It’s less than an hour since the news broke that Ursula K. Le Guin has died and right now my Twitter feed, populated as it is with science fiction and fantasy writers, editors and fans, is a single, unbroken string of testimonials. N.K. Jemisin, who won back-to-back Hugo Awards for her novels “The Fifth Season” and “The Obelisk Gate,” is recounting how a note from Le Guin filled her with joy.
Novelist Madeline Ashby recounts meeting Le Guin at a lecture, mentioning to Le Guin that she was writing her thesis on her, and Le Guin insisting Ashby send it to her. She did. Le Guin wrote back with notes.Neil Gaiman is saying, “I miss her as a glorious funny prickly person, & I miss her as the deepest and smartest of the writers, too.” Patrick Nielsen Hayden, associate publisher of Tor Books, is saying, “She wasn’t always right, but she was always wise.”
On and on and on goes this immediate and real-time outpouring of grief and remembrance of a woman who gave us Earthsea, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which is as much a parable for our time as anything that anyone has written, or likely will.
She was a supporting column of the genre, on equal footing and bearing equal weight to Verne or Wells or Heinlein or Bradbury. Losing her is like losing one of the great sequoias. As the unceasing flow of testimonials gives witness, nearly every lover and creator of science fiction and fantasy can give you a story of how Le Guin, through her words or presence, has illuminated their lives.
She was a supporting column of the genre.
… Losing her is like losing one of the great sequoias.I am no exception. My story involves her book “Always Coming Home,” which posits the life of a people who, as Le Guin put it, “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” when astounding technology exists but most people live simply in villages. In the book, a woman named Stone Telling recounts the story of her wanderings, and that story is interspersed with chapters featuring the songs and stories and rituals of this future nation, called the Kesh.
I met the book as a teenager, drawn to it by the cover, which featured an owl sailing over…
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