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.
The Reavers of Skaith
The Reavers of Skaith
The revolution is here. In The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith, mercenary Eric John Stark traveled to the dying world of Skaith only to find himself haunted by a dangerous prophecy that made him an enemy of the state. With the help of a beautiful wise woman, a handful of battle-scarred insurgents, and a pack of vicious telepathic hounds capable of killing with their minds, Stark rallied half a world to the cause of freedom. Yet not everything went as planned. Betrayed and left to die on a savage planet, Stark and his foster-father Simon Ashton must ally with cannibals and feral warriors to topple an empire and bring an enslaved civilization to the stars. But in fulfilling the prophecy, will Stark sacrifice that which he values most?
Talented enough to co-write The Big Sleep with William Faulkner and imaginative enough to pen the original screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, Brackett never fails to deliver breathtaking worlds and fantastic adventure. In this stunning conclusion to her Skaith trilogy, Brackett brings her gritty vision of the galaxy to life as never before, and proves once again why she remains a reigning queen of science fiction.
“Leigh took science fiction and lifted it above the genre preconceptions. This is fiction at its most exciting, in the hands of master storyteller.”
—George Lucas, Creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones