URSULA K LE GUIN: A BELATED APPRECIATION
If you read science-fiction/fantasy, or know/follow people on social media who do, you know that Ursula K Le Guin is gone.
The fan tributes have been pouring in, illustrating clearly just how big a deal she was as a writer and how influential her writing has been on multiple levels. (Jo Walton has written a fine tribute on that score.)
Consequently, I don’t feel qualified to write a tribute because I’m pretty late to the Le Guin game.
I only started reading her work a little over three years ago - four years, if you include my aborted attempt to start with The Dispossessed. So not only am I late, I couldn’t even get through the first two chapters of one of her most acclaimed books before giving up on it.
And I don’t have an explanation for either. I’ve seen Le Guin’s name on the sci-fi racks of bookstores for as long as I can remember, but somehow I wasn’t inspired to pick them up. I don’t think it was because of her gender - I’ve never consciously avoided female writers, and there were several from the genre that I liked even back in the 80s.
Looking back, I suppose maybe it was because I had some specific ideas of what kind of SF/F I liked when I was a teenager, and Le Guin’s take on SF/F didn’t fit in that particular window. And once I was old enough to expand that window, it had actually expanded way beyond genre fiction - so much so that I stopped reading SF/F for a long time because I felt it was too narrow and I wasn’t getting anything out of it. In retrospect, it seems obvious that my mindset was a lot narrower than the genre was.
Similarly, when I tried The Dispossessed the first time, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it, even as I approached it as a reader with comparatively broader horizons. That happens sometimes - I’ll try an author for the first time and it won’t click for whatever reason. Then I’ll try again later and it’s magic - it’s like, “Okay, I get it now.”
In this case, it turned out to be The Left Hand Of Darkness that was my gateway to Le Guin’s vision, and it absolutely blew me away. Several Le Guin books later (all of which I liked), I tried The Dispossessed again and it blew me away too.
And so it goes.
Most of the tributes I’ve read mention her Earthsea books as her greatest (or at least most popular) work. Personally I like her SF books more, if only because fantasy is a genre I lost a taste for a long time ago, but the Earthsea books are also good (or at least the first three - I haven’t read the rest yet, but I intend to).
So there’s another testament to her talent - she actually made me enjoy books in a genre I’m not that into.
(Speaking of Earthsea, here’s a fun fact: The person who finally convinced me to try Le Guin was the priest of my church - he’s a big fan of the Earthsea books and has cited them in his sermons to make a point. The irony that Le Guin was a solid atheist is not lost on me.)
I haven’t read that that many of her books to make any kind of informed comment. But I will say that based on what I have read, perhaps her greatest talent was bringing something new to the table. She didn’t stick to the genre tropes, and more often than not used them mainly for lumber to build something different, or at least to say something worth saying.
So I don’t have any stories about her being an influence or an in-depth familiarity with her entire body of work. What I can say is that she was an extraordinarily gifted writer who wrote a couple of the best books I’ve ever read, and who has yet to disappoint me. And one good thing about getting started on her late is all the books I’m looking forward to reading now. I’ve already ordered copies of The Lathe Of Heaven and the first three novels of the Hainish cycle to start with.
Better late than never,
This is dF
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