Women to Admire: Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin changed the landscape of science fiction with her beautifully written and tenaciously argued work. The sci-fi genre will never be the same.
Ursula K. Le Guin was like no other science fiction writer, before or after her time. During her career, Le Guin, for all that she was enmeshed in the sci-fi genre, stood apart from other creators. Her work contains a multitude of ideas, astounding both for their bravery, their progressiveness and the beautiful language used to describe them.
Her writing pushed the boundaries of the sci-fi genre, exploring new territory that was unabashedly intellectual and heartfelt. Neither did Le Guin sacrifice ideas or become naive in service of this sentiment.
At the time she began publishing in earnest during the 1960s, many of her fellow writers were thoroughly mired in a patriarchal, pulpy sort of genre writing. Many of their protagonists were men, often of the brave and square-jawed variety. They often dealt with sweeping drama, moving about from world to world and leading people and armies to a new way of life.
Women in those works, if they were present at all, rarely had much of a role to play. They were often damsels in distress or evil space queens that required defeat.
Le Guin, meanwhile, dove into the subject with intellectual rigor and an activist’s heart. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, was perhaps the first of her works to gain attention for this new direction. The novel follows Genly Ai, a human man who is selected as a representative of the Ekumen, an interplanetary cooperative. He must try to forge an alliance between the Ekumen and the people of Gethen.
Ai has a difficult time adapting to the Gethenian culture. The people on this planet are “ambisexual,” meaning that Gethenians only become a certain biological sex when it is time for them to reproduce. Thus, there are no fixed genders on Gethen. This has deeply affected their culture and way of life.
The Left Hand of Darkness is evocative of Le Guin’s best work. It is brave and uncompromising in its exploration of a truly alien culture. Yet, for all that the people of Gethen may seem strange to us, they are thoroughly human. Le Guin had the ability to balance the wild, forward-thinking nature of science fiction with the need for well-drawn characters and a moving story.
Even if some of her earlier and best-known work featured male protagonists, they were unlike any others experienced by readers. Here, there was no boastfulness, no swagger, but a complex character who could be humble and thoughtful as often as they were brash. These themes continued into her later work, when Le Guin began to use more female protagonists.
She was born as Ursula Kroeber in 1929 to two well-regarded anthropologists and writers, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber and Alfred Kroeber. Her work would eventually reflect the cultural focus of her parents’ fields of study. Le Guin went on to earn her master’s degree in medieval literature from Columbia University. Shortly thereafter, she won a Fulbright fellowship and traveled to Paris to further her studies. There, she met Charles Le Guin. They later married and had three children together.
Upon their return to the United States, Ursula Le Guin dropped her Fulbright in order to raise her children. Though this would have been a death knell for some women’s creative endeavors, Le Guin found strength and satisfaction in the balance of writing and family life.
“An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she said in an interview with The New Yorker. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”
She was also a vocal environmentalist and Taoist, as seen in many of her other works. These include The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1985). She often explored political and religious themes in her work. In The Dispossessed, she depicts a breakaway anarchist society that has successfully developed on a planet’s moon.
Le Guin was unafraid to depict the complexities of life in an environmentally hostile world. Neither does she shy away from the foibles of the people who maintain either society. The entire plot of the Earthsea series focuses on a young wizard named Ged. A tremendous mistake — caused in large part by his rashness and disregard for Taoist-style balance — sets in motion the plot of A Wizard of Earthsea.
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Le Guin never made easy conclusions. The reader is left to decide where truth and justice truly lie. Indeed, they may wonder whether those are metrics we should use in the first place. Some of her earliest work has been in continuous publication for over 50 years. Yet, it has never ceased to be relevant. Though she died in January 2018, Le Guin will remain a substantial figure for many years to come. Her work remains as moving as it is cerebral, as poetic as it is brave. It is as incomparable as it ever was.