We are saddened to report that acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin passed on Monday, January 22nd, at her home in Portland, Oregon as confirmed by The New York Times. She was 88 years old.
Le Guin is internationally known for lending her distinct feminist voice to science fiction and fantasy, and was writing even as a child. At age 11, Ursula Le Guin submitted her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction. In 1964 her first Earthsea story, “The Word of Unbinding,” was published. The series continued over six books and eight short stories, including A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind. In 1970 The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and the sequel, The Dispossessed, was also so honored when it was published in 1975.
Her upbringing in a house of anthropologists influenced works like the Hainish Cycle, with its tales of contact between futuristic human species. The Left Hand of Darkness envisioned a radical speculative future of sexual identity and gender identity, raising the bar for subsequent SFF works.
She received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1995; the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001; and in 2003 The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her the 20th Grand Master. Her life-long contribution to the shape of genre fiction cannot be overstated, and that is the legacy she leaves behind to fans and readers across the world.
Le Guin is survived by her husband, son, two daughters, and four grandchildren. All our condolences go out to her family and friends. She will be deeply missed.
We leave you with words of wisdom from the incomparable author herself:
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
Oh no.
Thank you for your stories, RIP
“Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal? What is it but death, death without rebirth?”
—Sparrowhawk, ‘The Farthest Shore’
Ursula K. Le Guin, RIP.
RIP to one of the beacons of light in the darkness. What a loss. I’ll remember her.
The one that hit me hardest:
“I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.”
This is terrible, I know she was 88 but I hoped she would go on forever. One of the great writers, great minds and great visionaries of our lifetimes.
While I’m reading and absorbing her Steering the Craft, no less. I will appreciate the book even more now. I thank her for all she’s done.
The doors of the Four Houses are open. Surely they are open.
Time to finish the Wizard of Earthsea series and re-read Steering the Craft for the 10th time. RIP, she is one of the best writers I have read and her stories will live on forever.
I am so very sorry to hear this.
Devastating news. I am saddened beyond words.
Good rest to you, guide of my dreams.
AH, so my dad gets to meet her before I do. She and Tolkien were my guides from the late 60s to today, and onward.
Cetians died eagerly, curious as to what came next.- Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘‘The Word for World Is Forest’’ (1972)
“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.
—The Creation of Éa”
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
The light had died away; it was all dark around them.
A life such as she lived, was one worth the living.
There’s only one road out of Omelas.
Being a libertarian and a lover of technology and one of the people who believes moving out into space will lead to cleaner environments better people (something she hated – see word for world is forest) as opposed to a progressive Democrat (like most of this site) I didn’t like her later works or her essays as much as many people here likely. She however was my gateway to character driven literary as opposed to “hard” technology/idea driven sci-fi fantasy and a great example of how character driven stories when done right have great ideas. Left Hand of Darkness is a classic and always will be and was incredibly fundamental to who I am when I read it. The earthsea books (though the later ones got a little too depressing) were as well. I also give her credit for admitting the problems that exist in both of the economic systems she portrayed in the dispossessed when so many other authors sweep one or the other under the rug. Madeline L’Engle might be the only other author that had more of an effect on me when I was young.
She was amazing, important, and as far as I could tell from her work incredibly intelligent. She will always be among the top tear writers of science fiction and fantasy. Time for a reread of earthsea, disposed and the left hand of darkness.
When my mother died, we were discussing having a literary quotation in her memorial booklet, and my sister mentioned that my mother’s favourite novel had been The Dispossessed. (Also one of my favourites, so I would not have been quite neutral in choosing.)
I wrote to her agent, and got permission (“from Ursula, her agent, and Harper Collins”) to use this quote:
“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
“she, and the other kids, and her parents, and their parents, and the drunks and whores and all of River Street, were at the bottom of something — were the foundation, the reality, the source. But will you drag civilization down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and she had tried for years to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to make it into houses where human beings could live. But nobody who thought he was better than mud would understand.”
RIP!
I read “The Left Hand…” back in 1980 – the first translation in Bulgarian, – when I was still in high school. Back then the issues of race and gender which that central for this novel, could not be any further from me and went almost unnoticed, so the line that most impressed me was the question that one of the locals asked: why hurry? This came up in response to a comment about the motoring ice sleighs – they could be made better and faster. And suddenly, faster and better were not synonymous anymore.
She has left us, but her books are still around.
I honestly think she was one of the greatest living writers in the world – not just the greatest living genre writer.
I am not as familiar with her works as I’d like to be, but this news saddens me. There is no doubt that the world has lost a great legend. RIP.
The word for loss is sadness.
Sad loss for genre fiction. Her take on fantasy with the Earthsea books and the gender issues in left hand of darkness were fabulous. she deserved her icon status IMHO
May her memory be a blessing.
I didn’t know what to say when I heard the news and I still don’t but I appreciated Christopher Priest’s remarks.
Requiescat in pace
Ms Le Guin’s voice will be sorely missed in the SF community.
Farewell Ursula K Le Guin.
Your search for balance and compassion as you explored the inner lands of imagination was an inspiration, and it was with you that I first encountered the practice of magic as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous, and where the use of power always hinged on a precarious balance of opposing forces. Since then, a need for balance in acts of power always resonates within me. Maybe one day it will resonate with the real-life wizards of our world, as it did with the Archmage Sparrowhawk. So long to Earthsea and beyond.