Ursula K. Le Guin passes away

[mathmom]

She was one of my favorite writers, so brilliant in so many genres. She brought her anthropological eye to sci fi.

From her translation of the Tao Te Ching:

The beginning of everything is the mother of everything. Truly to know the mother is to know her children, and truly to know the children is to turn back to the mother. The body comes to its ending but there is nothing to fear. Close the openings, shut the doors, and to the end of life nothing will trouble you. Open the openings, be busy with business, and to the end of life nothing can help you.

[JHS]

Ha. I was just about to start the same thread. I never read her translation of the Tao Te Ching, but I very much appreciated her lifelong vison/critique of anthropology and the way it informed her imagination and storytelling.

Her best work – I think that’s The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Always Coming Home – really stands up in a way that few other works that influenced by the late 60s do. (Anyone looked at The Cook and the Carpenter recently?) Those books had a lot of meaning for me when I read them in the early 70s (except for Always Coming Home, which was written in the mid-80s), and they had a lot of meaning for my kids who read them 25 years later.

Here is a favorite passage for me, from the introduction to Always Coming Home. She is talking about imagining a future society in the Napa Valley, where she lived at the time:

If I listen, can I hear voices with the inner ear? Could you hear voices, Schliemann, in the streets of Troy? If you did, you were crazy too. The Trojans had all been dead three thousand years. Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent – the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and dirt and tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility?

There’s no way to reach that lot by digging. They have no bones. The only human bones in this pasture would be those of the first-comers, and they did not bury here. . . . They owned their Valley very lightly, with easy hands. They walked softly here. So will the others, the ones I seek.

The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical, is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or you borrow a baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home.

[Consolation]

I share your admiration for her work, but I would add the Earthsea books to the list of her best. I also understand that she was a mentor to many other writers.

I haven’t read Always Coming Home. Clearly I must.

[Midwest67]

Oh yes, Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea Trilogy. Read several times, and in the olden days, those well worn paperbacks followed me from apartment to apartment to apartment. Much enjoyment.

RIP

Editing to add…CATWINGS! How could I forget that series! Read and read and read to my kids.

[romanigypsyeyes]

This made me so sad when I heard yesterday. She’s the reason I fell in love with sci fi & fantasy. She’s the one who steered me into feminist technoscience. She will be sorely missed.

A few of my favorite quotes:
"When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want – to hear you erupting. You young Mount St Helenses who don’t know the power in you – I want to hear you.”

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”

And a letter to the editor just last year:

A recent letter in The Oregonian compares a politician’s claim to tell “alternative facts” to the inventions of science fiction. The comparison won’t work. We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real - all invented, imagined – and we call it fiction because it isn’t fact. We may call some of it “alternative history” or “an alternate universe,” but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions are “alternative facts.”

Facts aren’t all that easy to come by. Honest scientists and journalists, among others, spend a lot of time trying to make sure of them. The test of a fact is that it simply is so - it has no “alternative.” The sun rises in the east. To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or “alternative fact”) is a lie.

A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact. Lies are told in order to reassure oneself, or to fool, or scare, or manipulate others. Santa Claus is a fiction. He’s harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous. In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible.

[HImom]

She was very talented and will be missed. I liked much of her work but didn’t understand some of it and found it unsettling.

[katliamom]

I always thought of her as a YA writer (like Madeline L’Engle) and that wasn’t my genre even when I myself was a YA… so I’ve never read her. Maybe I should now…

[mathmom]

@kataliamom, YA is not a genre - it’s just a marketing tool! Madeline L’Engle wrote many books that are definitely adult books BTW and some of them have crossover characters from the books marketed to children and teens. In any event most of LeGuin’s books are aimed at adults.

@JHS so interesting that you pick Always Coming Home as a favorite. It was a bit too weird for me, though I read every last word of it, listened to the tape that came with it and puzzled over its drawings. I’m afraid I like my fiction more linear, more character driven and less experimental. Interestingly enough John Scalzi, who is about as straightforward a story teller as you can imagine, also talks about it in his appreciation: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-leguin-scalzi-20180123-story.html

[JHS]

Catwings, yes! I should have mentioned that. Oddly, I picked it out of a shelf this past Saturday, and tried to read it to a couple of little girls I was tutoring, who couldn’t sit still for it. It had been at least 25 years since the last time I had picked it up. Lovely book.

@mathmom Of course I love Always Coming Home. It’s made for wannabe academics – an experiment in which the fictional world is presented by means of what would likely be a supplemental book in an anthropology course, a collection of texts and observations gathered over 100 years or so from a particular culture, in this case an imagined tribal culture existing a century or so after some catastrophic nuclear apocalypse ended civilization as we know it. The way it’s presented lets the culture be complex and dynamic, like a real culture in the real world we know, rather than fixed like the imagined cultures in most science fiction. It has fashions that come and go with the decades, political movements that rise and fall, challenges faced and overcome or not. Different narratives are woven through the collection of materials, from different people at different times, so that none of them is definitive as to what that world means.

So, yes, it’s challenging, non-linear fiction that to some extent toys with abandoning narrative altogether, and at least relegates narrative to a much smaller role than it ever has in conventional science fiction. But for all that, it’s awfully easy to read and to enjoy, and it’s full of beauty. It also acquires a lot of depth, at least for me, from the obvious connection it has to the work LeGuin’s parents did as cultural anthropologists studying the Native American tribes of the northern California coast.

[mathmom]

@JHS for some inexplicable reason, I am quite willing to put up with all sorts of shenanigans in film that annoy me in literature. (I also figured out freshman year that actually I had no interest in being an academic.) That said, the book has remained on my shelves all these years because I think I should give it another go. It may well be that an older me, knowing what I am getting into, will appreciate it more. But I’m too busy rereading Jane Austen right this second.

For some reason, I never cared for Catwings. It was a little too twee for me. Was it twee? Or am I being unfair?

[TomSrOfBoston]

The Lathe of Heaven!

[JHS]

Catwings is pretty twee.

I’ve never even looked at LeGuin’s early fantasy oeuvre – Malafrena and the Orsinian stuff. Can anyone comment on it?

[mathmom]

I liked both - they aren’t really fantasy - they just take place in an imaginary Central European country. My husband thinks they are boring. I’m not a fan of the short story - which was a minus for the * Orsinian Tales* , but I thought they were lovely and haunting.