Ursula Le Guin: Classic or Dud? Search and Destroy

I love her SO MUCH. Since moving to Seattle I've met her a couple of times at book fests, and oh, she is the coolest person imaginable. I want to be like her when I'm her age.

What I wanna know -- in a battle between her school for wizards & the Harry Potter school for wizards -- who wins?

In the Tombs of Atuan, Ged asks Tenar (= ex-High Priestess of the Nameless Ones) if she can read, and she says, "No, it's one of the Black Arts obv"

just noticed that Ged is depicted as caucasian on cover of my puffin copy!! oops!

i like that the dragons find humans v.komikal

The Lathe of Heaven ft(obvious)w, but did you know she translated the Tao Te Ching?!

The Dispossessed is uncannily masterful

How this thread can have gone so long without mention of the best SF short-story collection ever written, _The Compass Rose_, is beyond me.

I'm kinda annoyed, I looked over just now to my bookcase and I can't see my copy of Compass Rose there. I didn't get rid of it, I hope!

(I can see Orsinian Tales, Always Coming Home, all the Earthsea books and a slew of the sixties and seventies novels.)

I looked over to another bookcase and found Compass Rose there. All is right with the world.

the slug lords read and discuss "things" this week, from 1970

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime

the way she puts sentences together is pretty incredible - it's got this comfortable yet ancient feel to it, like liturgy or something

The Dispossessed blew me away aged 18, I must dig it up and re-read. City of Illusions is a fun overlooked one.

I thought the no knowledge of swimming or boatbuilding in 'Things' was a bit of a stretch, but overall I liked the semi-mystical tone, and the ambiguity of the ending and hence possible interpretations. Earthsea is the only other stuff of hers I've read - Tombs of Atuan is my fave - I mean to try some more but the library's got nuthin; time for another trawl of the second hand shops.

I think Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness are in print as part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series.

thought this was brilliant again tracer, do you offer a talking-book service? enjoyed mark and katie's discussion also

don't suppose you can read "things" online?

wow, thanks cozz-own d.h. i don't know what you mean by a "talking-book service", but it sounds old-fashioned, like a seltzer man or something that mr. burns would be familiar with.

no, you can't read "things" online, which is one of the inspirations for the show, actually - to make these stories more accessible for an illiterate online age

by talking book service I meant will you come round mine and read some of my long-festering books into a dictaphone for me : )

cool; will def. be hitting the bookstore today then to grab some ursula

New Le Guin feature/interview via the LA Times, prompted in part by her Nebula win two weeks back for Powers.

I finally read one of her books recently (thanks SF book club!), and really liked it. It was the one about the flipflop ambisexual aliens. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed it, as I had somehow picked up the idea that Le Guin's work is a bit serious and full of makes-you-think moments. Instead I got a book with loads of exciting political intrigue and stuff about human societies. Deadly.

just been on an earthsea binge. tombs of atuan > a wizard > tehanu > other wind > farthest shore imo, but they're all remarkably solid. tehanu is in some way the most interesting, in examining the earthsea male dominated power structure she's obviously questioning some of her earlier decisions as the author and creator of the world.

farthest shore freaked me out as a kid. so did tehanu, actually. i was probably easily freaked out.

i just read The Beginning Place/Threshold, and what impressed me was the fact that the novel was fairly short and sweet. cuz it was definitely the kind of story that someone else would have milked for ten volumes. this is true of her short stories too. the ideas are so good that other writers could dine out on them forever. but she herself just moves on to the next thing.

um, with the exception of her two long-ass series.

Brief but accurate:

http://io9.com/5924893/ursula-k-le-guins-great-unsung-masterpiece

I never got further than about 10 pages into this, and always felt vaguely guilty about the fact.

You should. (Trust me, it's very, very worth it.)

Ugh that other list of books linked in the article. So much boring.

^^^ list is terrible

I have been wondering if Starmaker is worth reading for awhile now tho...

like really people can't make it through Cryptomicon or 1984 wtf

Starmaker is superb, amazing scope, encompassing the whole universe and the end of time. Haven't read Last and First Men, but it's on the list. As is Always Coming Home - think I'll order it tomorrow in fact.

I don't most people have even heard of that Leigh Brackett book let alone pretended to read it.

Gravity's Rainbow and Dhalgren are definitely books that are more pretended to be read than actually read, but I wouldn't recommend reading either so...

^^^ has not been able to finish either book in all honesty.

Or Finnegan's Wake for that matter.

I've never heard of that Brackett book myself. agree about Dhalgren. never bothered with Gravity's Rainbow, not interested in its subject matter really

SF Public Library does not have a copy of the Long Tomorrow so yeah basically no one has read that book.

You people. (Have fully read and loved both the Pynchon and Delany books.)

Actually if I hadn't've read Dhalgren and wrote a paper on it in college, I wouldn't've been accepted to grad school and given a full fellowship, whole life story changed etc. So there ya go.

I like some Pynchon (primarily Crying of Lot 49, but V and Vineland were both enjoyable too). absolutely hate Delany.

I like plenty of Delany, but Dhalgren is overlong and irritatingly written. Basically feel the same about GV as well, but I'm not a big fan of any Pynchon really.

Ursula K Le Guin's house is for sale! If we club together we could probably afford it, right?

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article245407450.html

lets do it

I am good with this approach.

Holy wow that home is glorious.

wish i was always coming home to there.

omg yes please let’s do this

I don't think this will work out the way you hope, Laura.
Oh social media. pic.twitter.com/49m1UWnVzl

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) December 8, 2020

Awesome.

We are delighted to announce that the 33rd stamp in the US Postal Service Literary Arts series honors Ursula. Stamp release will be later this year, date TBD. From then on, all our letters will be three ounces! Thank you @USPS for this distinction. https://t.co/jGboi8i5LU pic.twitter.com/8H3UOGafPv

— Ursula K. Le Guin (@ursulakleguin) January 15, 2021

Gorgeous

And as I've been muttering elsewhere -- while I'm not positive this is the first US stamp to feature a nonbinary figure, that background scene is obv Left Hand of Darkness and thus features Estraven, so.

Yes, I was just admiring that illustration of Ai and Estraven. Really nice work.

so cool

I’m reading Tombs of Atuan with my son right now and that book is a god damn masterpiece.

You spend almost half the book just living in Arha’s rhythms, feeling the texture of her world and understanding what structures it it: the boundaries of fear and ritual. You have the sensation of a society living on just the husk of an unremembered time. The living drama of humanity has moved on from this place yet we are centred on it. (It’s like the US Senate!) What scriptwriters call “the inciting incident” comes a good third of the book’s length too late, by today’s standards, but what you gain is a recognition of its gravity. Plus it’s goth as shit. It really is astounding. Once the motor of the story picks up its pace all the weight of that long opening gives an inertial force to events that is just awesome. Honestly - the first book - Wizard of Earthsea - is very good, but it follows a fairly traditional structure. And the elements are not very surprising. It’s told masterfully of course, but you know, you’ve got a wizard’s school and some dragons and a hot-headed protagonist. This though - this is really something else. The intensity of it is frankly almost overwhelming.

There’s so much in there about freedom and breaking free of stultifying tradition and whether it’s possible to cast off beliefs you were inculcated with, and how morality intersects with these questions, and how you sometimes need to take the biggest risk you can take, and how an act of kindness - even made without really realising it - can open up your whole heart and change your whole life

booming and otm

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Atuan has been my favourite of the Earthsea books for a long time. It was one of the first books I used inter-library loan for as a kid and it was so unlike anything else I'd ever read at that age.
I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I haven’t read Tehanu yet Ned but why do you think it’s more impressive than Tombs of Atuan? Is it possible to explain without giving anything away?

All very true. But also underscores why Tehanu is even MORE impressive.

Yeah, as I said upthread, it's amazing that the series' turn from epic to intimate feels so liberating.

I think it's time for a re-read of the whole series.

I did this in 2020 (actually was my first readthrough of books 4-6) and cannot recommend enough.

I'm curious about her translation of the Tao Te Ching as well, but I think I might want something more traditional there.

literally bought this based on yr rec, th

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

The UKL TTC is U&K.

Sean Guynes concluded his excellent Le Guin reread with a post on why Tehanu is Le Guin's best book:
https://www.tor.com/2021/02/24/tehanu-le-guins-return-to-earthsea-and-her-best-novel

the 1st time i read it i did it with wrong expectations (and probably at a wrong age).
it'll likely speak more to me now that i'm older, lol.

Psyched

I also found Tombs of Atuan much more immersive and approachable and generally meaningful than Wizard of Earthsea. Ged is very much a figure of legend, running around fighting monsters (even if they're of his own making), and there's something correspondingly chilly and distancing about the narration. With Tombs of Atuan, you're plunged into the emotional world of someone who can't go anywhere or have adventures or even have a name; she's just a kernel of humanity hidden away in the dark, being somehow herself in spite of everything. I guess it's the difference between a traditionally masculine story and a traditionally feminine story, but Le Guin has turned the contrast way, way up.

I'm in the minority, I guess, as I don't think Tehanu works as well as Tombs of Atuan. Tehanu feels to me like Le Guin very consciously trying to write a feminist Earthsea book, in a way that comes across as forced to me.

That post feels very incoherent, sorry. I think I meant "the difference between a traditionally male story and a traditionally female story" - the kind of story imposed from without by traditional gender roles, but exaggerated to the most extreme point, so that the man can literally go anywhere and do anything but has an emotional life/interiority that's almost entirely inaccessible to us, while the woman is literally stuck in a freaking cave and we are immersed so fully in her POV that it's dizzying. Like the difference between, idk, Tom Jones and Persuasion, but side by side in the same series, and the characters are able to sort of step outside of the lines that have been drawn for them and meet and communicate, and somehow both of them seem more human through each other's eyes - idk where I'm going with this but I think it's cool.

Anyway, great posts, Tracer.

See whereas I loved Tehanu because I felt like "oh finally, this stops being about male magic and male energy and turns the dial to matters more rooted and more intimate". It resonated.

I actually didnt like Tombs much because all the scenes down in said tombs felt weird and claustrophobic to me.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I liked what she was trying to do in Tehanu but I just felt like I could see her trying, and it distracted me. But I do like it, and I get why a lot of people love it.

Had the thought recently that the Jedi are basically orgasm denial wizards which is probably what makes them so fucked up as “good guys”

Theres a short story in "Birthday of the world" called "Paradises Lost" that I found really evocative, the concept of multiple generations being in a spaceship heading for a goal (a new planet) and how that parallels with the concept of faith/life after death. Itd make a great TV series.

I keep thinking of that story these days because of QAnon, the way they watch this religion spring up from absolutely nothing and then take firm enough root to potentially derail everything, and then the oh-so-important vote where sanity just barely prevails, it all feels very familiar.

yes, nice parallel!

Tombs and Tehanu are tied for my favourite, I didn't read the latter till I was much older and found it incredibly powerful, like she was taking the traditional patriarchal structure of the first books and burning it with fire. Wizard/Tombs/Farthest Shore = thesis, Tehanu = antithesis; Tales & The Other Wind = synthesis!

I reread The Farthest Shore recently and liked it much better than I remembered. I had it lumped together in my mind with A Wizard of Earthsea, but it's much darker and more adult - and more personal as well, even though you still don't get much of a sense of who Ged is. This central idea of a world where something has gone deeply, inexplicably wrong everywhere, all the joy and sense of purpose running out of everything, all these people walking around feeling like they've lost something, and they can't even remember what - it all felt, honestly, like a really disturbing reflection of the world as it is now. And I'm not usually a big fan of world-building for its own sake, but the imagery she invents for the land of the dead just feels so right: the wall of stones, the dry river with its dry source, the mountains of pain, all feel like they're part of some vast collective unconscious, like they've always been there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/21/realists-of-a-larger-reality-wanted-ursula-k-le-guin-prize-for-fiction-to-launch-in-2022

Well, what I would call the "finding her footing" Le Guin is still pretty wonderful. The Left Hand of Darkness has one hell of a touching ending. And it's been too long since I read the first three Earthseas -- The Other Wind ends gorgeously, not to mention the series as a whole with Firelight. But several of my favorite of her novels drop off hard right at the end -- Malafrena, Tehanu, Paradises Lost, Powers, Lavinia a little bit too. I read so much of her, I picked up on the pattern -- it's often like she can't tear herself away from the beautiful world or characters she's made, so she just -- stops.

― TheNuNuNu, Monday, 24 March 2025 15:04 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have posted before here that imo the two reinventions of earthsea (in Tehanu and then the next two books) are wonders of world literature. Emotionally, the Tehanu ending takes my breath away; creatively what she does in The Other Wind is magnificent. I haven't read all the others you mention, yet.

That's really interesting, ledge, and suggests to me that I didn't understand the end of Tehanu (which I know I read at least a couple of times as a pre-teen/teen) and should try it again. It's always been my least favorite Earthsea book for that reason but now I'm intrigued.

I also love the ending of Tehanu. It *is* abrupt, but I remember the transition from the slowness of the first 95% to the “oh, shit” of the last section being quite thrilling and exciting. I’m looking forward to the last two books. I didn’t know about “Firelight”.

Indeed! Tehanu is a magnificent reinvention. I hadn't thought of Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind as synthesis, but that makes great sense, and will be a good thing to keep in mind next time I go through the series (problem also perhaps being that I reread 4-6 often but have only been through 1-3 twice).

One of her most captivating (and also disturbing + painful) novels is a mostly forgotten one called The Eye of the Heron. If Tehanu is the book where Ursula set fire to the patriarchal structure of fantasy she started out in, as you put it in an older post Ledge, The Eye of the Heron is the book in which she finds that structure breaking down around her *in real time.* Like literally *as she's writing.* You'll see what I mean. It's unreal -- and so touching, especially knowing what she made of her literary world afterwards. (Fair warning, though ymmv: I thought Heron was a three-star read the first time around, but on second read it became an obvious five.)

Get yourself a copy of Malafrena as soon as you can. It's a novel she rewrote something like seven times, finally finishing and publishing it in 1979, after the great turning point that was The Eye of the Heron -- and so coming full circle, in a way (the title of the next novel she wrote: The Beginning Place). That final rewrite happened around the time of her beloved mother's death. The whole thing is almost unbearably elegiac -- my own first read accompanied my engagement and marriage so I was rapt and in tune with the weight of the emotions, and on second read a couple years back I could hardly stop crying -- also could hardly bring myself to turn the pages sometimes, remembering what was ahead. But also -- it's Le Guin, so it's warm and funny and patient as sheep grazing, and multiple parts of it have the narrative propulsion of the back half of Left Hand.

I swear by The Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices, and Powers; best read in that order) like most Le Guin readers swear by Earthsea. I wish she had written another seven. New fiction in the Annals world was what she was working on in the days right before her death... Gifts and Powers both have that Malafrena effect on me, where in certain sections I have to slow way down, knowing what I'm inevitably reading my way towards. I can't think of any other writer who does that to me.

And I think she's an even greater short story writer than novelist... "Another Story (or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" is as touching as fiction gets for me -- but I'd recommend reading it after The Shobies' Story and Dancing to Ganam, as those form a "short story trilogy" together.

Long overdue for a reread: Four Ways to Forgiveness (nowadays published as Five, but the fifth is the only one I didn't love) and The Telling, which I remember having mixed-if-mostly-positive feelings about because the world-building was more interesting than the main narrative.

My theory is that there is no aspect of human suffering that Ursula didn't write about (beautifully, empathetically, wisely). She became my favorite author in 2014, and there is nothing I had suffered before then, and nothing I have suffered since, that hasn't found a profound and comforting echo in her work.

What's more, the prose style she developed toward the middle or end of the 1980s and then honed right up to her very last years (its apotheosis: the Annals, Lavinia, and a short story called "The Jar of Water") is, alongside Tolkien, the most beautiful I've ever known the English language to sound.

Emotionally, the Tehanu ending takes my breath away

I'm glad to read this, Ledge. I would love to be wrong. It's been some three years since I last read Tehanu, so I'll have to (ha! "have to") read it again before I could get into specifics.

I remember the transition from the slowness of the first 95% to the “oh, shit” of the last section being quite thrilling and exciting.

Yes definitely that - and twice over, you get the triumph of the villain which is just an amazing floor-dropping-away moment, when he calmly reveals his absolute power over them; and then a fist pumping feel good climax. Arguably if you do appreciate (and I do!) the slower, bleaker - hellishly bleak - majority of the book maybe the ending undercuts it? Well fuck, if we can't have happy endings in fiction, where can we?

xpost - thanks, I will absolutely read those, I've not been rushing to read all her books because I don't want to get to the place where there are no new ones left to read! And maybe I've been wary of The Annals of the Western Shore because it's YA, well so what. I have read most of the short story collections - if the fifth 'Way to Forgiveness' is Old Music and the Slave Women then I remember finding that very affecting. I'm overdue for a re-read too.

I've not been rushing to read all her books because I don't want to get to the place where there are no new ones left to read!

Same boat! I saved Always Coming Home for last, having read every bit of fiction she ever published (except the out-of-print children's books that sell for, like, $80), got 100 pages in, and told myself, "Noooope. Not going there yet." Still haven't.

Old Music and the Slave Women, yes. See there we go -- as with Tehanu's close, it's gonna be great to go back to it with refreshed expectations.

The Annals were published as YA but not written as such. There's an essay or interview somewhere where Ursula explains that in the mid-2000s "Young Adult" was, in her view, the freest genre in existence, in the sense that publishers in thay YA field were getting all kinds of weird writing into print, and smuggling it out into the world as "young adult." And so she was really happy to take shelter under that umbrella.

YA has been the "overflow room" for so much surrealism and fantasy for a really long time. Madeline L'engle tells the story of submitting Wrinkle to publishers like 45 times and getting rejected, and the only acceptance she found was if she published it to be marketed to children.

crazy factoid: she went to high school in Berkeley with Phillip K. Dick but they didn't know each other

What's more, the prose style she developed toward the middle or end of the 1980s and then honed right up to her very last years...

I thought about this for a few hours and can't let it stand, because the real first flowering of what I think of as her "mature" prose style is in Malafrena ('79). But it didn't become her default level of excellence for another few years -- Malafrena having the benefit of the multiple rewrites.

everyone quick its kicking off in the ursula le guin thread

My strong opinion is that her catalogue has too many shit covers that look like 1990s church pamphlets. The handling of the backlog is also annoying - lots of titles missing or strewn over different publishers, especially those unappealing SF Masterworks editions. (Not Le Guin’s fault, obviously.)

I wish to apologise to Ursula for ever doubting her. Just finished all of the Annals of the Western Shore, there's nothing childish about them. The first one is very simple, sparse even, but not slight; the second is more complex and the third is a tour de force. They all have her sharp focus on injustice, her gift of compassion and her magical storytelling. Such a great idea to have the narrator of the third be a slave brought up comfortable and unaware of the injustice of the system.

Great of you to follow up so soon, Ledge! And glad I didn't oversell it.

Gifts is sometimes my favorite novel of all time. Sparse is a great word for it, but I'd demur re: "simple" (as your own description does too) -- I think the ambiguity around Orrec's dilemma is an incredible narrative feat. I've read Gifts four times and could continue to make a strong case for either Orrec having no gift of destruction whatsoever, or for him in fact having one but -- willingly, if subconsciously -- binding it shut.

As regards our discussion that started Miyazakiwards -- thoughts on the ending of Powers, Ledge? Gifts and Voices (esp. Gifts) had endings I'd consider 100% satisfying, but the penultimate chapter of Powers particularly, while magnificent in conceit, feels so hurried and constrained to me compared to everything else. And I find the effects of that rush linger in the otherwise lovely final chapter.

The overall story is pretty simple but yes there are depths, such as you mentioned, and the delicate diplomacy that Orrec's father uses to deal with Ogge.

Gry suggests that "you can't go forwards and backwards at the same time" and if Orrec's gift is of making, maybe he never had the gift of unmaking. But yes it's never made totally clear.

The final two chapters are much quicker than the rest of the book, he visits just about as many different places in the penultimate as he does in the rest of the book. But it didn't feel rushed when I was reading it, the pace fitted the urgency of his situation. And I'm not sure I would have appreciated much more description of long and arduous treks and him getting his hooks out for fishing :) - the ending was lovely, a neatly giftwrapped happy ending obviously.