Ursula K. Le Guin for the Young and Old (and In Between)
Many of the highest honors that are usually bestowed upon the most accomplished and important authors—that they were prolific, that their work was ground-breaking and redefined a genre, that their books reached huge numbers of readers—can also be applied to Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on Monday at age 88.
But Le Guin also had qualities that many of the best authors do not, including the fact that she was comfortable speaking freely and candidly in interviews and essays. She was a truth-teller, cutting and funny with a performative streak, willing to reflect upon her own impact as an author who deeply examined gender, sexuality, mortality, and the role of philosophy in science fiction. In the days after her death, a plethora of fascinating stories about her and her work are surfacing and resurfacing online.
Her honesty and wit shine through every word. Take this excerpt from an essay in her 2004 collection, The Wave in the Mind, featured in Brain Pickings:
I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”
And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.
There’s a lot more where that came from. Check out another great excerpt from Brain Pickings, a wide-ranging interview in The Paris Review, an essay in Slate that Le Guin titled “A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel Wrecked My Books,” just as a sample.
Thinking about Le Guin’s legacy, we wanted to highlight not the science fiction and fantasy that she’s famous for, but her other work—her memoir and essays, which capture her honesty and wit, and her children’s books, which many people may not have known existed.
And if you’ve never read any of Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy before, we have suggestions about where to start.
Children’s Books
In this rhyming picture book, Le Guin constructs a cat’s fantasy world. Mice rain from the sky, there’s a fountain of cream, and dogs are nowhere to be found.
After her brother is captured by trolls, a brave girl sets out on her magical red horse in an epic quest to rescue him. The flouting of gender constructs and effortless creation of a wholly realized other world are exactly what older readers would expect from Le Guin telling a classic children’s fairy tale.
The Catwings series
Elementary-school students are the target audience for this four-volume series, in which Le Guin recounts the adventures of kittens who are born with wings. Even Orson Scott Card, who scoffed at the premise, couldn’t help but love the honesty and depth of the characters.
Memoir and Essays
No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters
In 2017, Le Guin published a selection of her best blog posts—reflections on aging, writing fantasy, and the state of the world.
Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books, 2000-2016 with a Journal of a Writer’s Week
A collection of writing about writing, this book of Le Guin’s essays, reflections, and criticism is a treasure trove of a glimpse into her mind. One reviewer said it contradicted Le Guin’s own assertion: "I seldom have as much pleasure in reading nonfiction as I do in a poem or a story."
Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010
Le Guin’s legacy of amazing work wasn’t limited solely to prose. This collection isn’t literally an elegy, but the poems that span much of Le Guin’s career are well worth reading in the context of the end of her life.
The Library also has Le Guin’s books in Russian and Chinese.
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