A Legend Passes into the Realm: #RIPUsulaKLeGuin
While there are many fantasy books and many authors of speculative fiction, very few with legendary status ever live so long, and if they do, they often leave their fantastic worlds earlier than situation and health allows. Pratchett unfortunately died early, Eddings abandoned his original universe to fly to more scientific heights, White traded Arthur for Lilliput, and Howard was swept away by mental illness before he could see his Hyborean Age leap to international and universal acclaim, but amongst the Great Men of speculative fiction, there are few women who invade the scene, women who have laid siege to the tree fort and camped near the gatehouse of literary exclusivity.
Ursula K. LeGuin was the shield maiden of her day. She never won a Nobel Prize, refuse to accept the title of 'fantasy writer' when she was a distinguished novelist, and raged against an industry that made itself a bastion against women in writing. She did not change nor abbreviate her name for the sake of drawing in more male readers, she was a Grandmaster and a pedantic upstart, and despite the world's best efforts, she made people think. The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and really all her Hainish books were revolutionary, and her Earthsea series ploughed the furrow that brought women to the forefront of fantasy writing. I came to her work late in life, unfortunately, and I am miserable over not having got to her books when I was in the throes of miserable adolescence. I certainly needed her books then, but her words and ideas are perhaps even more pertinent now than they were in the sixties and seventies. What she wrote then as science fiction has become science fact, and the same lessons still apply, though the era has changed.
I am trying not to be too despondent about her passing: her life was long and her legacy immense, one that will ripple through humanity's future for eons to come. Her greatest fear was that she should be forgotten soon after being gone, but somehow, considering the inheritance she left to all those behind her, her fears will happily remain unfounded.
Ursula K. LeGuin was the shield maiden of her day. She never won a Nobel Prize, refuse to accept the title of 'fantasy writer' when she was a distinguished novelist, and raged against an industry that made itself a bastion against women in writing. She did not change nor abbreviate her name for the sake of drawing in more male readers, she was a Grandmaster and a pedantic upstart, and despite the world's best efforts, she made people think. The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and really all her Hainish books were revolutionary, and her Earthsea series ploughed the furrow that brought women to the forefront of fantasy writing. I came to her work late in life, unfortunately, and I am miserable over not having got to her books when I was in the throes of miserable adolescence. I certainly needed her books then, but her words and ideas are perhaps even more pertinent now than they were in the sixties and seventies. What she wrote then as science fiction has become science fact, and the same lessons still apply, though the era has changed.
I am trying not to be too despondent about her passing: her life was long and her legacy immense, one that will ripple through humanity's future for eons to come. Her greatest fear was that she should be forgotten soon after being gone, but somehow, considering the inheritance she left to all those behind her, her fears will happily remain unfounded.
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