Ursula Le Guin: Short Stories Ursula Le Guin

Reception

Le Guin received rapid recognition after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, and by the 1970s she was among the best known writers in the field.[2][41] Her books sold many millions of copies, and were translated into more than 40 languages; several remain in print many decades after their first publication.[5][9][184] Her work received intense academic attention; she has been described as being the "premier writer of both fantasy and science fiction" of the 1970s,[185] the most frequently discussed science fiction writer of the 1970s,[186] and over her career, as intensively studied as Philip K. Dick.[41] Later in her career, she also received recognition from mainstream literary critics: in an obituary, Jo Walton stated that Le Guin "was so good that the mainstream couldn't dismiss SF any more".[56] According to scholar Donna White, Le Guin was a "major voice in American letters", whose writing was the subject of many volumes of literary critique, more than two hundred scholarly articles, and a number of dissertations.[2]

Le Guin was unusual in receiving most of her recognition for her earliest works, which remained her most popular;[100] a commentator in 2018 described a "tendency toward didacticism" in her later works,[9] while John Clute, writing in The Guardian, stated that her later writing "suffers from the need she clearly felt to speak responsibly to her large audience about important things; an artist being responsible can be an artist wearing a crown of thorns".[5] Not all of her works received as positive a reception; The Compass Rose was among the volumes that had a mixed reaction, while the Science Fiction Encyclopedia described The Eye of the Heron as "an over-diagrammatic political fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-parody".[41] Even the critically well-received The Left Hand of Darkness, in addition to critique from feminists,[187] was described by Alexei Panshin as a "flat failure".[54]

Her writing was recognized by the popular media and by commentators. The Los Angeles Times commented in 2009 that after the death of Arthur C. Clarke, Le Guin was "arguably the most acclaimed science fiction writer on the planet", and went on to describe her as a "pioneer" of literature for young people.[100] In an obituary, Clute described Le Guin as having "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", and as having a reputation as an author of the "first rank".[5] In 2016, The New York Times described her as "America's greatest living science fiction writer".[188] Praise for Le Guin frequently focused on the social and political themes her work explored,[189] and for her prose; literary critic Harold Bloom described Le Guin as an "exquisite stylist", saying that in her writing, "Every word was exactly in place and every sentence or line had resonance". According to Bloom, Le Guin was a "visionary who set herself against all brutality, discrimination, and exploitation".[6] The New York Times described her as using "a lean but lyrical style" to explore issues of moral relevance.[9] Prefacing an interview in 2008, Vice magazine described Le Guin as having written "some of the more mind-warping [science fiction] and fantasy tales of the past 40 years".[15]

Le Guin's fellow authors also praised her writing. After Le Guin's death in 2018, writer Michael Chabon referred to her as the "greatest American writer of her generation", and said that she had "awed [him] with the power of an unfettered imagination".[6][7] Author Margaret Atwood hailed Le Guin's "sane, smart, crafty and lyrical voice", and wrote that social injustice was a powerful motivation through Le Guin's life.[190] Her prose, according to Zadie Smith, was "as elegant and beautiful as any written in the twentieth century".[6] Academic and author Joyce Carol Oates highlighted Le Guin's "outspoken sense of justice, decency, and common sense", and called her "one of the great American writers and a visionary artist whose work will long endure".[6] China Miéville described Le Guin as a "literary colossus", and wrote that she was a "writer of intense ethical seriousness and intelligence, of wit and fury, of radical politics, of subtlety, of freedom and yearning".[6]

Awards and recognition

The accolades Le Guin has received include numerous annual awards for individual works. She won eight Hugo Awards from twenty-six nominations, and six Nebula Awards from eighteen nominations, including four Nebula Awards for Best Novel from six nominations, more than any other writer.[86][191] Locus Magazine subscribers have voted Le Guin to receive 24 Locus Awards.[86][192] At the time of her death she was third for total wins, as well as second behind Neil Gaiman for awards for fiction.[193] For her novels alone she won five Locus Awards, four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and one World Fantasy Award, and won each of those awards in short fiction categories as well.[33][86] Her third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore, won the 1973 National Book Award for Young People's Literature,[194] and she was a finalist for ten Mythopoeic Awards, nine in Fantasy and one for Scholarship.[86] Her 1996 collection Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[195] Other awards won by Le Guin include three James Tiptree Jr. Awards, and three Jupiter Awards.[86] She won her final Hugo award a year after her death, for a complete edition of Earthsea, illustrated by Charles Vess; the same volume also won a Locus award.[86]

Other awards and accolades have recognized Le Guin's contributions to speculative fiction. She was voted a Gandalf Grand Master Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979.[86] The Science Fiction Research Association gave her its Pilgrim Award in 1989 for her "lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship".[86] At the 1995 World Fantasy Convention she won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, a judged recognition of outstanding service to the fantasy field.[86][196] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.[197] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her its 20th Grand Master in 2003: she was the second, and at the time of death one of only six, women to receive that honor.[198][199][200] In 2013, she was given the Eaton Award by the University of California, Riverside, for lifetime achievement in science fiction.[86][201]

Later in her career Le Guin also received accolades recognizing her contributions to literature more generally. In April 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named Le Guin a Living Legend in the "Writers and Artists" category for her significant contributions to America's cultural heritage.[202] The American Library Association granted her the annual Margaret Edwards Award in 2004, and also selected her to deliver the annual May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture.[203][204] The Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work: the 2004 panel cited the first four Earthsea volumes, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Beginning Place. The panel said that Le Guin "has inspired four generations of young adults to read beautifully constructed language, visit fantasy worlds that inform them about their own lives, and think about their ideas that are neither easy nor inconsequential".[203] A collection of Le Guin's works was published by the Library of America in 2016, an honor only rarely given to living writers.[188] The National Book Foundation awarded Le Guin its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, stating that she had "defied conventions of narrative, language, character, and genre, and transcended boundaries between fantasy and realism to forge new paths for literary fiction".[205][206] The American Academy of Arts and Letters made her a member in 2017.[207] On July 27, 2021, Le Guin was honored by the US Postal Service with the 33rd stamp in the Postal Service's Literary Arts series. The stamp features a portrait of the author taken from a 2006 photograph against a background image inspired by her book The Left Hand of Darkness. The stamp was designed by Donato Gionacola.[208]

Legacy and influence

Le Guin had a considerable influence on the field of speculative fiction; Jo Walton argued that Le Guin played a large role in both broadening the genre and helping genre writers achieve mainstream recognition.[56][209][210] The Earthsea books are cited as having a wide impact, including outside the field of literature. Atwood considers A Wizard of Earthsea one of the "wellsprings" of fantasy literature,[211] and modern writers have credited the book for the idea of a "wizard school", later made famous by the Harry Potter series of books,[212] and with popularizing the trope of a boy wizard, also present in Harry Potter.[213] The notion that names can exert power is a theme in the Earthsea series; critics have suggested that this inspired Hayao Miyazaki's use of the idea in his 2001 film Spirited Away.[214]

Le Guin's writings set in the Hainish universe also had a wide influence. Le Guin coined the name "ansible" for an instantaneous interstellar communication device in 1966; the term was later adopted by several other writers, including Orson Scott Card in the Ender Series and Neil Gaiman in a script for a Doctor Who episode.[215] Suzanne Reid wrote that at the time The Left Hand of Darkness was written, Le Guin's ideas of androgyny were unique not only to science fiction, but to literature in general.[55] That volume is specifically cited as leaving a large legacy; in discussing it, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time".[216] Bloom followed this up by listing the book in his The Western Canon (1994) as one of the books in his conception of artistic works that have been important and influential in Western culture.[217] This view was echoed in The Paris Review, which wrote that "No single work did more to upend the genre's conventions than The Left Hand of Darkness",[34] while White argued that it was one of the seminal works of science fiction, as important as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).[54]

Commentators have also described Le Guin as being influential in the field of literature more generally. Literary critic Elaine Showalter suggested that Le Guin "set the pace as a writer for women unlearning silence, fear, and self-doubt",[6] while writer Brian Attebery stated that "[Le Guin] invented us: science fiction and fantasy critics like me but also poets and essayists and picture book writers and novelists".[6] Le Guin's own literary criticism proved influential; her 1973 essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" led to renewed interest in the work of Kenneth Morris, and eventually to the publication of a posthumous novel by Morris.[218] Le Guin also played a role in bringing speculative fiction into the literary mainstream by supporting journalists and scholarly endeavors examining the genre.[209]

Several prominent authors acknowledge Le Guin's influence on their own writing. Jo Walton wrote that "her way of looking at the world had a huge influence on me, not just as a writer but as a human being".[56] Other writers she influenced include Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, as well as David Mitchell, Gaiman, Algis Budrys, Goonan, and Iain Banks.[6][34][100] Mitchell, author of books such as Cloud Atlas, described A Wizard of Earthsea as having a strong influence on him, and said that he felt a desire to "wield words with the same power as Ursula Le Guin".[219] Le Guin is also credited with inspiring several female science fiction authors in the 1970s, including Vonda McIntyre. When McIntyre established a writers' workshop in Seattle in 1971, Le Guin was one of the instructors.[220] Film-maker Arwen Curry began production on a documentary about Le Guin in 2009, filming "dozens" of hours of interviews with the author as well as many other writers and artists who have been inspired by her. Curry launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to finish the documentary in early 2016 after winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.[221]

In October 2021, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction was announced. The award is managed by the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust and a panel of jurors. The prize is worth US$25,000 and will be awarded annually to "a single book-length work of imaginative fiction." The inaugural shortlist was announced on July 28, 2022.[222] The prize's inaugural winner was announced on October 21, 2022, Le Guin's birthday.[223][224]

Adaptations of her work

Le Guin's works have been adapted for radio,[225][226] film, television, and the stage. Her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven has been released on film twice, in 1979 by WNET with Le Guin's participation, and then in 2002 by the A&E Network. In a 2008 interview, she said she considered the 1979 version as "the only good adaptation to film" of her work to date.[15] In the early 1980s Hayao Miyazaki asked to create an animated adaptation of Earthsea. Le Guin, who was unfamiliar with his work and anime in general, initially turned down the offer, but later accepted after seeing My Neighbor Totoro.[227] The third and fourth Earthsea books were used as the basis of Tales from Earthsea, released in 2006. Rather than being directed by Hayao Miyazaki himself, the film was directed by his son Gorō, which disappointed Le Guin. Le Guin was positive about the aesthetic of the film, writing that "much of it was beautiful", but was critical of the film's moral sense and its use of physical violence, and particularly the use of a villain whose death provided the film's resolution.[227] In 2004, the Sci Fi Channel adapted the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy as the miniseries Legend of Earthsea. Le Guin was highly critical of the miniseries, calling it a "far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned", objecting to the use of white actors for her red-, brown-, and black-skinned characters.[228]

Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness was adapted for the stage in 1995 by Chicago's Lifeline Theatre. Reviewer Jack Helbig at the Chicago Reader wrote that the "adaptation is intelligent and well crafted but ultimately unsatisfying", in large measure because it is extremely difficult to compress a complex 300-page novel into a two-hour stage presentation.[229] Paradises Lost was adapted into an opera by the opera program of the University of Illinois.[230][231] The opera was composed by Stephen A. Taylor;[230] the libretto has been attributed both to Kate Gale[232] and to Marcia Johnson.[230] Created in 2005,[232] the opera premiered in April 2012.[233] Le Guin described the effort as a "beautiful opera" in an interview, and expressed hopes that it would be picked up by other producers. She also said she was better pleased with stage versions, including Paradises Lost, than screen adaptations of her work to that date.[231] In 2013, the Portland Playhouse and Hand2Mouth Theatre produced a play based on The Left Hand of Darkness, directed and adapted by Jonathan Walters, with text written by John Schmor. The play opened May 2, 2013, and ran until June 16, 2013, in Portland, Oregon.[234]