I mentioned the news of the author Ursula Le Guin passing away in an earlier post. Here is a note of appreciation.
As an Operations Research person, I love hard science fiction (Clarke, Niven, Reynolds, and others). But, it was astounding to read Le Guin the first time, and the sense of mystery has only deepened over the years. She was distinct from every other literary author that I have read. In her writings, Le Guin brought her unique sensitivity in creating imagined worlds with poetic words corralled with a rational curiosity of science.
Much has been written on the internet on the social foresight in her writings: the physical appearance of her protagonists, gender issues, politics of social choice, etc. She imagined worlds before they became tropes: the years-long seasons (now popular in the Game of Thrones) and the wizarding school in Earthsea Quartet (later expanded to popular effect in the seven-volume Harry Potter series, including the scar on the forehead).
Le Guin broke down the dilemmas of our lives and placed them in distant universes. By doing so, she broke genres, borders, and constraints of literary classification: She flipped the script on dystopian literature with her ambiguous Utopia, in Dispossessed; She explored the role of sex in Left Hand of Darkness by minimizing it only during Kemmer in The Left Hand of Darkness; She made Philip K Dick’s alternate universes poetic in The Lathe of Heaven.
To me, the striking aspect of Le Guin’s writings was the nature of her distinct exploration. Most SF writers imagined worlds that could be, but she often wrote of what our worlds couldn’t be.
Better than any of us, in her stories, she overcame the Orwellian constant struggle to visualize what was in front of our noses.
My absolute favorite is the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas“, Le Guin’s unique take of an age-old moral dilemma. Such questions have been explored with variants of the trolley problem. The earliest powerful SF exploration of the issue was in Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations (1954).
Like the people who walked away from Omelas, Le Guin knows where she is going, although it is impossible for any of us to imagine.
I am glad that she has left us a treasure. Sad that it is all we have of her now.
Notes:
1. Link to her short story seems to be in the public domain. Happy to update.
2. A good place to start reading Le Guin is the first book of the Earthsea Cycle. Here is the Amazon link (I am not an affiliate): The Wizard of Earthsea