“The Day Before the Revolution” is apropos too.
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May her passing have been sweet, and her life well lived, her works will long outlast her body. The original Earthsea trilogy was very important to me as a young man. I still re-read all her books periodically.
The K. stands for Kroeber. Ishi lived with her parents, and her mother wrote Ishi in Two Worlds. I suspect she gained insights from being part of Ishi’s modern family that informed her writing. It seems to me that no other fiction writer has captured foreign mindsets like she did.
For some reason I have always suspected the Wizard Nun in McKilip’s Riddle-Master of Hed was an homage to Le Guin.
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I read that to my students each term. Ursula was sitting behind me in a musical production of The Left Hand of Darkness in Portland some years ago, and I mentioned that fact and she laughed and said that educators from all manner of disciplines (law, engineering, epidemiology, etc.) told her about their use of the story. She related that young readers especially were interested in finding some way for Omelas to continue while the abused child was also rescued and cared for… they could not accept The Deal.
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I was just finishing up some of her shorter books, which I had never read. I finished Lathe of Heaven three days ago, and found it to be very weird and powerful. Now I might have to go back and re-read Left Hand for the third time.
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Short but sweet: interconnected.org/home/more/2007/03/acacia-seeds.html
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I started reading her novels as they were acquired by my local library when I was in high school. They were good stories, and I enjoyed the novel situations and people, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized just how much she had taught me. She exposed me to ways of thinking and being I hadn’t yet encountered, and my life has been better for it.
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so it goes
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”
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“True journey is return.”
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I remember being introduced to her work as a middle school student in a summer SF survey course. Her challenging work opened me up to a whole world of speculative fiction beyond the standard-issue blasters and spaceship stuff.
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Very sad news. The Left Hand of Darkness was one of the instrumental books of my life. The librarian in the mobile library in Hamilton Ont. almost didn’t allow me to take it out 'cos of the “sex” I assume. Which dates it precisely the week before coming to England when I was 13 - the memory is vivid.
Strangely, yesterday I just finished reading a minor work of hers, Threshold, which had been sitting untouched on a bookshelf for 30 years. Strange.
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Read a lot of her books in the 70s going into the 80s. Picked her up again with the new Earthsea books. Always wanted to write like her, but didn’t have the mojo. Damn.
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The Earthsea Trilogy was my Harry Potter. It inspired a life long love of myth and story telling. I have have been exploring how fiction illuminates the nature of my truth/reality ever since.
Thank you Ms. Le Guin.
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That’s the one that just … impacted me so much as a child. The “needs of the many” seems so perfectly clear until you really think about what that might entail.
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See my takeaway from Omelas was that the Deal was fundamentally flawed. That “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” breaks down real fast when you’re made personally responsible for that one.
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Same here. I was in the sixth grade when I found a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea in my school library. It was the first book I ever read, with the exception of children’s books or comics. It’s the book that made me a reader, and I return to it often when I need when I need a little literary comfort.
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For me it was the Earthsea trilogy. It truly helped shape who I am today.
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The great Le Guin.
Adults would read us
Tolkien and Lewis.
Drinking cocoa
in a bush hut,
or in a gypsy caravan.
Or on the big rock by the river after a swim.
Then one night,
by candle light,
we heard the story of Sparrowhawk.
She outshone them all.
Long live Le Guin!
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I’ve been thinking a lot of this particular short story lately. A must read, for sure. It raises an important philosophical question without feeding an answer to the reader.
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Her stories taught me to unbuild the walls I put in my own way, and to that end I owe more of who I am to her influence than perhaps any other author. I was hooked from the moment my childhood self found a dogeared paperback of The Wizard of Earthsea on the used book rack at my local library. I don’t remember weather it cost me 25 or 50 cents of my summer lawn mowing money, but it was probably the best money I ever spent.
As sad as I am for our loss, we were fortunate indeed to have such a warm light illuminate our little world, and I look forward to passing her books on to new readers.
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