Any major science-fiction gourmand will tell you that Ursula K. Le Guin is among the most compelling writers living today. At age 79 she’s also a renowned poet and essayist, but it’s as the author of some of the more mind-warping sf and fantasy tales of the past 40 years that she’s most revered:
, the six Earthsea books, nine short-story collections, and her latest novel,
, among them.
These books drop you into acutely strange territories where conjectured sociology, alien technologies, and our own deeply held myths are merged, to almost psychedelic effect—psychedelic as in perspective-mutating, context-smashing. They’re on the through-line of true speculative lit that stretches from Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells to Kurt Vonnegut and William Gibson—what writer Nancy Jesser calls “an anthropology of the future, imagining whole cultural systems and conflicts.”
Le Guin has lived in Portland, Oregon, with her historian husband, Charles, in the same house for almost 50 years. Vice: First off, I’m curious about the motivation of an 11-year-old girl in 1940 to submit stories to science-fiction magazines. What led you to that point?
Ursula K. Le Guin: Astounding Amazing Thrilling Wonder There’s all this debate about what even constitutes science fiction. Strictly speaking, a movie like Star Wars is not sf in the original sense. It’s more of a “space opera.”
Star Wars Wikipedia categorizes a lot of your work as “soft science fiction”—a pretty horrible-sounding designation. Is there a more useful term for what you do? Maybe one that’s not even contingent on the category of science fiction?
Don’t tell me that you still come up against resistance from male readers to the idea of a female sf writer.
Tehanu Are there many other professional female sf writers?
Locus I really wouldn’t have guessed that many. What unique perspectives do women bring to sf?
Your new novel, Lavinia, fleshes out of an important female character in Virgil’s Aeneid, one who never speaks in the original poem. I was really struck by one thing. In the ancient world people bore the burden of anticipating an unhappy afterlife in the underworld. It’s as if there were no heaven, only hell and purgatory, to look forward to. I’d think it would be difficult to create motivations in characters with that view of their existence.
Aeneid No, no. As an atheist myself I certainly don’t believe that being moral proceeds solely from a belief in gods or religions. But—ancient history not being my strongest suit—I was under the impression that the underworld was populated exclusively by deeply melancholic and tormented shades—that there was no concept of paradise for mortals. Not true? OK, misfire on my part.
The spirit of Virgil appears to Lavinia several times, and in one scene he reels off a condensed if extremely graphic account of the violent deaths in the Aeneid. It goes on for pages! His cynicism is palpable. Is it also yours? Is Lavinia an antiwar book?
Lavinia Aeneid It’s got several themes, the most interesting being your conflation of the concept of fate with the narrative privilege of the author. In this case Lavinia actually meets her author, but fate still takes its course. It seems like a key idea in your writing.
Aeneid We have this weird idea of the Bronze Age—in Hollywood movies, comic books, and video games, anyway—as an era of total savagery with little-to-no peace or empathy. Your historically accurate depiction in Lavinia is so different.
Iliad Odyssey Age of Bronze Sounds good. Sf writers often have to invent and detail advanced technologies for their stories. Your communication device, the ansible, was so good it was adopted in variation by other sf writers. Too bad you couldn’t patent it! But were you thinking at all of Joseph Licklider and the ARPANET—the original internet—when you invented the ansible in 1966?
I watched the Studio Ghibli anime of Tales From Earthsea—well, half of it. I thought it was pretty crappy but haven’t exactly worked out why. Then there was the Sci Fi Channel’s Earthsea series. Your opinion?
Peeping Tom Black Narcissus Wow, you and Michael Powell. Perfect pairing, actually.
Have there been any worthy adaptations of your novels to the screen?
Lathe of Heaven I have a friend who’s very into sf literature but won’t watch an sf movie. Snobby, or would you agree that the form doesn’t work well on film?
Brother From Another Planet No, they can’t. But why is that? Why do science-fiction ideas and narratives lend themselves so well to such old technologies as writing and reading?
Your father was the estimable anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Was he an influence?
Your books have fascinating takes on castes, slavery, and racial conflict. Do you think we’ll eventually evolve past those limitations? I guess I’m wondering if you see yourself in any way as utopian.
The Dispossessed Always Coming Home What’s your take on magical realism? Where would you put it in relation to sf?
The book that many consider your masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness, describes a planet of a-gendered humans. They become male or female for only a few days in every lunar cycle.
That narrative conceit is not the central one in the book…
Your exploration of it is so up-to-date, it’s astonishing.
Have you known transgendered or hermaphroditic people in your life?
The Left Hand of Darkness How do you keep the immense scale of the books from wobbling out of control in your head? The sheer intensity of it would cause me to dream constantly of the alien worlds I’d created.
Yes, but for the Hainish Cycle of books you invented over 80 different inhabited worlds, each with its own cultures and physics…
The Dispossessed mostly
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These books drop you into acutely strange territories where conjectured sociology, alien technologies, and our own deeply held myths are merged, to almost psychedelic effect—psychedelic as in perspective-mutating, context-smashing. They’re on the through-line of true speculative lit that stretches from Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells to Kurt Vonnegut and William Gibson—what writer Nancy Jesser calls “an anthropology of the future, imagining whole cultural systems and conflicts.”
Le Guin has lived in Portland, Oregon, with her historian husband, Charles, in the same house for almost 50 years. Vice: First off, I’m curious about the motivation of an 11-year-old girl in 1940 to submit stories to science-fiction magazines. What led you to that point?
Ursula K. Le Guin: Astounding Amazing Thrilling Wonder There’s all this debate about what even constitutes science fiction. Strictly speaking, a movie like Star Wars is not sf in the original sense. It’s more of a “space opera.”
Star Wars Wikipedia categorizes a lot of your work as “soft science fiction”—a pretty horrible-sounding designation. Is there a more useful term for what you do? Maybe one that’s not even contingent on the category of science fiction?
Don’t tell me that you still come up against resistance from male readers to the idea of a female sf writer.
Tehanu Are there many other professional female sf writers?
Locus I really wouldn’t have guessed that many. What unique perspectives do women bring to sf?
Your new novel, Lavinia, fleshes out of an important female character in Virgil’s Aeneid, one who never speaks in the original poem. I was really struck by one thing. In the ancient world people bore the burden of anticipating an unhappy afterlife in the underworld. It’s as if there were no heaven, only hell and purgatory, to look forward to. I’d think it would be difficult to create motivations in characters with that view of their existence.
Aeneid No, no. As an atheist myself I certainly don’t believe that being moral proceeds solely from a belief in gods or religions. But—ancient history not being my strongest suit—I was under the impression that the underworld was populated exclusively by deeply melancholic and tormented shades—that there was no concept of paradise for mortals. Not true? OK, misfire on my part.
The spirit of Virgil appears to Lavinia several times, and in one scene he reels off a condensed if extremely graphic account of the violent deaths in the Aeneid. It goes on for pages! His cynicism is palpable. Is it also yours? Is Lavinia an antiwar book?
Lavinia Aeneid It’s got several themes, the most interesting being your conflation of the concept of fate with the narrative privilege of the author. In this case Lavinia actually meets her author, but fate still takes its course. It seems like a key idea in your writing.
Aeneid We have this weird idea of the Bronze Age—in Hollywood movies, comic books, and video games, anyway—as an era of total savagery with little-to-no peace or empathy. Your historically accurate depiction in Lavinia is so different.
Iliad Odyssey Age of Bronze Sounds good. Sf writers often have to invent and detail advanced technologies for their stories. Your communication device, the ansible, was so good it was adopted in variation by other sf writers. Too bad you couldn’t patent it! But were you thinking at all of Joseph Licklider and the ARPANET—the original internet—when you invented the ansible in 1966?
I watched the Studio Ghibli anime of Tales From Earthsea—well, half of it. I thought it was pretty crappy but haven’t exactly worked out why. Then there was the Sci Fi Channel’s Earthsea series. Your opinion?
Peeping Tom Black Narcissus Wow, you and Michael Powell. Perfect pairing, actually.
Have there been any worthy adaptations of your novels to the screen?
Lathe of Heaven I have a friend who’s very into sf literature but won’t watch an sf movie. Snobby, or would you agree that the form doesn’t work well on film?
Brother From Another Planet No, they can’t. But why is that? Why do science-fiction ideas and narratives lend themselves so well to such old technologies as writing and reading?
Your father was the estimable anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Was he an influence?
Your books have fascinating takes on castes, slavery, and racial conflict. Do you think we’ll eventually evolve past those limitations? I guess I’m wondering if you see yourself in any way as utopian.
The Dispossessed Always Coming Home What’s your take on magical realism? Where would you put it in relation to sf?
The book that many consider your masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness, describes a planet of a-gendered humans. They become male or female for only a few days in every lunar cycle.
That narrative conceit is not the central one in the book…
Your exploration of it is so up-to-date, it’s astonishing.
Have you known transgendered or hermaphroditic people in your life?
The Left Hand of Darkness How do you keep the immense scale of the books from wobbling out of control in your head? The sheer intensity of it would cause me to dream constantly of the alien worlds I’d created.
Yes, but for the Hainish Cycle of books you invented over 80 different inhabited worlds, each with its own cultures and physics…
The Dispossessed mostly
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