I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin lately. I’m not sure how it happened. It wasn’t something I planned to do, like some people do when they plan to read one author or set or works. I just read this book and that, as I do, and before I knew it, it was the end of May and I was reading my fourth book by Le Guin. It was (and is) the second volume of The Unreal and Real, The Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Somewhat embarrassingly, I purchased both when they were first published, a decade ago. They’re lovely editions put out by Small Beer Press.
I have to admit, I don’t have a big history with Le Guin’s work. She’s always been around, but I never read any of it when I was a child, or a teenager, like so many others did. A lot of my friends read A Wizard of Earthsea in primary school and talked about how good it was. For some reason, though, I just never read it. I don’t know why. In fact, I didn’t read anything by Le Guin until after I finished High School and I came across a couple of stories in year’s best collections. She had a good year in 1994, with ‘The Matter of Seggri’ and ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight,’ coming out, amongst others. But these two stories were reprinted in Year’s Best books so that those of us who didn’t know much about overseas magazines could read the pieces. After I read ‘The Matter of Seggri’ I read The Left Hand of Darkness which I liked a lot, though not as much as ‘The Matter of Seggri’.
I still love ‘The Matter of Seggri’. The piece is a novelette about Seggri, a planet with large gender segregation due to its gender imbalance. From memory (I reread it just a few days ago so my memory of it is a lot better than it would normally be but please excuse me if I’m wrong), the gender ratio is one male for every eighteen females, and the society that has unfolded from this is one where women rule, and men are kept in castles where they are denied education and are instead trained in dancing and sports and rented out to women for sex and babies. The piece is divided into five different perspectives, from first contact explorers, to a memoir, and an excerpt from a popular novel. Le Guin has put the piece together so that it shows you an overview of Seggri’s society and gives you a brief glimpse into its history and politics. It’s a great piece, and from a structural point of view, an excellent example on how to mix different perspectives to create a larger whole.
There’s a lot to like about Le Guin’s body of work and it’s a body of work that has a good range and diversity in it. I quite like her Hainish cycle, her set of science fiction stories that are built out of that old, colonialist trope of finding new civilisations and observing them. For Le Guin, the observing culture is the Hain, the oldest and most benevolent, and it’s hard not to see echoes of her family (her parents were anthropologists) and a sort of privilege where encountering different cultures and benevolently observing them wasn’t problematic. It’s the kind of thing that belongs to an older generation and the concept of observing ‘lesser’ cultures cannot escape the feel of real world Empires, especially if you live in one of the nations that still exist under that conquest. But that’s not uncommon. Yet, still, the Hainish stories account for a lot of my favourite Le Guin pieces, perhaps because her, in her alien cultures, Le Guin runs her best thought experiments.
But if you don’t like those stories, there’s Le Guin’s fantasy work, with A Wizard of Earthsea and its following novels and short pieces as a centre. I read A Wizard of Earthsea this year, actually, for the first time, and found it a very gentle fantasy novel. The first three books are for children, and the second three are, I believe, for adults – or at least, that is what I have been told, since I haven’t read them yet. But what struck me about Earthsea was how it avoided the more violent traps of fantasy work, and which certainly existed in the YA fantasy I read while growing up. This is something I find true of all Le Guin’s work. While there is violence, the violent acts portrayed on the page are quite restrained, and don’t seem to overcome the narrative and exist without consequence, or for the simple act of violence. This doesn’t mean that Le Guin can’t, and won’t, portray terrible acts, but rather that they’re done quite differently than to what I’ve become used to seeing. Or, I guess, that I am myself used to writing.
I don’t like everything I’ve read of Le Guin’s, though, I must admit. I’m not a huge fan of her realist fiction, which often feels like it has lost the elegance of her other work, and tightened up to such a condition that it feels kind of stifling. Part of it, I think, is simply that Le Guin doesn’t write the kind of dirty, grungy realist fiction that I like, which is usually about losers, drunks, gamblers, or losers who are drunks and gamblers. The first volume of The Unreal and The Real had quite a few of her realist pieces in it, and I have to admit, I didn’t care for most of them. I wish I could tell you why, exactly, I didn’t like them beyond this sense that they’d lost what I liked in her other work, this sense of elegance and thoughtfulness that stayed with you after the piece. I’m sure that there are people out there who do like the realist work, and the novels she wrote, but I just wasn’t there for what I read. The exception to this was ‘Half Past Four’ a story about a set of characters who are different versions of each other, all existing at half past four, and the various changes and alterations of their lives.
Anyhow, if like me, you don’t have a lot of Le Guin, Library of America has been putting out a bunch of omnibus’ over the last few years. Reportedly, Le Guin was involved with this up until her death. For what it’s worth, I’ve found the books to be a good way to pick up a bunch of Le Guin’s work in editions that aren’t hideous, or in various formats and shapes and sizes that hurt your sense of aesthetics, which is a real pain that every reader feels.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of seven books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He once wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)