LE GUIN, Ursula K(roeber)

(1929-)

   US writer, based in Portland, Oregon. Her first novel was published in 1966; by 1970 she was spoken of as one of the most important writers within the field. Her reputation has extended far beyond the readership of GENRE SF, while within the genre she has been honoured with 5 HUGOS and 4 NEBULAS; more attention has been paid to her by the academiccommunity than to any other modern sf writer.UKLG is the daughter of Dr Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, the former a celebrated anthropologist whohas published much work on Native Americans, the latter a writer best known for Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). UKLG was thus brought up in academic surroundings; her own education, with an undergraduate degree from Radcliffe and a master's degree from Columbia, was in Romance Literaturesof the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French. She wrote POETRY (some of it collected in Wild Angels (coll 1975 chap)) and a number of unpublished realistic novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country, before turning to sf. (It is generally assumed that her two Orsinia books, both set in 19th-century "Orsinia", Orsinian Tales (coll of linked stories 1976) and Malafrena (1979) - neither sf or fantasy - are reworkings of this 1950s Central European material.) Typically, UKLG's tales set a man in an alien (and perhaps alienated) world, and follow him on a quest, until he makes a CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH and proves an agent for the reconciliation of the sundered parts; the quest often takes the form of a winter journey.All her early published genre stories were bought by Cele GOLDSMITH for AMZ and Fantastic, her first published genre piece being "April in Paris" for Fantastic in 1962; like much of her early work this is more FANTASY than sf, though she makes no rigorous distinction between the two, as she notes in "A Citizen of Mondath" (1973) and other essays in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979; rev with biblio omitted 1989 UK) ed Susan WOOD.Much of UKLG'searlier work, generally known as the Hainish series, is set in a common universe. The people from the planet Hain once seeded the habitable worlds of our part of the Galaxy with human life; this has resulted in great cultural variety, useful for a writer who grew up with ANTHROPOLOGY as an everyday discipline. Five novels, two novellas and several short stories belong to the sequence, which covers about 2500 years of future HISTORY, beginning 300-400 years from now.UKLG's first three novels come late in the sequence's internal chronology. They are Rocannon's World (1966 dos; text corrected 1977), Planet of Exile (1966 dos) and City of Illusions (1967), and were collected as Three Hainish Novels (omni 1978). InRocannon's World an ethnographer is marooned on a primitive planet with which he comes to terms only with difficulty; finally, in giving himself to the planet, he receives in return the gift of "mindspeech" or telepathy (ESP). Planet of Exile, set over 1000 years later, has mindspeech innormal use; a Terran colony is struggling to survive on a planet whose natives they despise; under pressure the two communities are finally able to merge. City of Illusions is set on a cowed Earth ruled by the human-seeming but alien Shing invaders who have the hitherto unknown art of "mindlying". The amnesiac hero turns out, when his memory is restored, to be a messenger from the planet of the previous book; able to detect mindlying, he will be the agent of destruction for the malign Shing.Perhaps the generic structures of these books are too conventionalto sustain fully the weight of meaning they are required to bear. But, though apprentice work, all show, well developed, the typical UKLG strategy of shaping a story around recurrent motifs, which gain in richness and density as the action juxtaposes them in new patterns, until it might almost be said that the motifs are the story. Many of these are the simple archetypal symbols that have always dominated myth and poetry: darkness and light, root and branch, winter and spring, submission and arrogance, language and silence. These are not seen by UKLG as polarities or opposed forces; rather, they are twin parts of a balanced whole, each deriving meaning from the other. UKLG's dualism, insofar as it exists, is not so much in the Western philosophical tradition (where progress is often seen to derive from the tension of antitheses, as in Marxist dialectics) as in the Eastern Taoist tradition, where the emphasis is on balance, mutuality (as in yin and yang) and an ordered wholeness. However, while Jungian archetype and the tenets of Taoism play a central role in all UKLG's work, critical commentaries on UKLG have emphasized them almost too much; they are by no means the whole story.The first work of UKLG's maturity as a writer is THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. The story is told in a prosenotable for its clarity and evocative precision. Once again an ethnologist visits a planet, this time Gethen, whose people are androgynous; normally neuter, they have the capability of becoming either male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle; the world itself is snow-bound. The professional observer cannot hold aloof from events; in the novel's most moving sequence, a long, lonely journey across the ice, he reaches a painful understanding with, and a reciprocated love for, the Gethenian protagonist. Because the Gethenians appear initially to be like us, the reading experience - a gradual understanding of the differences between Gethenians and us - invites thoughtfulness about the nature of SEX andsexism in our world, and of cultural chauvinism generally. These four Hainish novels were reprinted along with "The Word for World is Forest"(see below) as Five Complete Novels (omni 1985).The next two important items in the Hainish sequence are novellas: "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) and THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, DangerousVisions ed Harlan ELLISON; 1976). The former story, its title taken from Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress", is set just after the action of Rocannon's World, and the latter, which won a 1973 Hugo as Best Novella, rather earlier. Both set humans on alien planets; the first (LIVING WORLDS) is inhabited by only a sentient plant network (the previous lineof the Marvell poem is "My vegetable love should grow"); the second planet is occupied by a much-exploited native race, in a situation clearly made to articulate parallels with the Vietnam War. In both cases a kind of union is gained through human surrender to otherness, and alienation is imaged as violence, madness and ravening egoism. UKLG's stories are remarkably persuasive and consistent in their outlook, although the answers tend to come less easily in the work of her middle period, whose major work was the fifth and last novel in the Hainish sequence.This was THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA (1974), which won a Hugo and aNebula, and is widely regarded as UKLG's most richly textured sf work. This is not a book in which difficulties are readily surmounted; a central image is the wall. The novel stands at the head of the Hainish sequence, for it tells the life of a physicist whose new MATHEMATICS (by another conceptual breakthrough) will result in the ANSIBLE, the instantaneous-communication device (FASTER THAN LIGHT) necessary if the League of All Worlds - the galactic network about which the sequence isconstructed - is to come into being. Two inhabited worlds, one a moon of the other, have different systems of POLITICS: one is an anarchy (reminiscent of that proposed in real life by Kropotkin), the other isprimarily capitalist. The hero, Shevek, is not completely at home in either society. The book has been read as pitting a UTOPIA against a DYSTOPIA, but, as the book's subtitle implies, there are seldom absolutesin UKLG's work; the attractive anarchist society is in some ways blinkered and emotionally regimented (with the willing collaboration of its people). Ideationally the novel is very strong, but a slight didactic dryness inthe telling-which, perhaps deliberately, hinders any simple emotional identification with the hero - alienated some readers. Nonetheless, it is a deeply imagined work of art. The short story "The Day before the Revolution" (1974) is an introduction to the anarchist society of TheDispossessed, being the tired, unromantic last memories of that society's founder; it, too, won a Nebula.One interesting non-Hainish novel was published before The Dispossessed. Set in the imaginative territory generally associated with Philip K. DICK, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) tells of a man who through his dreams can bring alternate reality structures into being. In its interest in METAPHYSICS, it is of a piece with her other work, including her fantasy (see below). It was intelligently dramatized for US tv as The LATHE OF HEAVEN .Through all this period (1962-74), UKLG also wrote non-Hainish fiction, including the Hugo-winning"The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), a bitter, deft parable about the cost of the good life, and "Nine Lives" (1969), a moving story of CLONES mining an alien planet. With the exception of THE WORD FOR WORLD ISFOREST, all UKLG's early short fiction can be found in THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS (coll 1975; UK paperback in 2 vols), her first and best collection. UKLG has published fewer sf short stories since then. One of them, The New Atlantis (1975 as title story of The New Atlantis ed Robert SILVERBERG; 1989 chap dos), is a dark NEAR FUTURE story, in which a ruinedECOLOGY is causing the USA (along with its frightened and frightening state apparatus) to sink into darkness just as ATLANTIS's white towers re-emerge above the sea; it ends ambiguously - as much of UKLG's later fiction does - with the cry of the Atlanteans: "We are here. Where have you gone?" This is one of the stories in UKLG's second collection, The Compass Rose (coll 1982), an occasionally whimsical book which had a mixedcritical reception, as did the novella The Eye of the Heron (1978 in Millennial Women ed Virginia KIDD; 1982 UK), an over-diagrammaticpolitical fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-parody. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1971-87 var mags; coll 1987)contains stories and poems about animals, many being previously collected, but featuring the first book appearance of "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?"; this Hugo-winning story recounts a human girl's meetingwith incarnations of Native American spirit animals (including Coyote); it was later released as a graphic novel, Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight? (graph 1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (coll 1994) continuesto reflect UKLG's increasing absorption in tales which - while difficult to define generically - range comprehensively over the terrains of the fantastic.It became clear in UKLG's fiction after The Dispossesed (including the Orsinia sequence) that her strongly utopian impulse wastaking over. This is unusual in postwar sf, whether genre sf or mainstream. Because utopian fiction tends not to be plot-driven, much of her fiction since 1974 has seemed a little static: it consciously demands a more contemplative kind of attention than that dictated by most sf. It is a difficult, quixotic demand, since it requires that the reader will accept a cultural re-education. The clearest example is the most recent and biggest of her sf novels, ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). This is an experiment: a collage of verse, reports, tales, drawings by Margaret Chodos, an associated cassette of music by Todd Barton, and even recipes,all relating to the matriarchal society of the Kesh, who live in California's Napa Valley in a future long after some catastrophic eventhas sunk the coastal cities. An intermittent narrative tells of a woman who marries into, then flees from, a masculine, aggressive society. Utopia is here approached by way of a fictional anthropology, which focuses on its society not by asking the sf question, "How did it get that way?", but simply asking: "What is it?"UKLG's FANTASY stories may be her most personal work, and have given some of her readers more pleasure than anything she has written. The Earthsea trilogy, austere but vivid, is a major work whose appeal goes far beyond the teenagers at whom in the first instance it was aimed: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972; slightly cut 1973 UK), collected asEarthsea (omni 1977; vt The Earthsea Trilogy 1979). Set on ISLANDS in an ocean world, the trilogy tells of training in a MAGIC so rigorous in its principles as to be easily understood as a form of alternate science. The books recount episodes in the apprenticeship, the full-powered maturity and the final death-quest of a magician, Ged. A grave joyfulness pervades the trilogy, which is perhaps more maturely thoughtful (while remaining exciting) than the comparable Narnia series of C.S. LEWIS. However, over the next decade a certain backlash against UKLG became evident from the women's movement. It was alleged that, especially in this trilogy, Le Guin saw men as the actors and doers in the world (magicians are male) while women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink. UKLG's FEMINISM certainly altered in nature over the next two decades (as evidentin ALWAYS COMING HOME), and she also made a kind of restitution by writing a fourth novel in the Earthsea series: Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990). It is a sad, powerful, quiet book about the strength of women (andthe ultimate impotence of Ged); it won a Nebula. Earthsea Revisioned (1992 lecture given as "Children, Men and Dragons"; 1993 chap) considers some issues raised within - and by - the sequence. UKLG has edited 4 anthologies: Nebula Award Stories 11 (anth 1976);Interfaces (anth 1980) and Edges (anth 1980), both with Virginia Kidd; and The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (anth 1993)with Brian Attebery, assisted by Karen Joy FOWLER. She also published a second collection of nonfiction pieces, mostly literary essays and reviews, Dancing at the End of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (coll 1989). In 1989 she received the PILGRIM AWARD for services to sfcriticism.The limpid, serene clarity of her fables, whether in fantasy, sf or even the quasihistorical fiction of her Orsinia stories, is powerful, and has won her many loyal friends, even in the genre readership which some see her as having abandoned. Why else would this group continue to award her Hugos and Nebulas through to the end of the 1980s? It is possible that UKLG has been overpraised, but she has given much to the genre, not least by showing (through example) how the traditional novelist's interest in questions of character and moral growth need not be alien to sf. John CLUTE once wrote of her as "eminently sane, humanitarian, concerned" but went on to lament her "fatal lack of risk". This may be overstatement, but it points to a quality in her work that hasbeen observed by other critics. It is true that UKLG's demure certainties could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But can self-confidence justly be evidenced as a flaw?

   PN

   Other works: From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973 chap), a critical pamphlet; Dreams Must Explain Themselves (coll 1975 chap), a pamphlet which has a story, an essay, a speech and an interview; The Water is Wide (1976 chap); Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976; vt A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else 1976UK), a contemporary love story, not sf, directed at teenagers; Walking in Cornwall: A Poem for the Solstice (1976 chap); Leese Webster (1979 chap), for children; The Beginning Place (1980; vt Threshold 1980 UK), a poignant fantasy novel for young adults about an ambiguously desirable alternate world; Gwilan's Harp (1977 Redbook; 1981 chap); Hard Words and Other Poems (coll 1981 chap); the Adventures in Kroy sequence for children, comprisingThe Adventures of Cobbler's Rune (1982 chap) and Solomon Leviathan's Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip around the World (1983 chap); In the Red Zone (1983 chap); The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine (1984 chap dos), a pre-published excerpt from ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985); King Dog: A Screenplay (1985 dos), based on Hindu myth; Wild Oats and Fireweed . . . New Poems (coll 1988 chap); A Visit from Dr Katz (1988 chap), for children; Catwings (1988 chap),Catwings Return (1989 chap) and Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994 chap), all for children; Fire and Stone (1989 chap) with illustrator Laura Marshall, for children; Way of the Water's Going: Images of the Northern California Coastal Range (1989) with Ernest Waugh and Allan Nicholson, naturephotographs printed with excerpts from ALWAYS COMING HOME; The Lathe of Heaven/The Dispossessed/The Wind's Twelve Quarters (omni 1991); The Eye ofthe Heron \& The Word for World is Forest (omni 1991 UK); Searoad: The Chronicles of Klatsand (coll 1991), not sf/fantasy, 10 short stories seton the Oregon coast; Nine Lives (1969 Playboy; 1992 chap); Fish Soup (1992 chap); A Ride on the Red Mare's Back (1992 chap); Blue Moon over Thurman Street (1992 chap); Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems (coll 1994chap).

   About the author: SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, Nov 1975, is a Le Guin issue, concentrating on the sf; The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (chap 1976) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1979) ed M.H.GREENBERG and J.D. OLANDER; Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space (anth 1979) ed Joe De Bolt; Ursula K. Le Guin (1984) by Charlotte Spivack; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1986) ed Harold Bloom, in whichmost notes and documentation from the original essays have been unaccountably dropped; Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (anth 1987) ed Bloom.

   See also: ACE BOOKS; AMAZING STORIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; INVASION; LEISURE; LIBERTARIAN SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PASTORAL; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POETRY; SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY; WOMEN SF WRITERS.