cience fiction, fantasy, realistic fiction, poetry and even children's literature
all have at least one thing in common: Ursula K. Le Guin. The prolific author and
feminist stands tall in several fields. Among the 60-plus books bearing her name
are science fiction milestones (including The Dispossessed and The Left
Hand of Darkness, each of which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards), fantasy
classics (including A Wizard of Earthsea, the first novel in the Earthsea cycle)
and beloved children's books (the best known of which are Catwings and its
successors). Here, Ms. Le Guin looks back over her long career, talks about her
new novel, The Telling, and contemplates the future of speculative fiction.
You've written many different kinds of books. How do you feel
about the way books are marketed by genre?
Le Guin: I have no real objection to marketing and shelving by genre,
because people who read a certain type of book want to be able to find it. The problems
come with books that are cross-genre--and with the critical assumptions that anything
they call "genre" is going to be automatically inferior and they don't have to review
it or learn how to read it. That's where I get cross and run around orating about
it. ... I know that I'm always called "the sci-fi writer." Everybody wants to stick
me into that one box, while I really live in several boxes. It's probably hurt the
sales of my realistic books like Searoad, because it tended to get stuck
into science fiction, where browsing readers that didn't read science fiction
would never see it.
I've heard that publishers sometimes react to the success of a book by saying,
"Give me another one just like it."
Le Guin: It's funny, I started out with a kind of a naive arrogance, like,
"I know what I can write and that's what I'm going to write." I never did feel that
I had to do what a publisher said. That's probably what kept me from getting published
for the seven or eight years that I was sending stuff out and not getting published.
But once I got published, I met up with editors and publishers who were willing to let
me do what I thought I had to do.
Some of your alien societies are fundamentally different from ours, and yet there's
something eerily familiar about them.
Le Guin: Actually, all my worlds, in the novels anyway, are populated by
human beings. I make that pretty clear. ... Part of what a novel does is make you
feel with the people in it--so that you really can get into their skin and be a
different person for a while, while you're reading the novel. If the person is
too remote from human experience, I think that's not possible.
Your heroes really go through hell. How does suffering relate to character
development for you?
Le Guin: I do tend to punish my central characters rather severely. That's
a huge question, actually, because I don't believe that suffering purifies a character.
Suffering generally brutalizes people--it just hurts them, and sometimes it cripples
them. But one thing most fantasies seem to do is show somebody coming through adversity
by using a lot of intelligence and courage and endurance. A lot of fantasy stories are
"the little guy triumphs over a very harsh world." That's such an ancient plot, and
we need it. Kids need it, because kids are little guys in a world that's very
hard to understand. And everybody needs it, because we all do face an awful lot
of shit [laughs].
Some of your stories feature a character that seems to embody a society.
Le Guin: I think that's just novelistic convenience. You've got to have a
protagonist, and if you're interested in cultures, then the protagonist has to kind
of represent that culture. And if you have a foreign visitor the way I so often do,
like Genly Ai [in The Left Hand of Darkness], those two people can bounce
off each other and learn from one another. Estraven and Genly certainly do bounce
off each other.
You once said that science fiction wasn't working for you, back in the '80s.
What did you mean by that, and what's changed since then?
Le Guin: What was happening in the '80s was a sense that this
"remasculinization" of science fiction was beginning. ... A good many science
fiction books being written now strike me as boys' books. And I don't say men's
books, I do say boys' books, because they're kind of like the old science fiction.
These books don't have very much to interest a grown woman, to be brutally frank
about it. ... Which is all a little different from the stuff that was being written
when I came into science fiction in the '70s and early '80s. There was less
technology, maybe, and more social science. There was a kind of openness,
which I'm beginning to miss now in science fiction. ... What happened,
maybe, is that the literary experimentation that some of us that started
writing in the '60s and '70s--we were turning science fiction into literature,
and the hell with those who didn't like it. ... One reason women banged into
science fiction so hard in the '60s and '70s was that some writers realized
that this is this wonderful place to write novels that show different opportunities
for women. We could try out different societies. I mean, that's what The Left
Hand of Darkness is--I'm trying out a different physiology, finding out what
gender is by doing away with it. Maybe those experiments have been made and those
thoughts have been thought, and we're going on to other things, for which science
fiction is not as appropriate.
How has the speculative fiction landscape changed since your
first novel?
Le Guin: It's so much bigger. When I was first in SFWA, we pretty much
literally knew each other. ... Now, it has become a commercially profitable
field to exploit. So the science fiction section of the bookstore is about
20 times bigger than it was--or they didn't even used to have them.
But the level of writing, I'm afraid, has remained the same, or in some
ways become less.... A lot of people have sort of drifted out of science
fiction and left it to the essentially commodity writers, who just kind
of grind out the same stuff over and over--the sort of soulless series
that just go on. There's an awful lot of them in fantasy too.
Who do you feel are your peers today?
Le Guin: Carol Emshwiller is really a good case in point. I feel like
Carol keeps exploring new things. Her publishers don't understand it. Very few
people understand. Carol is the most unappreciated great writer we've got.
Carmen Dog ought to be a classic in the colleges by now, and I think
it would be if somehow people knew about it. It's so funny, and it's so keen.
Carol just hasn't found her critics or her audience somehow yet. But so long
as there's writers like that, I don't feel lonesome.
What were you reading as a kid that influenced you?
Le Guin: Once I learned to read, I read everything [laughs]. I read
all the famous fantasies--Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows,
and Kipling. I adored Kipling's Jungle Book. And then when I got older I found
Lord Dunsany. He opened up a whole new world--the world of pure fantasy.
And ... Worm Ouroboros [by E.R. Eddison]. Again, pure fantasy.
Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction
when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov, things like that. But that didn't have too
much effect on me. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and
discovered Sturgeon--but particularly Cordwainer Smith. ... I read the
story "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," and it just made me go, "Wow! This stuff
is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that."
What's changed about the Hainish worlds since Rocannon's World?
Le Guin: In Rocannon's World it isn't even the Ekumen, it's the
League of Worlds. That was pretty much sort of like Star Trek--a very
dim notion of, well, there's got to be some kind of organization out
there. Then the League of Worlds fell apart in about the third novel, kind of
off-stage, and then the Ekumen begins to show up. I began to understand who
the Hainish were and that they had actually sort of seeded all the known
worlds. ... Which is, scientifically speaking, absolute hokum. We on Earth
can trace our ancestry, and it's primate, and it's Earthly. But for the
sake of writing novels, it's very convenient to have everybody be at least
like cousins, so they can hopefully talk to each other and possibly fall in
love and things like that.
For some people romance is one of the things they expect in a novel.
Le Guin: Not if they read science fiction. [The Left Hand of Darkness]
is a love story, but the sexuality is evaded. ... Although it seemed awfully hard on
the poor guy. But certain distinctions had to be kept just for the sake of the novel
for it to say what it was saying. If it had become a sexual encounter, that would
have blurred a whole lot of the things that I wanted to talk about all through the
book. And it just wouldn't have worked. It would have given the story a sort of
false climax [laughs]. Premature.
Tehanu is subtitled "The Last Book of Earthsea." We thought,
"O.K., she's tired of Earthsea, she doesn't want to go back there."
Le Guin: Honestly, I put that on because I knew once I put out a
fourth one people would say, "Oh, well, you're going on, and this is going
to be a whole series, isn't it," and I truly believed that I'd finished the
story. But I certainly haven't. There's a fifth and a sixth book
coming out. Harcourt will put out Tales from Earthsea in May 2001.
The Other Wind will come next fall. Tales from Earthsea is
five rather long stories. Part of it goes back in the history of Earthsea,
and part of it goes on from the end of Tehanu. ... When I finished
Tehanu, I thought I had finished the story of Tenar and Ged and got
them settled. But of course I had opened up this whole other can of worms
with the little girl, Tehanu. I mean, who is she? What is she? And that's
essentially what I have to follow in these next two books--to find out who
Tehanu is and what her job is.
What kinds of SF or fantasy stories spark your readers' imaginations?
Le Guin: The fan mail from the fantasy tends to be nice letters from all
kinds of people just appreciating the books. It's very touching. With the science
fiction, often they want to either appreciate an argument of mine, or argue with
me. It's more intellectual. And they're much harder to answer. Science fiction
readers are so sharp, and they know how to read science fiction. The most
embarrassing one was this nice, kind of plaintive letter I got from a guy
who said, in Four Ways to Forgiveness, Werrell seems so different
from Werrell--this planet in Planet of Exile. And at that time,
and not until then, I thought, "Oh my God, I used the same name for two
different stories!" [laughs] He had laboriously worked out a sort of
history for this planet--and I just told him, "No, they're different
planets, I'm a dope!"
Somebody called your short story "The Matter of Seggri" a "how-to manual on how
to explore gender issues through the use of science fiction."
Le Guin: "The Matter of Seggri" is kind of like a boiled-down novel.
There's an awful lot of stuff in it, in not very many pages. It was very difficult
to write that story, because the subject matter is painful--this terribly
imbalanced society and the solutions that they arrived at. This was again
like exploring a society that I knew only some things about. I think the
reason it's written in these various voices is that I would think about
it, and then one of these voices would start explaining things to me, giving
a different take on it. I've actually been doing [multiple voices] a good
deal. I don't like to make too many gender distinctions of this kind, but it
seems to be something that women do oftener than men--write in many voices so
there is no one authoritative central voice.
Tell me about
"Flyers of Gy: An Interplanetary
Tale,"which you just published
on SCI FICTION.
Le Guin: That's part of a series of stories which will eventually be a
book of very short pieces called Changing Planes. They all take place on
what I call planes. Totally different places, which I don't explain, except insofar
as you meet them in that story. It's like bouncing around a whole lot of different
worlds. ... They're all quite short, and they're all rather weird like that
one. ... Here are these people that can fly, but it's a kind of curse. And
yet at the end of the story, is it a curse? ... We do love to do that in
science fiction--say, "Oh, you thought it would be so great, ha ha ha."
One person described The Telling as a wake-up call about the decreasing
rights of self-expression.
Le Guin: That's a nice interpretation, and I'm glad it can be seen that way,
but I was really just trying to work out in fictional terms what something like the
Cultural Revolution in China or the rise of fundamentalism in Arabic countries does
to the people involved in it--whether it's the suppression of a religion, which is
what happened in China, or the dominance of a religion and the suppression of
politics, which is happening in a lot of the Arab world. These are terrifying
phenomena--this stuff's going on right now, all around us. And it is something
obviously that human beings are likely to behave this way given the right
circumstances. So I sort of had to write a book about it.
The Telling seems to be a little more introspective than some of
your other books.
Le Guin: That's the way my heroine, my tale-teller, is--she just came out
that way. And I couldn't write the book without her, without Sutty. But Sutty's a
gnarly little character. So it's kind of her book. I had a lot of trouble starting
the book because I couldn't find the person to whom this story was happening.
When she finally came along--there she was. And I couldn't argue [laughs].
You make five false starts and you're so grateful when you finally find this
character who's going to tell you this story.
I was reading John Clute's review, which basically said, "OK, you're going
to get to this part in the middle where it seems to slow down a bit--now don't
stop."
Le Guin: [Laughs] Well, thank you, John Clute. I'm grateful, because I
worried about that, where she's trying to figure out what The Telling is.
It gets pretty
intellectual. It's one of the good things about science fiction. You can actually throw
in a whole chapter of what is to a large extent intellectual speculation, without losing
all your readers. You might lose some of them, and I don't blame them, but some of them
will not only bear with it, they'll even like it.
You approached that in The Left Hand of Darkness by using interstitial
matter, which covers similar ground but in the form of folk tales and that kind
of thing.
Le Guin: It was purely fortuitous. Those were written to explain things to
myself, and it wasn't till I'd finished the book that it occurred to me that I could
put them in. Of course, then there was some rewriting and fitting together, but
basically they were just little things where I couldn't figure out what
was going on, and why people were behaving this way.
So what's next? We already talked about the two forthcoming Earthsea books.
Le Guin: So long as they're forthcoming, I'm off the hook [laughs]. Because
I don't know what I'll write next. I never do. Meanwhile you go through a lot of
anxiety ... and then, once you've completely convinced yourself that you're
through, you're done, you're over, you're washed out, then some character comes
sauntering along, and you write another story.
Do you feel you're going to retire at some point?
Le Guin: Oh, I hope not. I don't want to. I love writing. I love it better
than anything. ... Writers are terrible whiners. They really are. We get together
and whine at each other. But actually I think a lot of writers secretly do enjoy
it when they're writing. It's just not fashionable to admit it.
Well, I think I've finished grilling you.
Le Guin: Listen, can I leave a question for the people reading? I think
we need a name for a form that has always existed, but I think it's more popular
than ever now: connected stories in one volume--stories which are separate short
stories, but they have characters or theme or place or something in common.
Four Ways to Forgiveness is an example of this--a collection that's
actually something between a collection of short stories and a novel. I want
to put this out there, because somebody's going to come up with a good name
for this form.
