Ursula K. Le Guin

• 1. Introduction

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  Ursula K. Le Guin was eleven years old when she mailed her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction. The magazine sent it back. She then submitted nothing else for ten years.

  Nearly sixty years of publishing lay ahead of her after that silence. By the end she had produced more than twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories, along with poetry, criticism, translations and children's books. Yet the writer whom most readers file under science fiction said she would rather be known as an "American novelist".

  That preference raises a puzzle. What sort of childhood leads a writer to send anthropologists to other planets? Why did publishers refuse her early books as inaccessible, and what finally opened the door? And why did readers who never touched a rocket-ship story end up treating her invented worlds as serious literature?

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• 2. The Anthropologist's Daughter

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  Robert Oppenheimer was one of the academics who visited the Kroeber household in Berkeley. Decades later, Le Guin would model Shevek, the physicist hero of The Dispossessed, on him. She was born in that city on the 21st of October 1929, with three older brothers named Karl, Theodore and Clifton.

  Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mother, Theodora, held a graduate degree in psychology but did not turn to writing until her sixties. Theodora's book Ishi in Two Worlds appeared in 1961. It told the story of Ishi, a man Alfred had studied, who was the last known member of the Yahi after the rest died or were killed by white colonizers.

  The family split its year between Napa Valley in summer and Berkeley during the school term. A large book collection kept all four children reading. Issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding Science Fiction circulated among the siblings, and Ursula loved Norse mythology and the Native American legends her father told aloud. She also enjoyed Lord Dunsany and Lewis Padgett, and she wrote her first story at the age of nine.

  From 1947 to 1951 she studied Renaissance French and Italian literature at Radcliffe College of Harvard, graduating as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. As a child she had cared about biology and poetry, but trouble with mathematics narrowed her options. Columbia University gave her a master's degree in French in 1952. She began a doctorate and won a Fulbright grant to study in France from 1953 to 1954.

  Aboard the Queen Mary in 1953, she met the historian Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris that December, and she said the marriage meant the "end of the doctorate". While Charles finished his own doctorate at Emory University and later worked in Idaho, she taught French at Mercer University and then the University of Idaho. She also worked as a secretary until her daughter Elisabeth was born in 1957.

  Caroline arrived in 1959, the year Charles took a post at Portland State University and the family moved to Portland, Oregon. Their son Theodore was born there in 1964. Raising small children squeezed the hours she could give to writing, and the couple would stay in Portland for the rest of their lives.

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• 3. Years of Rejection

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  Between 1951 and 1961, Le Guin wrote five novels set in Orsinia, an imaginary country of her own devising. Publishers declined every one, judging them inaccessible. Her poem "Folksong from the Montayna Province" appeared in 1959, and her story "An die Musik" followed in 1961. Both were Orsinian, and some poetry from those years was gathered much later in the 1975 volume Wild Angels.

  After a long run of refusals, she turned to science fiction, partly because she knew a market existed for work that fit the label. Her story "April in Paris" ran in Fantastic Science Fiction in 1962 and became her first professional sale. Seven more stories followed in Fantastic and Amazing Stories over the next few years. Among them were "The Dowry of Angyar," which introduced the Hainish universe, and "The Rule of Names" and "The Word of Unbinding," which introduced Earthsea. Critics largely ignored them.

  Ace Books released her first novel, Rocannon's World, in 1966. Planet of Exile came out the same year and City of Illusions in 1967, and together the three would be called the Hainish trilogy. The first two were each printed as half of an Ace Double, two novels bound back to back and sold cheaply as one paperback. City of Illusions appeared alone, a sign that her name was beginning to count. Reviews were few and cool, though the books already carried her recurring interests: a journey that is also a search for identity, contact between cultures, and opposing forces brought into balance.

  In 1968, Playboy asked whether it could print her story "Nine Lives" without her full first name. She agreed, and it ran under "U. K. Le Guin". She later called it the first and only time an editor or publisher showed prejudice against her as a woman writer. It struck her as so silly and grotesque that she "failed to see that it was also important". Later printings restored her full name.

  That same year, the editor of Parnassus Press asked her to write a novel for teenagers, a market he saw as full of promise. She had not planned to write for young adults, but the result was A Wizard of Earthsea, a coming-of-age story set in an archipelago. It was well received in both the United States and Britain. In 1969 came The Left Hand of Darkness, which scholar Donna White said "stunned the science fiction critics". It won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best novel, making Le Guin the first woman to take both.

  The Word for World Is Forest earned another Hugo in 1973. Her anger over the Vietnam War fed the book, and she later called it the "most overt political statement" she had made in fiction. In 1974 The Dispossessed won both awards again, which made her the first person to win both for each of two books.

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• 4. Balance and Shadow

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  In 1997, Le Guin published her own translation of the Tao Te Ching. She said she was "raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit," yet Taoism gave her a "handle on how to look at life" during her teenage years, and she was also drawn to Buddhism. The philosophy runs through her stories as a preference for leaving things alone. The hero of The Lathe of Heaven embodies it, and the anthropologists of the Hainish worlds try not to meddle with the cultures they meet. One of the first lessons Ged learns in A Wizard of Earthsea is to use magic only when it is truly needed.

  The name Earthsea itself points to a balance between land and sea. In each of the first three novels, somebody upsets that equilibrium, which also covers people and their environment and a wider cosmic order that wizards must protect. Evil in this world is not a dark power fighting a bright one. It comes from characters misunderstanding how life holds together, which is the reverse of the usual Western conflict between good and evil.

  Carl Jung is the other frequent name in the critics' accounts. A Wizard of Earthsea appeared at the height of Jungian literary analysis, and scholars read its shadow as the Jungian Shadow, standing for Ged's pride, fear and hunger for power. At the book's end Ged accepts that shadow as part of himself, and reviewers have called this a rite of passage. Le Guin said she had not read Jung before writing the first Earthsea books, and she disliked readings that she found reductionist and mechanistic. In a 1974 lecture, she did discuss her interest in the dark and repressed parts of the psyche.

  Growing up was a subject she knew well. In a 1973 essay, she said coming of age was a process that took her many years and that she finished, as far as she ever would, around age thirty-one. Adolescents, she added, treat it as their main occupation. Fantasy suited the subject, she argued, because the subconscious is hard to describe in the language of rational daily life.

  Anthropology shaped her just as much. Her father was a pioneer of the discipline and directed the University of California Museum of Anthropology. As a girl she read The Leaves of the Golden Bough, a children's adaptation of James George Frazer's study of myth and religion. Living among her father's friends gave her, she said, the experience of the other. Elements of Ishi's story have been traced in Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest and The Dispossessed.

  So she often made observers her heroes. Rocannon in Rocannon's World and Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness explore unfamiliar societies, and Shevek becomes an observer on another planet. All of them belong to a universe in which humans did not begin on Earth but on a planet called Hain.

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• 5. Between Genres

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  Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer Smith were the writers who finally made science fiction matter to Le Guin. As a child she had sneered at the genre. She preferred Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to Robert Heinlein, whose tradition she summed up as "white man conquers the universe". She and Philip K. Dick attended the same high school without ever meeting, and she described The Lathe of Heaven as an homage to him.

  Writing across so many forms made her hard to classify. Mainstream critics, scholars of children's literature and scholars of speculative fiction each claimed part of her output, and the resulting criticism became "Balkanized". Earthsea suffered most, because it was treated as a children's series and so drew less attention. Le Guin called that attitude "adult chauvinist piggery". In 1976, George Slusser mocked the "silly publication classification" of the books as children's literature. Barbara Bucknall said the stories "are ageless because they deal with problems that confront us at any age".

  Because many of her premises came from sociology, psychology or philosophy rather than physics, her work was often called "soft" science fiction, and she was dubbed its "patron saint". Several authors disliked the term, arguing it could belittle stories not built on physics, astronomy or engineering, and could be aimed at women and other underrepresented writers. Le Guin proposed "social science fiction" for some of her work. She also pointed out that many of her stories were not science fiction at all.

  The Left Hand of Darkness broke the straight line that traditional, mostly male-written science fiction followed. It is framed as part of a report that Genly Ai sends to the Ekumen after his stay on the planet Gethen. His material includes personal narration, diary extracts, Gethenian myths and ethnological reports, so the reader sees what he chooses to arrange. Commentators have called the structure "distinctly post-modern" for its time. Scholar Mike Cadden described the narration of Earthsea as "free indirect discourse", which blends a protagonist's feelings into the narrator's voice and invites young readers to sympathize.

  In Earthsea, many of the heroes are dark-skinned and some villains are white, a reversal that several critics noticed. In a 2001 interview, Le Guin said it explained why her book covers so seldom showed the characters: "most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"

  Always Coming Home, published in 1985, has been called "her great experiment". It combines a story told by a young protagonist with poems, rough drawings of plants and animals, myths, and anthropological reports on the Kesh. They are a fictional people living in the Napa valley after a catastrophic global flood, the same valley where she spent her childhood summers.

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• 6. Gender Rewritten

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  The planet Gethen is home to people with no fixed gender, who take on female or male characteristics only during a brief part of their sexual cycle. Which they become can depend on context and relationships. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, imagined a society with no war and with sexuality absent as a constant factor in daily dealings. The Terran visitor's masculinity proves an obstacle to understanding. The book is counted among the first works of feminist science fiction and is the best-known study of androgyny in the genre. Her 1971 Earthsea novel The Tombs of Atuan, with a female protagonist, was called a "significant exploration of womanhood".

  Le Guin's own views kept moving. Reviewers faulted The Left Hand of Darkness for using masculine pronouns for its androgynous characters, for never showing them in typically feminine roles, and for treating heterosexuality as the Gethenian norm. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction said she saw men as the actors in Earthsea while women remained "the still centre, the well from which they drink". In her 1976 essay "Is Gender Necessary?" she insisted that gender mattered less to the novel than the theme of loyalty. When she revisited the essay in 1988, she admitted gender was central and apologized for showing Gethenians only in heterosexual relationships.

  Her fiction answered those critiques directly. In the 1995 story "Coming of Age in Karhide," she used feminine pronouns for all sexually latent Gethenians, and she did the same in a later reprinting of "Winter's King," first published in 1969. Scholar Sandra Lindow called the Karhide story "so transgressively sexual and so morally courageous" that Le Guin "could not have written it in the '60s". It later appeared in the 2002 collection The Birthday of the World, alongside six more stories about unorthodox sexual relationships and marriage arrangements.

  Tehanu, published in 1990, returned to Earthsea eighteen years after The Farthest Shore. Her views had developed considerably in between, and the book was grimmer than its predecessors and questioned some of their ideas. Critics saw it as a rewriting of The Tombs of Atuan, since the power and standing of the female lead, Tenar, are the inverse of what they were before. It earned Le Guin a third Nebula Award for Best Novel and led to the series being recognized as adult literature. She later said that The Eye of the Heron, from 1978, was the first work truly centered on a woman.

  A 1986 essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," attacked the old idea of the hero. Critic Siobhan Leddy said it shifted the view of humanity's foundations "from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing".

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• 7. Politics and Principle

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  The twin planets of Urras and Anarres anchor The Dispossessed. Settlers from wealthy Urras created Anarres, a planned anarchist society that is poorer in goods yet more advanced ethically. Le Guin drew on pacifist anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, and on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The book calls itself an "ambiguous utopia": Anarres is neither perfect nor unchanging, and Shevek travels to Urras to continue his research. The misogyny and hierarchy of Urras are missing among the anarchists, who build on cooperation and individual liberty. Charlotte Spivack saw in it a shift toward political ideas, and Le Guin has been credited with rescuing anarchism from a cultural ghetto.

  The parable "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" won a Hugo Award. It describes a city of wealth, happiness and security that depends on the continued misery of a single child, and some readers take it as a critique of American society. A comparable choice faces Orrec and Gry in Gifts, the first volume of Annals of the Western Shore. The powers of their people can serve control and domination or healing and nurturing, and the two take a third path by leaving.

  The Eye of the Heron sets a town founded by descendants of pacifists against a city founded by descendants of criminals, testing human freedom. Always Coming Home views a warlike society, one resembling modern America, through its pacifist neighbors the Kesh. Scholars have called the Kesh a feminist utopia, and Warren Rochelle wrote that it was "neither a matriarchy nor a patriarchy: men and women just are". In The Word for World Is Forest, the natives of Athshe have fitted their lives to their planet's ecology, while the human colonizers wreck it carelessly.

  Four Ways to Forgiveness, a story suite from 1995, and the 1999 story "Old Music and the Slave Women" together examine revolution and rebuilding in a slave-owning society. Rochelle argued that the Ekumen's recognition of the slaves as human beings opens the possibility of a "truly human community". Annals of the Western Shore also returns to slavery, justice and the place of women.

  Her convictions moved beyond the page in 1977, when she refused a Nebula Award for her story "The Diary of the Rose". She was protesting the Science Fiction Writers of America's revocation of Stanisław Lem's membership. She tied the decision to Lem's criticism of American science fiction and his willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc. Accepting a prize "for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance" felt wrong to her.

  In December 2009 she resigned from the Authors Guild over its support for Google's book digitization project. "You decided to deal with the devil," she wrote, adding that the guild had given up the whole concept of copyright to a corporation. At the 2014 National Book Awards, she criticized Amazon's grip on publishing, citing its treatment of the Hachette Book Group in an ebook dispute. National Public Radio broadcast the speech twice.

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• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Eight Hugo Awards from twenty-six nominations sit on Le Guin's record, with six Nebulas from eighteen nominations. Four of the Nebulas were for Best Novel, from six nominations, more than any other writer has won. Locus subscribers voted her twenty-five awards. The Farthest Shore took the 1973 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her 1996 collection Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A complete edition of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess, earned her last Hugo a year after she died.

  In April 2000, the Library of Congress named her a Living Legend. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made her its twentieth Grand Master in 2003, and she was only the second woman so honored. The American Library Association gave her the Margaret Edwards Award in 2004, and its panel said she had inspired four generations of young adults. The Library of America published a collection of her work in 2016, an honor rarely given to a living writer. In 2014, the National Book Foundation awarded her its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The American Academy of Arts and Letters made her a member in 2017.

  Her books sold many millions of copies and were translated into more than 40 languages. Scholars wrote more than two hundred articles about her work, and by one account she was studied as intensively as Philip K. Dick. Harold Bloom called her an "exquisite stylist" and described her two earliest breakthroughs as her masterpieces. Not every judgment was warm. Alexei Panshin called The Left Hand of Darkness a "flat failure," and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia said The Eye of the Heron came close to self-parody. John Clute argued that her later work suffered from her felt duty to speak responsibly to a large audience, an artist "wearing a crown of thorns".

  Margaret Atwood regards A Wizard of Earthsea as one of the "wellsprings" of fantasy, and modern writers have credited it with the idea of a wizard school and the boy wizard that Harry Potter later made famous. Critics have suggested its theme that names hold power inspired Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 film Spirited Away. In 1966, Le Guin coined the word "ansible" for an instantaneous interstellar communicator, and Orson Scott Card and Neil Gaiman later used it. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, said he longed to "wield words with the same power as Ursula Le Guin". When Vonda McIntyre founded a writers' workshop in Seattle in 1971, Le Guin taught there.

  Adaptations had a rockier record. The Lathe of Heaven reached the screen in 1979 with her participation and again in 2002, and she called the first "the only good adaptation to film" of her work. In the early 1980s Miyazaki asked to adapt Earthsea. Unfamiliar with anime, she said no, then changed her mind after seeing My Neighbor Totoro. The 2006 film Tales from Earthsea was directed by his son Gorō instead, and she was disappointed, calling parts beautiful but faulting its moral sense and violence. She called the 2004 Sci Fi Channel miniseries Legend of Earthsea a "far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned" and objected to casting white actors for her red-, brown- and black-skinned characters. The stage treated her better. She called the opera Paradises Lost, which premiered in April 2012, a "beautiful opera".

  Le Guin died at her home in Portland on the 22nd of January 2018, at the age of 88. Her son said she had been in poor health for several months and had likely suffered a heart attack. A public memorial on the 13th of June 2018 included speeches by Margaret Atwood, Molly Gloss and Walidah Imarisha. Her final publications, all released after her death, included Dreams Must Explain Themselves and the poetry volume So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018.

  On the 27th of July 2021, the US Postal Service issued a stamp in her honor, designed by Donato Gionacola. Three months later, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction was announced, worth US$25,000, and its first winner was Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for The House of Rust. In November 2024, a crater on the planet Mercury was named for Le Guin.

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