Ursula K. Le Guin

Shortly after Christmas, I wrote a post praising Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968).  I expressed my surprise that, although I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, I'd never heard of the author or the book.  I had become mentally and emotionally immersed in  the book, and emerged from it at the end, blinking in the light of what we refer to as "the real world."

Since I wrote that post, I've read the remaining five books of Le Guin's Earthsea series, and another novel, even more complex and disturbing, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).  I've read critical reviews of these and other works, and several articles about Le Guin in the New York Times, including her obituary two years ago.  I realize that one of the most impressive writers of our time had somehow come and passed by outside my notice.

I've always considered Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to be one of the masterpieces of fantasy literature.  I still do, but it is a fairy tale of epic proportions, and was never intended to be something other than that.  The characterizations, even Frodo himself, are to some extent cardboard cut-outs.  The settings are often beautiful, but beautiful as in the background of a Disney cartoon. 

By contrast, Le Guin's settings are so richly and lovingly described that the reader feels he is reading a travelogue of a real world, written by a very perceptive and literate tourist.  In the midst of the tensest moments of the plot, the narrator stops to take note of an unusual bird or plant.  The characters presented are as complex and often puzzling in their reactions and motivations and self-understanding as are you and I, the readers.

As has been often pointed out, while LOTR is a saga that, like most ancient sagas, pitted the forces of good against the forces of evil, Le Guin's novels rarely have true heroes or true villains.  The battle isn't against an evil-doer, although some characters do evil, but against hostile environments and against the impersonal forces of fate and necessity.  And, often, against the protagonists' own undiscovered emotions and fears.  Le Guin's heroes seek -- like the wizards in the Earthsea series -- to maintain the proper balance in the universe, always aware that every act -- good or bad -- has unforeseeable consequences.  As does every failure to act.

It is this approach -- the approach that most reflects real life -- that makes her stories so complex and satisfying.

The Earthsea books, as noted in my earlier post, present a world populated by humans very like ourselves, perhaps as we were in the late middle ages.  The place is Earth, but an Earth with a different geography, where civilization, at least so far as is known by the inhabitants of Earthsea, is limited to a huge archipelago of islands, stretching from the northern latitudes to the tropics.  But beyond this geographical difference, the notable difference in Earthsea is the existence and acceptance of magic as essentially another branch of science. 

The smallest village has a village witch who uses simple spells to protect homes against fire, or livestock against diseases.  But beyond this level of village magic, which at times becomes nothing more than superstition, is the greater magic of the wizards, a magic that evolves from the very nature of the created universe and of whomever or whatever created it.  True wizards are highly trained, but no training will make a wizard unless he has been an inchoate wizard from birth -- a power that is randomly distributed among mankind, without distinction between rich and poor, aristocrat or peasant.  Earthsea's wizards are analogous to the great scientists of our times, perhaps.

The world of The Left Hand of Darkness, by contrast, is the roughly earth-sized planet of Gethen, at the outer limits of the known human universe.  A planet whose population dates back to the legendary past when an advanced civilization sent colonies to habitable worlds within their reach, a colonization which populated both our Earth (Terra) and Gethen.  The known inhabited universe, some hundred light years in diameter, consists of a few hundred planets, each of which belongs to a benevolent association called the Ekumen.  The Ekumen has sent Genly Ai as an explorer/ambassador to Gethen, seeking its people's agreement to join the Ekumen.

Genly Ai finds himself embroiled in political intrigue within the kingdom in which he landed and within a neighboring country, and caught up in the international struggles between the two countries.  Gethen is a much colder world than ours, perhaps gradually coming out of an ice age.  Technology on Gethen has reached perhaps the level we reached in the mid-20th century, with a number of differences resulting from the physical differences between our worlds.  For example, no one ever considered developing airplanes on Gethen, because they have no birds -- nothing that ever suggested the idea or desirability of sailing through the air. 

But the most interesting feature about Gethen is that the human race had become hermaphroditic, and had become essentially asexual for most of each month before "coming into heat," as we'd say about a dog, for a few days.  Only during this period of estrus did each individual become, unpredictably each month, either male or female in gender.  Thus, for example, a man might have a number a children, only some of whom would be "children of the flesh," meaning ones he had actually given birth to himself.

Le Guin, in discussing both Earthsea and Left Hand of Darkness, has explained that, unlike many science fiction writers, she has no interest in predicting the universe of the future or in explaining what is or is not scientifically possible.  She is interested in "thought experiments"  -- hypotheticals where she presents a number of given initial conditions and then explores the possible or necessary consequences.  What if magic were one of the sciences?  What if we were hermaphroidites whose lives were far less controlled by sexuality?  What if most of our world were covered with ice?

As I said at the outset, in these worlds there are no major villains or Homeric heroes.  Her protagonists -- Ged in Earthsea, Mr. Ai in Left Hand of Darkness -- are humans who master their physical and social environments, yes, but more profoundly who master themselves.  Men who learn, however well they can, how to maintain a proper balance of forces in the universe.  Or at least in the part of the universe they inhabit and understand.  “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” Ms. Le Guin told an interviewer in 2005.  

Not surprisingly, Ursula Le Guin had been fascinated by Taoism since she was a teenager, and was a translator of the Tao Te Ching.  Taoist thought permeates much of her writing.

Le Guin was a Radcliffe graduate with a master's degree from Columbia in the romance literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Born in Berkeley, she spent much of her life in Portland, where she taught history at Portland State University, and where she died at the age of 88 in 2018.

Her writing is beautiful and haunting, her thoughts profound, her imagination unbounded.  I'm glad I've finally discovered her work.