“I think both science fiction and fantasy are now becoming part of the mainstream. I wanted them to be respected as part of the mainstream — I didn’t want genre snobbishness to prevail. But there is a difference between how you write science fiction and how you write a realistic novel and how you write a Western, even if they always have miscegenated (as we used to say). I think it’s improving the mainstream, but I’m not sure it’s improving science fiction.”
Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born October 21, 1929 in Berkeley CA. Her father was renowned anthropologist Dr. Alfred L. Kroeber (1876-1960), and her mother was writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). She graduated with honors from Radcliffe College, Boston (1951) and earned a Masters Degree in French and Italian renaissance literature from Columbia University (1952). A Fulbright Fellow in 1953, she met fellow Fulbright scholar Charles A. Le Guin during the voyage to France on the Queen Mary; they married later that year in Paris. They both studied and taught French for several years before settling in Portland OR. She has also taught writing workshops in the US, UK, and Australia since the early ’70s. She and her husband have lived in the same house for more than 45 years, and have two daughters, one son, and several grandchildren. Le Guin was one of the earliest SF authors to gain literary recognition outside the genre and to be embraced by the academic community. Though she submitted a piece to Astounding at age 11 (it was rejected), when she began writing in the ’50s her focus was on realistic fiction. She was unable to find a publisher for her prose, and sold mostly poetry. She began concentrating on SF after selling time-travel story “April in Paris” to Fantastic in 1962, after which she wrote mostly short stories that leaned toward fantasy, all of which she sold to Cele Goldsmith for Amazing and Fantastic. First novel Rocannon’s World was published in 1966, and was the beginning of her Hainish series of novels and stories set in the same future universe, spanning some 2,500 years. The series continued with Planet of Exile (1966); City of Illusions (1967); The Left Hand of Darkness (1974), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards; and The Dispossessed (1974), which also won the Hugo and the Nebula; novellas “Vaster than Empires and More Slow”
(1971) and Hugo-winning “The Word for World Is Forest” (1972, as a book 1976); and a number of short stories, including Nebula winner “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974). The series, which combined feminist themes, mythology, and Taoism, helped alter the face of SF literature. Le Guin also introduced the “ansible,” an instantaneous communicator, subsequently used by other SF authors. She returned to the Hainish universe with story suite Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) and The Telling (2000). Le Guin wrote several non-Hainish works during the early period (1962-74) as well, including: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), which has been adapted twice for film, in 1980 and 2002; Hugo-winning story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973); and novelette “Nine Lives” (1969). She also wrote the Earthsea trilogy: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968); Newbery Honor Book The Tombs of Atuan (1972); and National Book Award winner The Farthest Shore (1972). Nearly 20 years later she finished the series with Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990), which won a Nebula. A decade later she added collection Tales of Earthsea (2001) and novel The Other Wind (2001). The first two books were adapted for a TV miniseries in 2004, the result of which so appalled Le Guin that she published essay “A Whitewashed Earthsea — How the Sci Fi Channel Wrecked My Books”. She was also disappointed in the animated adaptation Tales From Earthsea (2005). After the early Hainish works, Le Guin wrote fewer stories and focused on novels, including the Orsinia books: collection Orsinian Tales (1976) and Malafrena (1979), set in a fictional central European country; The Beginning Place (1980); multi-media Always Coming Home (1985) with music and poetry of Kesh, located in a future, postcatastrophe California; and story suite Searoad
of Saturn Continued on page 62
LOCUS October 2008 / 5