Ursula Le Guin
American author whose fantasy and science-fiction novels delighted both children and adults
URSULA LE GUIN, who has died aged 88, was an acclaimed American author of fiction, poetry and essays, whose career spanned more than half a century, and whose work influenced such fantasy writers as Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon and David Mitchell.
Le Guin’s greatest success, the Earthsea series, began in 1964 with the publication of her short story, “The Word of Unbinding”, in Fantastic magazine. Set in a world imbued with magic and structured along the lines of Britain’s Iron Age society, the realm of Earthsea – described in The Listener as “one of the great fantasy regions of the century” – is an archipelago of scattered islands, where villages must reckon with dragons and the most talented young men are schooled in wizardry.
A Wizard of Earthsea, her first novel in the series, about a young mage named Ged and his coming to terms with the dangers and limits of his own powers, was published by the Parnassus Press in 1968. Writing in The Observer when it was first published in Britain in 1971 by Puffin, the critic of children’s literature Naomi Lewis recognised A Wizard of Earthsea immediately as an outstanding work of fiction, calling it “the most convincing account I can recall of magic and its place in the human world”.
Often compared with Tolkein, the series continued with short stories and four more novels, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2001). The novels have remained continuously in print and been translated into 16 languages.
Ursula Kroeber was born on October 21 1929 in Berkeley, California, to the writer Theodora Kroeber and the anthropologist Alfred L Kroeber. Alfred Kroeber performed extensive ethnographic studies in California and the Great Plains, and received five honorary degrees. Theodora Kroeber, who earned a Master’s in clinical psychology before studying anthropology, wrote a celebrated study of the Californian Yahi Tribe, and its last surviving member, Ishi.
Ursula Le Guin remembered her upbringing as “high-powered in an easy-going way … There were also a lot of refugees around the house, and academic friends of my father.”
Writing was an early passion, and she wrote her first short story at the age of nine – a further effort was sent to Raymond Palmer’s magazine Amazing Stories, though rejected. She read French at Radcliffe College and graduated in 1951, followed by an MA in French and Italian at Columbia University. While crossing the Channel to study in France, she met
Charles Le Guin, a professor of French history, and they were married in 1953. Abandoning her studies for a doctorate, Le Guin turned her attention to writing as a career.
She would remain unpublished for another decade, until shifting into science fiction and fantasy in the 1960s. “Science fiction was what bought me,” she recalled. “The other genres weren’t interested.”
Her early short stories was printed
in Western Humanities Review,
Fantastic and Playboy; the men’s magazine wrote back requesting that she be credited as “UK Le Guin”, on the grounds that “many of our readers are frightened of stories by women”. She gave her permission, but confessed in a later interview that “it still rankles”.
Rocannon’s World, her first novel, was published in 1966. Drawing heavily upon Norse mythology, it belonged to the writer’s Hainish Cycle, later the setting for such prizewinning works as The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed
(1974) and The Telling (2000).
There followed a slew of books in quick succession. She was guest of honour at the first Vancouver Science Fiction Conference in 1972, and wrote extensively for numerous magazines. She published a number of poetry collections, starting with Wild Angels in 1975. A collection of her essays, The
Language of the Night (1979), received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Her work during this period explored the capabilities of her chosen genre, its self-exploratory nature and the influence of myth on modern storytelling. Her 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” focused on the importance of finding a distinctive language, since in fantasy “there is nothing but the writer’s vision of the world … There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide readymade emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures in creation
… To create what Tolkein calls a ‘secondary universe’ is to make a new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation.”
In “A Citizen of Mondath” she bemoaned the lack of critical attention given to science fiction, claiming that “the writer is almost his only critic”. Increasingly, she turned her focus to questions of gender, particularly in her science fiction novel The Left Hand of
Darkness, which portrayed a world of androgynous beings, sexually inactive for 24 days of every month. She became the first female writer to win a Hugo award with The Left Hand of Darkness.
Many feminist readings objected to the use of male pronouns throughout, and in 1976 Le Guin responded with a piece entitled “Is Gender Necessary?”: “I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for ‘he/she’. ‘He’ is the generic pronoun, damn it.”
However, a 1988 “Redux” of the essay took a different tack, acknowledging the difficulty: “I dislike the so-called generic pronouns he/ him/his which exclude women from discourse … they/them/their should be restored.” Her 1985 screenplay of the novel introduced a, um, a’s, as an alternative.
Though intensely private as an individual, Le Guin remained an active literary scholar and critic throughout her career, attending conferences, giving interviews and engaging vigorously in discussion. In 2010 she took the stage with Margaret Atwood as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series, debating the nature of “science fiction” versus “speculative fiction”.
The 21st century also marked a return to children’s fiction, with her Annals of the Western Shore series. She rediscovered Virgil after a gap of some 50 years of reading Latin, and published Lavinia, her retelling of the Aeneid myth, in 2008.
In 2006 Goro Miyazaki, son of the distinguished film director Hayao Miyazaki, adapted the Earthsea series for film. Hayao Miyazaki had approached Le Guin for the rights to her books in the 1980s, but she was unfamiliar with his work and turned him down. Later she came to regret the decision, and wrote to Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli explaining.
However, she was disappointed with the finished film, though conceding that “much of it was beautiful”, and criticised the simplification of moral issues: “The darkness within us can’t be done away with by swinging a magic sword. But in the film, evil has been comfortably externalised in a villain”.
Among many accolades she won six Nebula Awards, six Hugo Awards, the Gandalf Grand Master Award and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award. Yet she disliked discussion of her work in relation to any particular genre, confiding: “I would love to see somebody, somewhere, sometime, just talk about me as an American novelist.”
Her last book was No Time to Spare, published in December, a collection of punchy and often funny blog posts on diverse topics.
She is survived by her husband Charles Le Guin, a son and two daughters.
Ursula Le Guin, born October 21 1929, died January 22 2018