Two Ways to Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018)

I doubt the world needs another commemoration of Ursula K. Le Guin, but I feel compelled to add my two cents for the writer who, along with Stanislaw Lem, is my joint favorite author of science fiction.

not actually the edition I read
(but it has the best cover)

I first read Le Guin in high school, when we were assigned The Dispossessed in AP Literature. I was amazed to be reading a piece of science fiction for class, but I didn't particularly love the novel, I don't think. Certainly I didn't rush out and start buying other books by Le Guin. I do still remember being impressed by my teacher's lesson on the book one day, where he demonstrated how the structure of the book reflected its themes. My embrace of Le Guin's science fiction would have to wait another year.

I roomed with the same person my entire college career, my high school friend James. James and we got along quite well, but there were times his idiosyncrasies could drive a man mad: watching Simon Schama's The History of Britain as he fell asleep every night, his belief that a grown man should neither wear shorts nor use an umbrella, the way he would tear up little pieces of paper into progressively smaller pieces, his weird dual way of wanting to be nice but also not caring if he caused offense. I kind of make him sound terrible with this list, but I really enjoyed rooming with James, and he was a great friend. (We've sort of drifted apart since; he's in Canada now and almost a Jesuit priest.)

But every now and again he would just drive me around the bend, and I don't remember what the specific cause was anymore, but he did so some weekend night in spring 2004, near the end of our freshman year. I have a vague memory he was going on about Independence Day, but who knows. I took off without even saying a word (I being as nonconfrontational as he) and wandered around Miami's campus in the middle of the night.

Miami has a gorgeous campus that enables wandering, but there's only so many times you can go by the swan pond, and so I ended up in King Library at ten at night. I wandered into the leisure reading room, where I spotted The Left Hand of Darkness. I thought, "The Dispossessed was all right," picked it up, settled down into a chair, and began reading. I was there until the library closed, which got me about halfway through the novel.

Many words have been spilt on gender in The Left Hand of Darkness, and I'm sure they're all true. (My favorite I've seen of late was on WNYC's On the Media.) But what really sticks with me is the friendship between Genly Ai (visitor to Gethen from the Ekumen) and Estraven (a native Gethenian). Genly does not understand Estraven, but the two end up thrown together by the novel's events, and by Estraven's sense of duty.

artwork from the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Left Hand

What always sticks in my mind is their desperate eighty-day sled trip across a barren wasteland. Le Guin is a master of description, of character, and of society, and these all combine in this sequence where you feel how hard this is, both physically and emotionally. To me, it's one of the most affecting sequences in literature, up there with Hetty Sorell's own mad dash through the wilderness in Adam Bede.

I didn't finish the book that night, but I did check it out and wrap it up soon thereafter. From there I tracked down the rest of the Hainish novels, and from November 2005 to January 2007 I read the entire sequence in order of internal chronology, rereading The Dispossessed and Left Hand, and reading the rest for the first time. Aside from Left Hand, my favorite is Four Ways to Forgiveness, a moving take on discrimination and decolonization in a science-fiction told in one of my favorite formats, that of a linked story cycle. And in the long run, I went on to read Earthsea and many other books by her-- and yet I have many more to read.

(I could talk a lot about her. I did a project on The Word for World Is Forest in an English ed class in college; I read The Left Hand of Darkness again in one of my first pedagogy classes, in complicated circumstances that meant even the professor was kind of baffled; I loved Le Guin's reviews collected in Words Are My Matter; and I admire her fervent defense of the genre of science fiction. But that's enough for now.)

Le Guin's focus on what some call "anthropological sf" means she created other worlds in her writing, not just our world with advanced technology. But these other worlds still are our world; she is a master at the doubling effect that makes science fiction my favorite and the best genre.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History. (Four Ways to Forgiveness, p. 108)

Ursula K. Le Guin has flowed through me, has shaped my way of thinking about the world ever since she saved me on a dark and lonely night. Just like the river History, she will keep flowing through this land.