, has been sent to Aka to investigate why the planet has almost entirely lost its vital oral traditions and spiritual beliefs in the span of a single generation. Sutty’s quest for traces of Aka’s original religion causes her to reexamine her own childhood growing up amidst a repressive religious regime on Earth.
Also included are Le Guin’s 1977 introduction to The Word for World Is Forest and her provocative 1994 essay “On Not Reading Science Fiction.” The volume’s endpaper features a planetary chart of the known worlds of the Hainish descent.
Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth(2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books.