Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88

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Wednesday, 24 January 2018

quote [ Ms. Le Guin brought literary elegance and a feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy tales, drawing millions of readers around the world. ]

It's the times...we are losing the greats. RIP

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Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.

Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”

In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.

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“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female.
Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.

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“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 21, 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of two anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber. Her father was an expert on the Native Americans of California, and her mother wrote an acclaimed book, “Ishi in Two Worlds” (1960), about the life and death of California’s “last wild Indian.”

At a young age, Ms. Le Guin immersed herself in books about mythology, among them James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough,” classic fantasies like Lord Dunsany’s “A Dreamer’s Tales,” and the science-fiction magazines of the day. But in early adolescence she lost interest in science fiction, because, she recalled, the stories “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers: White men go forth and conquer the universe.”

She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951, earned a master’s degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Paris. There she met and married another Fulbright scholar, Charles Le Guin, who survives her.

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Author Ursula K. Le Guin in July 1996. Credit Jill Krementz, All Rights Reserved
On their return to the United States, she abandoned her graduate studies to raise a family; the Le Guins eventually settled in Portland, where Mr. Le Guin taught history at Portland State University.

Besides her husband and son, Ms. Le Guin is survived by two daughters, Caroline and Elisabeth Le Guin; two brothers, Theodore and Clifton Kroeber; and four grandchildren.

By the early 1960s Ms. Le Guin had written five unpublished novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. Eager to find a more welcoming market, she decided to try her hand at genre fiction.

Her first science-fiction novel, “Rocannon’s World,” came out in 1966. Two years later she published “A Wizard of Earthsea,” the first in a series about a made-up world where the practice of magic is as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous.

The first three Earthsea books — the other two were “The Tombs of Atuan” (1971) and “The Farthest Shore” (1972) — were written, at the request of her publisher, for young adults. But their grand scale and elevated style betray no trace of writing down to an audience.

The magic of Earthsea is language-driven: Wizards gain power over people and things by knowing their “true names.” Ms. Le Guin took this discipline seriously in naming her own characters. “I must find the right name or I cannot get on with the story,” she said. “I cannot write the story if the name is wrong.”

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Ms. Le Guin speaking in 2014 at the University of Oregon. Credit Jack Liu
The Earthsea series was clearly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. But instead of a holy war between Good and Evil, Ms. Le Guin’s stories are organized around a search for “balance” among competing forces — a concept she adapted from her lifelong study of Taoist texts.

She returned to Earthsea later in her career, extending and deepening the trilogy with books like “Tehanu” (1990) and “The Other Wind” (2001), written for a general audience.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female but assume the attributes of either sex during brief periods of reproductive fervor. Speaking with an anthropological dispassion, Ms. Le Guin later referred to her novel as a “thought experiment” designed to explore the nature of human societies.

“I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she told The Guardian.

But there is nothing dispassionate about the relationship at the core of the book, between an androgynous native of Gethen and a human male from Earth. The book won the two major prizes in science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards, and is widely taught in secondary schools and colleges.

Much of Ms. Le Guin’s science fiction has a common background: a loosely knit confederation of worlds known as the Ekumen. This was founded by an ancient people who seeded humans on habitable planets throughout the galaxy — including Gethen, Earth and the twin worlds of her most ambitious novel, “The Dispossessed,” subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974).

As the subtitle implies, “The Dispossessed” contrasts two forms of social organization: a messy but vibrant capitalist society, which oppresses its underclass, and a classless “utopia” (partly based on the ideas of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin), which turns out to be oppressive in its own conformist way. Ms. Le Guin leaves it up to the reader to find a comfortable balance between the two.

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“The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) offers a very different take on utopian ambitions. A man whose dreams can alter reality falls under the sway of a psychiatrist, who usurps this power to conjure his own vision of a perfect world, with unfortunate results.

“The Lathe of Heaven” was among the few books by Ms. Le Guin that have been adapted for film or television. There were two made-for-television versions, one on PBS in 1980 and the other on the A&E cable channel in 2002.

Among the other adaptations of her work were the 2006 Japanese animated feature “Tales From Earthsea” and a 2004 mini-series on the Sci Fi channel, “Legend of Earthsea.”

With the exception of the 1980 “Lathe of Heaven,” she had little good to say about any of them.

Ms. Le Guin always considered herself a feminist, even when genre conventions led her to center her books on male heroes. Her later works, like the additions to the Earthsea series and such Ekumen tales as “Four Ways to Forgiveness” (1995) and “The Telling” (2000), are mostly told from a female point of view.

In some of her later books, she gave in to a tendency toward didacticism, as if she were losing patience with humanity for not learning the hard lessons — about the need for balance and compassion — that her best work so astutely embodies.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, Ms. Le Guin was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She accepted the medal on behalf of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, who, she said, had been “excluded from literature for so long” while literary honors went to the “so-called realists.”

She also urged publishers and writers not to put too much emphasis on profits.

“I have had a long career and a good one,” she said, adding, “Here at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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[SFW] [obituaries]	[+10 Informative]
[by Bob Denver@1:07amGMT]

Comments

midden said^[1] @ 1:36am GMT on 24th Jan [Score:4 Underrated]

Ouch. Her book, A Wizard of Earthsea was a powerful influence on me in middle school. I still re-read it every few years. One of the things I found so disappointing when I tried to read the Harry Potter books was how poorly Hogwarts measured up to Roke.

Three lessons I got from the Earthsea trilogy: the only way to defeat the darkness within each of us is by first accepting its existence, the power of solitude and it's corollary, companionship, the strength to be found in letting go. Pretty powerful stuff to so clearly convey to a ten year old.

cb361 said^[2] @ 8:34am GMT on 24th Jan

Likewise. Many years later I read Tehanu, the fourth book in the series, and instead of a nice fantasy world with wizards and dragons, it was a scream against the (mostly misogynistic) hate in the world.

Towards the end, our (Ice-bitch and Beta-Cuck) protagonists are captured and degraded, body and mind. They are as powerless and helpless as any regular person, against an Alpha Male wielding magic, and there are no white knights left in the story to ride to their aid.

Reading it, I was furious. Up until that point, I hadn't realised how much I had come to care for the characters of Ged and Tenar over the years and readings. And I wasn't angry at the shitty heteronormative wizard in the story who was torturing and murdering them. I was angry at Ursula K. Le Guin. I was literally thinking "Just kill them and be done with it, but not this. Not this"

In fact, just as they were indeed about to be pushed off a cliff, there was one last White Knight (Ha ha!) in the story, but I have always remembered that sudden anger I felt towards the author creating her story.

midden said^[1] @ 2:22pm GMT on 24th Jan

It's interesting to me that while I know I did read Tehanu in my early twenties, shortly after it was published, I couldn't tell you much about it. I've only ever read it that once, and have never felt compelled to go back to it like I do the original trilogy.

cb361 said @ 3:16pm GMT on 24th Jan

I agree, but I got on less well with the third book too. It seemed overly depressing to my youthful brain. Many years later Le Guin provided greater closure for her take on the afterlife.

midden said @ 5:16pm GMT on 24th Jan

Could you expand on that point? Which book/story are you referring to when you say she later provided greater closure? I think I've read a few of her other books, but none of them have stuck with me like the Earthsea trilogy, certainly not enough to recall off the top of my head. I've also read a couple of her short story collections, and in my teens I tried to read Left Hand of Darkness more than once, but never got very far.

cb361 said @ 7:45pm GMT on 24th Jan

In the original trilogy, the (human) afterlife is a miserable, spectral existence, where "those who died for love pass each other in the street." I don't remember the details much either, but in the final book, written much much later, some rationale for this is given - that humans had created this afterlife because of their fear of death and non-existence. I seem to remember that the dry-stone wall between the worlds of the living and the dead is knocked down too, or something. My sister gave me The Other Wind for Christmas, but I only read it once and quite a few years ago. I always meant to read Le Guin's non-Earthsea books, but never have done.

midden said @ 8:16pm GMT on 24th Jan [Score:1 Informative]

Oh, ok. I don't interpret it as a miserable, spectral existence, though. It's not heaven, certainly, but neither is it hell. I take it instead as a depiction of non-existence. "Quiet were their faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope." They feel nothing, desire nothing, think nothing, remember nothing. The only real identity they have is that projected on them by the living. It's only a miserable existence if you cling to self and ego, as Cob does.

It's been a several years since I read it last, though. I think I'll have to put it on my list for this Spring.

rylex said @ 2:24am GMT on 24th Jan

First Ursula, now Tinky Winky.

2018 is off to a good start

cb361 said @ 1:12pm GMT on 24th Jan

It's the even-numbered ones you have to watch out for.

machpi said @ 10:13am GMT on 25th Jan

Hey, my modest goals have been to outlive David Attenborough and the Queen. ARE THESE PEOPLE IMMORTAL

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