Ursula K. Le Guin

The Queen of Sci-Fi

Ursula K. Le. Guin

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I have to confess that science fiction and fantasy novels are not really my ‘thing’.  I prefer literary realism; the stories that feel rooted in the real world, the domestic; something I can align with my own life or the lives others have lived.

That didn’t stop me harbouring a deep respect for the author Ursula K. Le Guin, however.  I encountered her first during a writing workshop several years ago, where we studied some of her illuminating (and surprisingly relevant) short stories, and later, as an essayist, I have enjoyed delving into some of her wonderfully astute essays. 

Also, I recognise the abiding popularity of sci-fi and fantasy within the reading community, and so thought it would be interesting to look at arguably the most successful female science fiction writer.  

Born in 1929 as Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, she was the youngest of four siblings and the only girl of the family.  Her mother Theodora was herself a writer, chronicling the life of Ishi, the last Yahi tribe member, whilst her father Alfred was an anthropologist.  Indeed, both of her parents’ work would infiltrate themselves within Le Guin’s later development as a writer, and much of her father’s anthropological influence has been noted within the fantasy worlds she created.  Her family encouraged art, ideas, and culture within their home, and members of the Native-American community became well known to them.

Le Guin became interested in mythology and eventually attended Radcliffe College and later, Columbia University.  Like something out of a story, she met Charles Le Guin, historian and  fellow Fulbright scholar on a maritime voyage to France, with the couple marrying a few months later in 1953. 

The couple had three children, making a home in Portland, Oregon, for several decades.  Le Guin, being devoid of a religious upbringing, became interested in the Eastern traditions of Taoism and Buddhism.

"Taoism gave me a handle on how to look at life and how to lead it when I was an adolescent hunting for ways to make sense of the world without going off into the God business."

Le Guin’s road to publication was not a smooth one.  As with many first time writers, she faced rejection after rejection, struggling to find her footing in the world of mainstream fiction.  

Thankfully, she didn’t give up, instead turning her hand to the science fiction and fantasy genre.  Here, at last, she found acceptance.  

In 1966, Le Guin published Rocannon’s World, the novel that would become the first of the Hainish Cycle, placing the planet Hain as the birthplace of humanity.  Comparisons with one of her later titles in the series, The Word for World is Forest, have been made to James Cameron’s Avatar.  

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of Le Guin’s most enduring titles became the fourth book of the Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, and was acclaimed by critics as a trailblazing example of the genre.  The novel profiles an alien race with no fixed gender characteristics known as the Gethenians, an androgynous species who are “ambisexual”, until the time of the monthly mating ritual when they enter “kemmer”, then becoming either male or female in order to reproduce.  Lauded as a visionary novel which forces a re-examination of gender, the book won both a Hugo and Nebula award for Le Guin.

“Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time”. 

Harold Bloom

Following this success, Le Guin was asked by her publisher to turn her attention to writing for younger readers, releasing A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968.  The book tells the story of student wizard Sparrowhawk, with wild descriptions of magic and a physical terrain based around a tempestuous archipelago.  The novel has gone on to draw correlations to JK Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series.  Le Guin, too, made her Earthsea creation into an ongoing series of books, with five more novels following on from this one.  The collection is aimed at a young adult audience, but as with the later Harry Potter, it has been enjoyed by adults and teenagers alike.  The books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been lauded for their emotional maturity and depth.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Becoming an established writer within the publishing world, Le Guin went on to publish more books for both children and adults, as well as poetry, short story collections, and adult speculative fiction.  She also turned her attention to the support of new writers, often via the online blog Book View Cafe and publishing a non-fiction book Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (which I have been told by fiction writer friends is excellent!!)  

In 2008, forty years after her first publication, Le Guin published Lavinia, referred to as a metatextual examination of a minor character from Virgil’s Aeneid.  She went on to win many writing awards during her lifetime, including the Living Legend Medal by the Library of Congress.  

In her later years, Le Guin worked on a collection of her non-fiction, including essays on the themes of motherhood, abortion, and the menopause.  She recalled having been asked in 1973 to write about herself by a publisher, which she was reluctant to do.  She refused, preferring her privacy.  Her introduction to her book Dreams Must Explain Themselves modestly states that it is: “a carrier bag full of ideas and responses, thoughts and rethinkings.” 

As well as pieces on her childhood, parents, and Ishi, the Native American who inspired her own mother’s first book at the age of fifty, there also appears a poignant piece entitled: ‘In the Princess’.  Originally written in 1982 and addressed to the National Abortion Rights Action League, Le Guin cleverly creates a fairy story in order to describe an abortion she had as a student.  She mentions the support of her parents “who were indeed royal, where it counts, in the soul”, and expresses gratitude to all those who have worked for the rights, dignity and freedom of women: 

“They set me free, and I am here to thank them, and to promise solidarity.”

Her 1988 essay ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’ explores the oft-quoted struggles of the mother/writer.  Referring to a scene from Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone where Rosamund’s baby begins eating her flatmate’s manuscript, Le Guin quips:  “Couldn’t she at least have eaten a manuscript by a man?”  Admitting to the humour in this, she responds: “No, no, that’s not the point. The point, or part of it, is that babies eat manuscripts. They really do.”

Referencing the topic of menopause, Le Guin complained in 1976 that it was “probably the least glamorous topic imaginable” despite being one of the very few to retain “some shreds of taboo”.  She concludes that “it requires fanatical determination now to become a Crone,” and she describes a fantasy of sending an old woman from the village marketplace to the fourth planet of Altair to teach the friendly natives about the nature of the human race, insisting that old women are the only people to have “experienced, accepted, and enacted the entire human condition”.  (I’m sorry, but just pause for a moment here: how good is this line?!) 

Ursula K. Le Guin, 2008

Le Guin goes on to acknowledge her debt of gratitude to Virginia Woolf, who’s A Room of One’s Own was published the year she was born.  She states however that although a ‘room of her own’ wasn’t absolutely necessary for a woman writer, it could be a good help.  

“The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper.”

Retiring from both her teaching duties and writing in later life, Le Guin became a vociferous critic of online sites such as Amazon and Google, citing their influence on how books were sold and consumed.  

Le Guin died in January 2018, at the age of 88.  Her fifty years as one of the most influential writers in the literary world was heralded by many of literature’s biggest admirers, including Stephen King, who hailed her as “one of the greats.”  

She argued for the importance of women “writing, publishing and reading one another, in artistic and scholarly and feminist fellowship...to keep women’s words, women’s works, alive and powerful – that’s what I see as our job as writers and readers for the next 15 years, and the next 50.”  

As a reader, writer, and researcher into the myriad stories of women, I heartily agree!