Program curator, speaker and music & culture journalist, programmer for Utopia, the Tel-Aviv International Festival for Science Fiction and Fantastic Film, editor-in-chief of Heavy Blog is Heavy, web developer and scifi enthusiast.
“There are no answers, only choices”, writes another science fiction luminary, Stanislav Lem, in Solaris. And so, we made a choice, to hope. Following Rebecca Solnit, another author we admire, hope is not a noun, but a verb — it is not something you get or something you lose, hope is something you do. And so, we call on, summon, implore for, and work on hope, and like anything done properly, it requires practice, and how better to practice than with the works and perspective of “Ursa Major”, “the Big Bear of science fiction”, Ursula K. Le Guin.
In 2018, at the age of 88, “The Big Bear” left us. Le Guin, one of the most well-known American authors of the 20th century, was probably the kind of person to laugh at our sadness over her departure. As a key figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s and 70’s, Le Guin touched the souls of millions of readers around the world and influenced the writing of countless others.
How did she do it? It’s hard not to see it as a modern cliché, in our current state, but the absurd is true: Le Guin emphasized the importance of love, empathy, and uncompromising engagement with reality. Le Guin did so while fundamentally challenging the meaning of the term ‘science fiction’ (often shifting it to ‘speculative fiction’) and insisted on writing not about future technology and space exploration, but also, and above all, about people, about human beings. About the pain, sadness, and beauty the future holds. Her goal, which she herself stated openly several times, was to make us think differently about what truly matters in the future, our fate as small and broken people, but at the same time, strong and significant. First and foremost, Le Guin asked us to confront the power embedded in language, in our assumptions about the nature of the world around us, how it works, and how it might work in the future.
When considering the full scope of her work, her immense talent resists precise definition or categorization. Influenced as she was by Eastern thought and philosophy, she expressed this very idea in both her writing and her thinking: that the good cannot be quantified and any attempt to do so is bound to fail.
Instead of trying to understand the world by categorizing and labelling what appears before us, we must look at it and reflect on the task at hand, the responsibility for life that rests upon us. In that sense, one cannot simply point to a specific element in Le Guin’s writing as the source of its brilliance. It is the elusive whole, her singular style, her ability to grasp and express so many worlds in such varied shades, all bound together by one idea: the return home and our shared need to walk that path together.
While creating entire worlds and characters to inhabit them, Le Guin shaped a uniquely singular literary voice. In a field that at times seems capable of seeing only the vast, the impossible, and the immeasurably distant, Le Guin has the remarkable ability to contain the intimate within the infinite, the personal human journey upon the strange map of the future she vividly imagined.
Ursula K. Le Guin (2014), from her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation medal in the United States:
I rejoice in accepting it [the medal] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.