Although Ursula Le Guin was labelled by many as a science-fiction writer, she was much more than that. She was a woman of letters in the truest sense, a published poet who could also turn her hand to literary fiction, fantasy, children’s books, screenplays, essays and verbal texts for musicians.
As she once said about her literature: “Some of it is fantasy, some of it is realistic, some of it is magical realism.” In her view, fiction and science fiction offered the writer’s mind and emotions different kinds of freedom, but she particularly enjoyed the freedom of imagination afforded by sci-fi.
Many science-fiction and fantasy aficionados would say that Le Guin was one of the two or three most significant writers in the second half of the 20th century. She was certainly a key female voice in a hitherto male-dominated niche: while most authors would produce tales of good triumphing over evil, she was more interested in the principles of Taoism, gender and cultural conditioning. She once said, indeed, that she could not write an evil character, even on request.
Hers was a winning formula. She wrote more than 20 novels, which sold millions of copies around the world and were translated into 40 languages. Her best-known fantasy works, the six books of Earthsea, sold especially well in the US and Britain, and her first significant sci-fi work, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), became a classic of the genre while breaking new ground in its radical investigation of gender roles, set as it was on a planet where everyone is ambisexual. “I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she said.
“To hell with it” was a favourite phrase of hers. “I don’t want to be reduced to being ‘the sci-fi writer’. People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it.”
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She was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, to Alfred Kroeber, a German immigrant who founded the university’s anthropology department, and Theodora Kroeber, a writer best known for her accounts of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe of California, and for her retelling of traditional narratives from Native Californian cultures.
Her childhood was spent with her three brothers in the Napa Valley, at a ranch that she called “a house full of fairytales”, where, as well as reading pulp science-fiction, she would talk to Native American friends of her parents about their oral culture and the prejudice they faced. This was an undeniable influence on her work — her focus was on the conquered rather than white people — and it was to her frustration later that book jackets and TV adaptations of her work would not reflect this.
After studying French and Italian literature at Radcliffe College and Columbia University (she specialised in literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods) she won a Fulbright scholarship to France, where she met Charles Le Guin, a historian from Georgia. They married in Paris in 1953 and moved to the Deep South. Objecting to the segregated society they found there, they then moved west. She taught for a while at the University of Idaho before Charles took up a professorship at Portland State University.
They had three children: Caroline and Elisabeth, both professors, and Theodore, who runs a gallery. For much of the late 1950s and 1960s Le Guin concentrated on raising them. Although she often spoke about how important her children were to her, she did note that it was frequently seen as a bad thing for women to have children. “Most of the women canonised by male critics have been childless women,” she said, “and this has led to a misunderstanding. You can have books and babies.”
Le Guin nevertheless found time to write, and she sold April in Paris, a time-travel piece, to Fantastic magazine in 1962. Editors in those years found her early stories difficult to categorise. Her work was usually rejected as not being suitably tailored for a particular magazine or publishing house; it was neither completely fantasy/sci-fi nor quite mainstream fiction.
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She published her first novel, Rocannon’s World, in 1966, when she was 37. Three years and three books later she wrote her most powerful — many would say her best — novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, an exploration of how an androgynous culture might function. This was a big leap for Le Guin; she had found her true voice and the novel won both the Hugo and Nebula science-fiction awards, broadening the genre and influencing many other writers.
The Left Hand of Darkness tackled issues of gender just as the women’s rights movement was gaining momentum in the US. This movement was “the great enabler” for her, she said in one interview, because it brought about the freedom for women to write as women and not just as honorary men. “Literature was a male game, with rules and canons laid down by men. I didn’t realise that I was doing a rather odd thing: trying to be an artificial man.” She added, however: “There are always rewards for playing the game the way the boys make the rules . . . you do get published.”
Her Earthsea cycle of books (1968-2001), set on an archipelago on a planet largely covered by water, was originally intended for a younger audience, but eventually became popular with adult readers too. These books follow the life of Ged, a boy who studies to be a wizard. In this Le Guin predated JK Rowling, the Harry Potter creator, and it was to her slight chagrin that critics in the late 1990s described Rowling’s work as groundbreaking and original.
Her own take on Rowling was pleasingly tart. “When so many adult critics were carrying on about the ‘incredible originality’ of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel’ — good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.”
The comparison with Rowling was anyway unfair, because Le Guin’s approach to science fiction was quite different from anyone else’s. She was not interested in space conquest or wiring, but, as she put it, “using the form as a wonderful box of fixed metaphors you can play with endlessly, like a musician with a sonata”.
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She could be prickly in other respects. It irritated her that writers of science fiction tended to be devalued or dismissed by the establishment because it was assumed that they could have little literary value. “When Margaret Atwood writes a serious review of one of my books for The New York Times, it is printed under the title ‘The Queen of Quinkdom’, to make sure nobody takes it seriously,” she complained in one interview.
Many men nevertheless championed Le Guin’s writing, including Stephen King, who called her “one of the greats, a literary icon”, and the great critic Harold Bloom, who praised her as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time”.
It was no doubt another source of annoyance to her that her best-known quotation — “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end” — was often misattributed to a man, Ernest Hemingway.
This affront to her feminist sensibilities apart, the anthropological and sociological leanings of her fiction did gain her much recognition in intellectual circles. Along with Philip K Dick, another very different, but equally original and important interpreter of America in science fiction, she was widely discussed in highbrow academic circles. One journal editor said that Le Guin and Dick were the subjects of four in every five articles submitted in the 1970s and 1980s.
For her part, her tastes could be quite lowbrow. She used to enjoy Star Trek, “until they went off the rails with Voyager”, and when she was in Britain she got hooked on Doctor Who — “the guy with the long scarf and the great nose [Tom Baker], not the one after him who looked like he needed some vitamins [Peter Davison]”.
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That Le Guin had an angular personality — and was uninhibited by sensitivity when it came to enforcing her will — became apparent in 2009, when she resigned from the Authors’ Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google’s book digitisation project. “You decided to deal with the Devil,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.”
In 2014 her outrage went viral when she received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and used her speech to decry “commodity profiteers” who sold writers “like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write”. She criticised our “obsessive technologies” that promote fear and greed. When asked what she made of her speech becoming an internet phenomenon, she said with a shrug: “A writer in her mid-eighties simply has less to lose.”
In another speech, this time on women in writing, she was equally refreshing in frankness: “If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.”
Ursula Le Guin, author, was born on October 21, 1929. She died of unspecified causes on January 22, 2018, aged 88