Ursula K. le Guin has died.

Ursula K. le Guin has died.  We will not hear from her again. The world is a poorer place.   But Ursula le Guin has lived.  We have her books.  The world is a richer place.    For nearly 50 years I have enjoyed giving people copies of her seminal novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.    Why?  Because ever since I first read it I was sure that the more people read it the better our world would be.   

I was sixteen I first read one of her short stories, Nine Lives, in which she explored the possible consequences of cloning humans.   What would it be like to have nine essentially identical siblings?   Pragmatically such a group could be of great exploratory, commercial or military value, especially working in very difficult or dangerous situations where their mutual bonding and precise understanding of each other’s capacities and responses would make them a highly effective team.  But what would be the effect of bereavement on such a family?  Nine Lives explored that, and I realised that science fiction is not just about science.  It is about people.  Her books have been my companions ever since.   

Her first published novel, Rocannon’s World, 1966, set out her educated palette of anthropology, sociology and psychology, painting carefully created thought-through worlds, set in an imagined future.    

The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 illuminated me, challenged my understanding of gender, and of what I would later learn to recognize as agape, the non-romantic, compassionate love that binds us together – and prompts us to make sacrifices for the sake of others.   Agape is the Greek word used by early Christian’s to describe this unselfish love.  The book also introduced me to interesting Taoist and Jungian concepts.

The Dispossessed  (1974) explored the political and personal consequences of living in anarchist or authoritarian societies.   These latter two novels also raised environmental issues, later echoed in The Word for World is Forest, The Eye of the Heron and Always Coming Home.    Add her evolving feminism and pacific anarchy ('a necessary ideal', she called it), to the mix and you may see how  her work was not escapism but radical engagement with own world and situation.    Eight of her novels are set in the same universe, and are known as the Hainish Cycle.    This gave a consistency and depth to her creativity.

But Ursula may be most famous for her Earthsea novels and stories, A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, The Tombs of Atuan, 1971, The Farthest Shore, 1972, and then nearly twenty years later in 1990, Tehanu, followed by Tales from Earthsea, 2001, and The Other Wind,  2001.  These are fantasy rather than science fiction.  Earthsea offers us an Iron Age culture, inhabiting an archipelago of islands on a watery planet.   Magic is employed here by those trained to handle it, mainly for practical tasks, such as repairing boats and buildings, and weather control – particularly useful for seafarers.    But magic is powerful stuff, and those able to use it’s great power carry great responsibilities.  (Spiderman’s Grandpa did not initiate that insight).    The early trilogy charted the education – and maturation - of young Ged, a gifted magician.   The Taoist theme is seen in the ways that Ged has to struggle with his own dark shadow, and the ways in which ‘good’ magic on works with nature, ‘bad’ magic works against it, as in necromancy.    And the ancient, powerful and mysterious dragons are always there, though rarely seen, and they have a deep wisdom of their own.    These three novels were mainly marketed for children and ‘young adults’. They certainly are ‘coming of age’ novels, but le Guin made no  compromises in her language, using her subtle and beautiful prose to construct sentences conveying complex ideas with perfect clarity.    They can give pleasure and insight to older  as well as younger adult.  

The later Earthsea books explored more adult themes, including childhood abuse – and death.   Her ‘land of the dead’, rather like that of Philip Pullman’s in His Dark Materials, resembles the classical Greek Hades, or the Jewish Sheol,  a grey land of shadows and shadowy beings.   Both le Guin and Pullman’s living protagonists try to free these trapped half-beings from their  impoverished states.     

Ursula understood her trade, wrote thoughtful literary criticism  and essays and books to help others develop their own craft.   She won dozens of awards, including five Hugo’s,  six Locus and four Nebulas, alongside a National Award for Children’s Fiction,  and in 2014 an honorary National Book Award.   In her acceptance speech she warned against the book trade 'preferring quantity to quality, letting profit define what is considered good literature'.  

Margaret Atwood has been a lifelong admirer of Ursula Le Guin  and hearing of her death she wrote in The Guardian that

“her sane, committed, annoyed, humorous, wise and always intelligent voice is much needed now.   Le Guin was always asking the same urgent question: what sort of world do you want to live in?  Her own choice would have been gender equal, racially equal, economically fair and self-governing, but that was not on offer.  It would also have contained mutually enjoyable sex and good food: there was a better chance of that”. 

I could live (more) happily in that world  too.   It does not have to be a fantasy.   But it takes work.    Ursula once wrote ‘Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new’.  

Thank you Ursula or your wisdom,  compassion, imagination, determination and craft.