lisa_goldstein (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lisa_goldstein) wrote2018-01-26 11:44 am
lisa_goldstein) wrote2018-01-26 11:44 am
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Ursula Le Guin
Something I haven’t seen in all the remembrances of Ursula Le Guin is how much she meant to girls who wanted to write science fiction and fantasy. There were women writers back when I started reading these genres, but there was always something keeping them from being considered in the top tier — Andre Norton wrote juveniles, Marion Zimmer Bradley was mostly read by women, etc. (This strategy and more is, of course, laid out in Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing.)
Then came Le Guin, and she was so good at the science fiction game — at speculation, at rigorously working out what one or several permutations would mean to a person or a society — that you absolutely could not ignore her. What if people’s genders weren’t permanent, if they could be one or the other every month? What if your dreams could affect the waking world? And it wasn’t just science fiction — she was all-around brilliant. Her characters were so real and rounded they became people you wanted to know. She wrote beautifully, in a field where most writing ranged from serviceable to awkward. And she was not just smart but wise, someone who could get to the heart of a subject with a few well-chosen words. I was looking through my copy of The Language of the Night this week and found this: “Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true.”
So I began to think that I could actually do this science-fiction thing. After all, here was a woman who was, IMHO, doing it better than any male writer. (And around the same time there were also Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm and Carol Emshwiller — and James Tiptree, or course, but we didn’t know her secret then.) She gave me, and any number of other girls reading science fiction in those years, the courage to try.
I was lucky enough to get to meet her a few times. Once, when a bunch of writers got together to read from an anthology she edited, The Norton Book of Science Fiction, she introduced herself to my husband by saying, “Hi, I’m Ursula.” Doug was charmed for life. For one thing, of course everyone knew who she was, but she didn’t take it for granted, didn’t expect to be treated any differently. For another, many writers he’d met would only talk to other writers, completely ignoring the writers’ spouses. She was gracious in addition to everything else, someone who turned out to be just as terrific in real life as in her writing.
Then came Le Guin, and she was so good at the science fiction game — at speculation, at rigorously working out what one or several permutations would mean to a person or a society — that you absolutely could not ignore her. What if people’s genders weren’t permanent, if they could be one or the other every month? What if your dreams could affect the waking world? And it wasn’t just science fiction — she was all-around brilliant. Her characters were so real and rounded they became people you wanted to know. She wrote beautifully, in a field where most writing ranged from serviceable to awkward. And she was not just smart but wise, someone who could get to the heart of a subject with a few well-chosen words. I was looking through my copy of The Language of the Night this week and found this: “Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true.”
So I began to think that I could actually do this science-fiction thing. After all, here was a woman who was, IMHO, doing it better than any male writer. (And around the same time there were also Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm and Carol Emshwiller — and James Tiptree, or course, but we didn’t know her secret then.) She gave me, and any number of other girls reading science fiction in those years, the courage to try.
I was lucky enough to get to meet her a few times. Once, when a bunch of writers got together to read from an anthology she edited, The Norton Book of Science Fiction, she introduced herself to my husband by saying, “Hi, I’m Ursula.” Doug was charmed for life. For one thing, of course everyone knew who she was, but she didn’t take it for granted, didn’t expect to be treated any differently. For another, many writers he’d met would only talk to other writers, completely ignoring the writers’ spouses. She was gracious in addition to everything else, someone who turned out to be just as terrific in real life as in her writing.
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