Influences
Once I learned to read, I read everything. I read all the famous fantasies – Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows, and Kipling. I adored Kipling's Jungle Book. And then when I got older I found Lord Dunsany. He opened up a whole new world – the world of pure fantasy. And ... Worm Ouroboros. Again, pure fantasy. Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov, things like that. But that didn't have too much effect on me. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon – but particularly Cordwainer Smith. ... I read the story "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard", and it just made me go, "Wow! This stuff is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that."
—Ursula K. Le Guin[97]
Le Guin read both classic and speculative fiction widely in her youth. She later said that science fiction did not have much impact on her until she read the works of Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer Smith, and that she had sneered at the genre as a child.[34][97] Authors Le Guin describes as influential include Victor Hugo, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Boris Pasternak, and Philip K. Dick. Le Guin and Dick attended the same high-school, but did not know each other; Le Guin later described her novel The Lathe of Heaven as an homage to him.[14][34][98][99] She also considered J. R. R. Tolkien and Leo Tolstoy to be stylistic influences, and preferred reading Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to well-known science-fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, whose writing she described as being of the "white man conquers the universe" tradition.[100] Several scholars state that the influence of mythology, which Le Guin enjoyed reading as a child, is also visible in much of her work: for example, the short story "The Dowry of Angyar" is described as a retelling of a Norse myth.[14][101]
The discipline of cultural anthropology had a powerful influence on Le Guin's writing.[102] Her father Alfred Kroeber is considered a pioneer in the field, and was a director of the University of California Museum of Anthropology: as a consequence of his research, Le Guin was exposed to anthropology and cultural exploration as a child. In addition to myths and legends, she read such volumes as The Leaves of the Golden Bough by Lady Frazer, a children's book adapted from The Golden Bough, a study of myth and religion by her husband James George Frazer.[58][102][103][104][105] She described living with her father's friends and acquaintances as giving her the experience of the other.[34] The experiences of Ishi, in particular, were influential on Le Guin, and elements of his story have been identified in works such as Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, and The Word for World Is Forest and The Dispossessed.[58]
Several scholars have commented that Le Guin's writing was influenced by Carl Jung, and specifically by the idea of Jungian archetypes.[106][107] In particular, the shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea is seen as the Shadow archetype from Jungian psychology, representing Ged's pride, fear, and desire for power.[108][109][110] Le Guin discussed her interpretation of this archetype, and her interest in the dark and repressed parts of the psyche, in a 1974 lecture.[109] She stated elsewhere that she had never read Jung before writing the first Earthsea books.[108][109] Other archetypes, including the Mother, Animus, and Anima, have also been identified in Le Guin's writing.[106] the planetary forests featured in multiple Hainish works are described as a metaphor for the mind, and of Jungian "collective unconscious.[111]
Philosophical Taoism had a large role in Le Guin's world view,[112] and the influence of Taoist thought can be seen in many of her stories.[113][114] Many of Le Guin's protagonists, including in The Lathe of Heaven, embody the Taoist ideal of leaving things alone. The anthropologists of the Hainish universe try not to meddle with the cultures they encounter, while one of the earliest lessons Ged learns in A Wizard of Earthsea is not to use magic unless it is absolutely necessary.[114] Taoist influence is evident in Le Guin's depiction of equilibrium in the world of Earthsea: the archipelago is depicted as being based on a delicate balance, which is disrupted by somebody in each of the first three novels. This includes an equilibrium between land and sea, implicit in the name "Earthsea", between people and their natural environment,[115] and a larger cosmic equilibrium, which wizards are tasked with maintaining.[116] Another prominent Taoist idea is the reconciliation of opposites such as light and dark, or good and evil. A number of Hainish novels, The Dispossessed prominent among them, explored such a process of reconciliation.[117] In the Earthsea universe, it is not the dark powers, but the characters' misunderstanding of the balance of life, that is depicted as evil,[118] in contrast to conventional Western stories in which good and evil are in constant conflict.[119][120]
Genre and style
Although Le Guin is primarily known for her works of speculative fiction, she also wrote realistic fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and several other literary forms, and as a result her work is difficult to classify.[2] Her writings received critical attention from mainstream critics, critics of children's literature, and critics of speculative fiction.[2] Le Guin herself said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".[3] Le Guin's transgression of conventional boundaries of genre led to literary criticism of Le Guin becoming "Balkanized", particularly between scholars of children's literature and speculative fiction.[2] Commentators have noted that the Earthsea novels specifically received less critical attention because they were considered children's books. Le Guin herself took exception to this treatment of children's literature, describing it as "adult chauvinist piggery".[2][121] In 1976, literature scholar George Slusser criticized the "silly publication classification designating the original series as 'children's literature'",[122] while in Barbara Bucknall's opinion Le Guin "can be read, like Tolkien, by ten-year-olds and by adults. These stories are ageless because they deal with problems that confront us at any age."[122]
Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life. [If] you like you can read [a lot of] science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, in the introduction to the 1976 edition of The Left Hand of Darkness.[123]
Several of her works have a premise drawn from sociology, psychology, or philosophy.[124][125] As a result, Le Guin's writing is often described as "soft" science fiction, and she has been described as the "patron saint" of this sub-genre.[126][127] A number of science fiction authors have objected to the term "soft science fiction", describing it as a potentially pejorative term used to dismiss stories not based on problems in physics, astronomy, or engineering, and also to target the writing of women or other groups under-represented in the genre.[128] Le Guin suggested the term "social science fiction" for some of her writing, while pointing out that many of her stories were not science fiction at all. She argued that the term "soft science fiction" was divisive, and implied a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction.[15]
The influence of anthropology can be seen in the setting Le Guin chose for a number of her works. Several of her protagonists are anthropologists or ethnologists exploring a world alien to them.[129] This is particularly true in the stories set in the Hainish universe, an alternative reality in which humans did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain. The Hainish subsequently colonized many planets, before losing contact with them, giving rise to varied but related biology and social structure.[58][129] Examples include Rocannon in Rocannon's World and Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness. Other characters, such as Shevek in The Dispossessed, become cultural observers in the course of their journeys on other planets.[102][130] Le Guin's writing often examines alien cultures, and particularly the human cultures from planets other than Earth in the Hainish universe.[129] In discovering these "alien" worlds, Le Guin's protagonists, and by extension the readers, also journey into themselves, and challenge the nature of what they consider "alien" and what they consider "native".[131]
Several of Le Guin's works have featured stylistic or structural features that were unusual or subversive. The heterogeneous structure of The Left Hand of Darkness, described as "distinctly post-modern", was unusual for the time of its publication.[54] This was in marked contrast to the structure of (primarily male-authored) traditional science fiction, which was straightforward and linear.[132] The novel was framed as part of a report sent to the Ekumen by the protagonist Genly Ai after his time on the planet Gethen, thus suggesting that Ai was selecting and ordering the material, consisting of personal narration, diary extracts, Gethenian myths, and ethnological reports.[133] Earthsea also employed an unconventional narrative form described by scholar Mike Cadden as "free indirect discourse", in which the feelings of the protagonist are not directly separated from the narration, making the narrator seem sympathetic to the characters, and removing the skepticism towards a character's thoughts and emotions that are a feature of more direct narration.[134] Cadden suggests that this method leads to younger readers sympathizing directly with the characters, making it an effective technique for young-adult literature.[135]
A number of Le Guin's writings, including the Earthsea series, challenged the conventions of epic fantasies and myths. Many of the protagonists in Earthsea were dark-skinned individuals, in comparison to the white-skinned heroes more traditionally used; some of the antagonists, in contrast, were white-skinned, a switching of race roles that has been remarked upon by multiple critics.[136][137] In a 2001 interview, Le Guin attributed the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers to her choice of non-white protagonists. She explained this choice, saying: "most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?"[58] Her 1985 book Always Coming Home, described as "her great experiment", included a story told from the perspective of a young protagonist, but also included poems, rough drawings of plants and animals, myths, and anthropological reports from the matriarchal society of the Kesh, a fictional people living in the Napa valley after a catastrophic global flood.[41][77]
