who was ursula k. le guin and why have her books become so influential in science fiction and fantasy?
ursula le guin is a writer who rose to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. several of her works were groundbreaking, especially in terms of her treatment of genre, which is probably what she is best known for. she dialogued with other feminist writers of the time. In a sense, she would also say that her work was groundbreaking for the field in terms of its treatment of colonialism.
I think, unfortunately, in my opinion, that many people share an understanding of science fiction that is based on a limited number of writers from the 1940s and 1950s, which was about space adventures, space battles, and colonization of planets . , and things like that. but there is a tradition of writers who, for decades, have used the genre to think about cultural and social issues.
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ursula le guin was also one of the first writers to think about other species and our relationship with ecology. so a lot of things that are really prominent today, in a more diverse genre, were part of her work decades ago. Writers from many countries are now participating in science fiction, and there are strong traditions of decolonizing, feminist, and queer science fiction. le guin was one of the people who opened the genre to the contemplation of this type of perspective.
A lot of what you said there reminded me of why I’ve enjoyed doing sci-fi interviews for five books; It has made me look again at the genre. I began to think of it not so much as a mode of entertainment but as a genre with explicit allegorical or analytical goals. With that in mind, perhaps this is a good point to talk about his new book, Science Fiction, in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series.
It’s a pretty short book. it’s meant to be accessible to people who don’t necessarily know anything about the genre, to introduce them to the scope of conversations taking place in the field today. ideally, I hope there will also be something for people familiar with the genre. the book is really about science fiction as a way of thinking, a genre that is doing something in the world, rather than just a set of icons: robots, spaceships or aliens and so on. it is to think about how science and technology intersect with social, cultural and political human relations.
chapters are organized around questions where those connections are particularly prominent and needed today; things like decolonization, climate change, environmentalism, robotics and automation, synthetic biology, and the microbiome…what do they really mean for our understanding of ourselves, our world, our political systems, and our ethics? that is the work that science fiction is doing, thinking things in those spaces.
i think this is a good way to think about ursula le guin, specifically, too. because he deals with many of those topics in his writings. Shall we first talk about the dispossessed? was published in 1974 and tells the story of an exiled scientist from an anarchist world who arrives on an ultra-capitalist planet.
The Dispossessed is an important work for several reasons in terms of le guin’s “Hainish cycle”.
correct, yes. maybe, before we continue, you should tell us about the hainish cycle.
the hainian cycle is a series of interrelated novels. the dispossessed is one, the word for world is forest is one, the left hand of darkness is one. there are other stories and novels. imagine that, thanks to the ‘ansible’—which is invented in the dispossessed—there can be instantaneous communication across vast interstellar distances. so that all the different societies can be part of this league of worlds and have commercial and political relations with each other.
part of the view of the hainian cycle is that, at some point, all of these planets were originally colonized by hainians in their distant past. so they also have a kinship relationship on all these planets.
i would say it uses the hainish cycle to explore the diversity of how it is possible to be human, both morphologically, because we have a genderless version of gethen in the left hand of darkness, and the smaller, furry creatures in the word world it is forest, but also in terms of culture.
There are different ways to draw lines between who you’re going to recognize as human, and even in novels where everyone is known to be related to each other, there are characters who refuse to acknowledge that and clearly state it. his kind is superior. so the difficulty of humans in recognizing kinship across cultural and morphological differences is something that she explores in great depth and sophistication in all of these books.
You feel that the dispossessed is one of the key texts of le guin’s work.
yes. as I said, this is the novel in which the ansible is invented, the technology for instant communication over great distances. therefore, it is a way of putting cultural understandings at the center of what it means for different civilizations to be in contact with each other. so that’s one of the reasons.
I also think it is a very important novel because, as its subtitle suggests, it has an ambiguous relationship with the notion of utopia. Both the anarchist society and the super-capitalist society have their pros and cons, right? I think ultimately she is more on the side of anarchist society, or certainly I am more on the side of anarchist society, and that is reflected in how I read the novel. but she represents that everyone has ongoing problems that need to be resolved.
What’s really interesting about how he deals with that dichotomy is how he complicates it, makes it more of a binary. anarchists have to deal with conditions of scarcity, that makes it much more difficult to have an equal civilization if there is never enough to go around. however, they persist because of their commitment to their values. while the capitalist society has superabundance, but it has as much deprivation as the society based on scarcity; inequality is the biggest problem of capitalist society. so I think the contrast asks us to think carefully about the assumptions we make about the relationship between human nature and the kinds of political systems we’re likely to build.
“we maintain a utopia by isolating ourselves from the outside”
I think it’s an important novel for today because we’re in this moment of heightened polarized anxiety about migration, about how people from really different cultural traditions can live with each other. and I think that this novel is bringing to the fore the problems that we have to solve to reach an inclusive and equitable state instead of postulating some kind of magical and perfect society where everyone has already solved these problems, and generally because somehow the problem of scarcity has disappeared. .
the book makes clear references to the utopia of thomas more. Le Guin’s anarchist planet Anarres shares many aspects: there are no locks on the doors, there is no private property. there is a rotation of accommodation. More’s utopia was also quite ambiguous.
a lot. another thing that is true of thomas more’s utopia is that it is isolated. the way we maintain a utopia is by isolating ourselves from the outside. walls are a symbol throughout le guin’s novel, especially the wall surrounding the spaceport.
Yes, it is the only border on the entire planet, and it is described in the opening scene: “Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-sided. what was in and what was out depends on which side you were on.”
Shevek’s trip to the other planet breaks that isolation. I think, combined with this novel where the ansible is invented, it really suggests that one needs to be in cultural exchange, I think.
This emphasis on questioning utopia as a model of perfection is not an original idea for me. This comes from the work of Tom Moylan, who gave us a new and more complicated vocabulary to think about in the utopian tradition of science fiction. le guin is one of the writers he speaks of as what he called “the critical utopia”, a utopia that still has its problems as this one clearly does. what you really learn is that utopia is not the model of how society should work, but a commitment to the values that a society should uphold, although you are always in progress trying to manifest this in a concrete way. but it is what le guin refers to in this novel as “permanent revolution.” that utopianism is always asking questions, never letting society settle into these rigid roles.
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Precisely what goes wrong for anarchists is that the bureaucracy they need to handle distribution and scarcity solidifies into a power structure, and then they are no longer as anarchist as their ideals would like. the meaning is that utopia is never a place you arrive, but a journey you are on.
yeah, that makes sense. and it feels good, given the tense history of attempts to build utopian communities; we’ve talked before on this site about how often they start out fine, but then fail. thinking of utopia as a process, not a destination, makes sense. let’s move on to our next book by ursula le guin: the word world is forest. What is it about and why do you think it is one of his best books?
It is set on a planet that has been colonized by terrans (people from the earth, in the Haitian cycle between species), but there are indigenous people on this planet, who are humanoid but look distinctly different. they have hair, they are much shorter in stature and their pigmentation is green. the colonists consider them subhuman and enslave them: they force them to work in fields to participate in a forestry project. That’s what humans are for: to cut down forests and return them to the land.
the indigenous civilization has a culture where they never kill each other. initially the indigenous people extend that to the colonizers as well, while the colonizers use all kinds of horrible violence to force the indigenous people to work. this novel was first published in 1972, and it seems very clear that it relates to the american occupation of vietnam at that time because, in addition to deforesting the planet, one of the things they use to attack indigenous people is called ‘burning jelly ‘. ‘ so that directly evokes the imperialism of the US military at the time.
there is an uprising among the indigenous people and finally the settlers are forced to leave. but at the end there is, again, an ambiguous ending, I think the script is very good at ambiguity. the indigenous have managed to force the settlers to leave and stop killing their forests. but they have also changed their culture as a result of this contact. the possibility that humans (i.e. local people) could kill each other now exists within their culture, and we wonder what that means for their future.
I’ve seen this book described as controversial. do you think that’s fair?
is it a controversy? I don’t know if I would say that. what I would say is that she is vocalized through two characters. one is an indigenous character and the other is the most militant and aggressive of the human characters, who continues with a sort of retribution against the indigenous people even after being ordered to go through his command structure.
His voice is very much a caricature. he is a very one-dimensional character, who continually fantasizes about violence against women, violence against natives… he is obsessed with his own notion of masculinity. so I think he’s not a well-developed character, and the choice to voice the settlers’ point of view wasn’t particularly successful. but I don’t know if it’s controversial in the sense that I don’t think he’s controversial. but of course, he was very sympathetic to the decolonizing point of view.
one thing i want to mention here is le guin’s family history: his father was an anthropologist who worked with ishi, the last of the yahi who were indigenous to southern california. I guess we can see where some of the inspiration might have come from, and also some of the anger.
absolutely. that’s a very important aspect of the le guin approach to science fiction. In this particular novel, one of the things about his portrayal of indigenous people is that they gain new knowledge through dreams. for them, dreaming is a serious ontological and epistemological practice; Dreaming and material space are deeply related. This is something that is consistent with many North American indigenous beliefs, so she builds on that.
I know some people will be concerned that she’s not indigenous, but she’s based on indigenous tradition, and I have mixed feelings about that myself. I think that now we have a much greater awareness of citation practices, that we must recognize the indigenous thinkers who are the holders and developers of these ideas. however, in terms of that time in the 1970s when he published this, I still want to give him some credit for bringing that worldview into the mainstream, in a way that he takes it very seriously.
“she is very sensitive to the notion that our ideologies and values are embedded in the language we use”
even the title: the word world is forest. in the indigenous point of view, you don’t consider trees as resources. you can’t cut down all the trees and still have a world. it is a much more ecological way of living with other species. do not overexploit, do not destroy. many of the reasons people turn to indigenous thought now is that we are in an environmental crisis produced by extractive capitalism. People suddenly think that maybe the indigenous people had better ideas about how to live and maintain the ecologies around them.
That’s a big part of the worldview and language he envisions for indigenous people in this novel. that is also very typical of le guin in general. as in the dispossessed, there are huge language differences. she invents a new language for anarchist society basically because she is very sensitive to the notion that our ideologies and values are embedded in the language and metaphors we use.
I think you can see the eye of an anthropologist in all of le guin’s work. his books are essentially studies of foreign cultures. but maybe that’s truer in our next book, which is the left hand of darkness. I sometimes say this too easily of books, but this one really blew me away the first time I read it.
le guin introduced the notion of what some people would call “social science fiction”. I’m not sure I fully accept that term, because the social and the scientific always work together. but because there is this older tradition that science fiction is about physics and space travel and stuff, there have been attempts to imagine technological change without social change, and social science fiction rejects that world view. in fact, sometimes there are not even technological changes but social changes that mark the world as different.
but back to the novel. in one of the introductions it has been published with, it specifically describes it as a thought experiment. It’s a simple idea: what if there was no gender? What if people were gender neutral and only adopted gender characteristics for sexual reproduction? If someone could adopt masculine or feminine characteristics, and if throughout their life they could be both, then what would it mean? we have a world completely saturated with gender difference and patriarchal worldviews, and le guin makes us realize how true this is by contrast.
again, just like we were talking about the dispossessed, this doesn’t mean we have a magical utopia where everyone gets along. there are no gender hierarchies, but the power plays are different. in fact, one of the things that most moved me about this novel when I first read it is its gentleness—
This is the main character, a diplomat sent to make contact with this genderless world.
—yes, how wrong she is, because she can’t help but see the world through the assumptions of a gendered culture. so he makes mistakes: he genders people, even when their understanding of themselves is genderless. due to his sense of who is feminine and who is masculine, he trusts the wrong people. misunderstands the power plays that are going on. therefore, it is an extensive experiment in how cultural assumptions shape our ability to even perceive the world.
For me, that’s the most exciting part of the novel. I know that other people are interested in the relationship of trust that develops between two characters from different cultures; there’s also that really strong interpersonal dimension in the novel.
absolutely. there’s an amazing interlude as these two characters walk through a frozen desert, which is almost a book within a book. let me quote le guin, addressing this idea of thought experiments explicitly: “why are things the way they are? should they be as they are? What would they be like if they were otherwise? To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to admit that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or wrong. This seems to me the philosophy that underlies all of his writings.
to some extent. it was also heavily influenced by taoism, notions of balance and perception of difference dialectically rather than binary, so yes it can be arbitrary or wrong, but that doesn’t mean there is an opposite of what we might call right . that is something that comes out strongly in her philosophy. the quote you just read reminds me of one of my favorite things she said. That’s when she earned the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters in 2014; in his speech, he not only thanked the committee for awarding him the prize, but said it was about time speculative fiction writers were recognized as participants in the culture of literature, rather than being some kind of ghetto segregation. : called them “realists”. of a greater reality.” and she reminded everyone how important science fiction is because the genre is about “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.”
I like that.
I totally agree with her and I hope this is reflected in the work I do. science fiction is such a necessary genre today, because in many ways we have to remember how to think differently in the dystopian world we live in: a world of ever-present racism, ever-increasing economic inequality, and returning ethno-nationalism, a world where covid-19 has shown us how big the gaps are between the privileged and the underprivileged. That’s not how things are, immutable.
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said: “we live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable, just like the divine right of kings”. We no longer live in that world. which is why the ability to imagine things differently is so important politically.
your fourth ursula le guin book recommendation, paradises lost, is a novel first published in 2002, making it one of her latest works, and can be found in a 2017 collection of her novels, the found and the lost. this is an independent work, that is, it is not part of the hainish cycle.
yes. It is about a multi-generational space journey from earth. Unlike some similar visions, they don’t have cryo-sleep or anything like that, the generations live through the journey, which is a kind of utopian dream, going from a land that is no longer in the service of their vision of what which is the good life. is, to another planet.
There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to add it to the list. Unlike most of the works I chose, this is not a well-known story. I wanted to add something new to the mix. And we also have so many fantasies these days, conventional fantasies, about colonizing Mars. people say things like, ‘it’s about the future survival of the human race,’ which I find ridiculous. we can barely survive on the planet we have evolved on, how can we imagine that we can terraform a planet that is not able to sustain us? but that fantasy of escaping earth is alive and well today.
“they arrive as a human species different from the humans that could live on this planet”
then, paradises lost. pluralization is important. each generation has different ideas about paradise. generation zero had a vision and they wrote the constitution of the ship: this is what we are going to do, and it will take 200 years to get there. the intervening generations are supposed to keep everyone alive so that when they get there, there will be settlers. And, of course, the colonists are supposed to carry on that vision.
but while 200 years, for a multi-generational ship, is not that long, if you think politically, it is a long time. Think of America on its bicentennial: how close did you come to following what the founding fathers proposed? How much has changed in the last 200 years? cultural changes and different values arise.
derivation of the mission. each generation is redefined.
As with the dispossessed, this novel shows that you can’t fix a policy in time. Even in a small space — 4,000 individuals, more than 200 years — different political ideas arrive. and begin to imagine the ship as their world. so when they finally arrive at the supposed paradise, this new green planet, they are looking for electrical outlets.
They are used to not wearing shoes and find the floor uncomfortable. they have brought no species other than plants with them, and the necessary microbes for the soil, so they have no living memory of animals. so that any other creatures around will scare them away.
so that they arrive as a different species of human from the humans that could live on this planet. I think the profound materiality of his vision brings us back to earth, so to speak, from these fantasies about the colonization of Mars.
You mentioned that multi-generational travel is kind of a trope within science fiction. Did the script do that much, play with the conventions of the genre?
usually not so directly. obviously the multigenerational spaceship is something you might recognize. there is the word for world is forest – much of the science fiction above deals with terraforming or extracting resources from a planet, but very rarely do you see conscious indigenous peoples resisting that effort. or if it does, it becomes a space battle war with no sympathy for the original inhabitants. does not have the same critique of the colonialism perspective.
also wrote fantasy. I’ve read a lot less of his fantasy, because I’m mostly a science fiction person. but I understand from what I’ve read of his fantasy that he also remixed fantasy tropes, and perhaps more overtly.
in his science fiction work, he is more exploring new territories. think left hand of darkness: on one level, it’s a story about a cultural emissary meeting a new civilization. we could call that a sci-fi trope, sure. but what is more important is what he is doing with the genre, rather than things related to visiting a new culture. it’s a reinvention of what the genre can do, rather than play with tropes.
Speaking of fantasy, we should mention his much-loved TierraMar cycle. and he also wrote non-speculative fiction. For your fifth recommendation, you have chosen one of these books: Lavinia, a narrative based on the last six books of Virgil’s Aeneid.
wrote much non-speculative work, including children’s books. she has just made a great contribution to literature in general. One of the reasons I wanted to include this book on the list, beyond expanding beyond the books that everyone recognizes and talks about, is that I think there is an interesting relationship between historical fiction and speculative fiction.
Both are interested in how culture changes over time and the kinds of moments that guide a culture to take a new path. These moments accumulate, as we were talking about lost paradises, and how the humans who arrive are a different type of human than those who left the earth. those kinds of changes.
with the case of lavinia, he carefully investigates the lives of people in what we now call italy, when the events of the aeneid were supposed to have taken place. they have different gods, different ways of thinking about violence, different ways of thinking about gender. it is an alien culture, so to speak. that’s something that historical fiction explores through careful research, and science fiction is really interested in too: the diversity of what’s possible for human cultures and values.
nicola griffith, another sci-fi writer I really love, also wrote a historical novel, hild, which does similar things to what le guin is doing in lavinia. here le guin is also giving voice to a character who really has no voice in the patriarchal literary tradition.
and atwood, i guess, at the penelopia.
I think this is consistent with what le guin does in his speculative fiction. she writes about how indigenous people see cultural colonization, or how people who are not committed to gender understand politics. that kind of things. she is also interested in the role legends have in shaping behavior. because even though i’m calling it historical fiction, there’s a metafictional quality to this, because lavinia has conversations with virgil, and somehow she understands herself as kind of a textual figure of virgil’s invention. it is clear that virgil is not writing history. she’s making up this great myth for the founding of rome that probably has nothing to do with the actual founding of rome, but nonetheless becomes very important for later understanding of roman identity, roman empire, etc.
is a book that really shows the power of stories. And, ultimately, that is what Le Guin has explored throughout his career: the power of stories to shape cultural values and political societies.
As you mentioned, she was extremely prolific. she wrote 22 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four volumes of translation. it’s an amazing output. but let us return to this point of the fictional interweaving of it and a kind of frank philosophy. i think we should perceive ursula le guin as a great american writer, but also as a great thinker in general. would you agree with that?
absolutely. in fact, that’s part of my understanding of what science fiction does, as a genre, and why I want to work in it. it is a place to think about what happens when different cultures meet, to think about how technology changes social and political life. we are wondering if the things we consider necessary are really contingent after all, and where we can go from there.
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