Question: In The Lathe of Heaven, you portrayed a world in which one person's utopia became another's dystopia. Do you see a parallel between the world you portrayed in 1971 and the world in which we live now, say with regard to the war in Iraq? Was there any event that inspired you to write Lathe of Heaven?
Ursula K Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven is a taoist novel, not a utopian or dystopian one. It's just this world in its usual degree of mess and misery, or a little more so. Haber is a utopian, yes: and he tries to use George's dreams to achieve his quite rational notions of how things might be improved: but every time he tries it, things get worse. There is an old American saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The novel extends that a bit - "Even if it's broke, if you don't know how to fix it, don't."
Q: The book also deals with the power of one man's dreams in determining reality. Do you think dreams play any part in influencing our reality? Philip K Dick is said to have had a vision that formed many of his later views and ideas, as explored in Valis. Are any of your novels based on dreams you have had?
UKL: No, I don't think dreams change reality (I really am fairly sane). Of course a dream can change the way one thinks and acts, as Phil Dick's dream or vision changed his thinking. Some writers can use dream fairly directly as story source, as Stevenson did in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but I do better when awake.
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written 'Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.' What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I'd like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling's writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the "incredible originality" of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a "school novel", good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
Q: Where did the idea of discovering 'true names' as a means to powerful magic come from? Do you know what fired you to include it in the Earthsea books as such a central theme?
UKL: It's a very old idea in magic, all over the world. I read Lady Frazier's Leaves from the Golden Bough as a kid, and probably met it there. Or almost anywhere. A writer, an artist whose medium is words, is likely to find the idea of magic as naming, words as power, a quite natural one.
Q: Have you ever considered allowing Earthsea to be filmed?
UKL: Well, it looks as if the last of a longish series of non-starters is going to start; the Sci Fi Channel here is suddenly announcing that they are going to film the first two books of Earthsea in British Columbia and release it as a four-hour miniseries in December. If there's a script I haven't seen it. (I can only say I hope it is better than the last one I saw, which, apparently feeling that Ged's story wasn't very interesting, threw in a sea-monster, some pirates, and - was it cowboys? a space ship? - surely not...)
Q: One of the most memorable images of the Earthsea books is that of the "wall of stones" and the grey world of the dead beyond. The idea of a shadowy world of despair seems to crop up a lot in SF - in the last century I'm reminded of Philip K Dick's "tomb world", or the grey town in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, or most recently the world of the dead in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I guess there are more ancient parallels in the Old Testament references to "Sheol" or the Greek conception of the Fields of Asphodel. Why do you think so many writers have talked about death in these terms and is there a reason why it is such a recurring theme in the Earthsea books?
UKL: The dark, dry, changeless world after death of Earthsea comes (in so far as I am conscious of its sources) from the Greco-Roman idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante, and from one of Rilke's Elegies. A realm of shadow, dust, where nothing changes and "lovers pass each other in silence" - it seems a fairly common way of thinking about what personal existence after death would be, not a specifically modern one? I do hope you noticed that the wall of stones was broken down in the sixth book of Earthsea, and that all that world of dust and silence was "changed, changed utterly". . .
Q: Do you have a favourite TV programme?
UKL: I used to watch Star Trek, until they went off the rails with Voyager, and when we were in England about two centuries ago we got hooked on Dr Who - the guy with the long scarf and the great nose, not the one after him who looked like he needed some vitamins. There isn't much to watch on American TV now unless you are into violence and/or canned laughter. Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead? It seems appropriate. The only program I watch weekly is Bill Moyers, which probably means nothing to you in England. He is a terrific interviewer and political commentator.
Q: It has sometimes been said that your book The Dispossessed manifested the libertarian/communal ethos of the counter-culture. (Perhaps Always Coming Home did too?)
UKL: I'd put it this way: Dispossessed is an Anarchist utopian novel. Its ideas come from the Pacifist Anarchist tradition - Kropotkin etc. So did some of the ideas of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies.
Q: How do you view that countercultural movement these days, as the boomers grow old (and wise?). With hindsight - what was its upside, and downside? Do you still share that brand of idealism (if you ever did), or have your hopes and visions morphed into a different shape?
UKL: I liked the generosity and the sense of responsibility towards the future that were strong in the sixties and seventies. They are strong again, now, among people in the Green and anti-corporation movements, the anti-war and anti-Bush movements. A lot of people don't get wise as they get old, they just get old.
Q: Is Taoism a path you try to follow? Doesn't it seek to undermine individualism and promote traditional roots - the antithesis, really, of boomers' ideals and legacy?
UKL: Taoism is two things: one is a religion, very nearly wiped out by Mao Tse-tung in a tremendous act of cultural despotism; I know next to nothing about it. The other is a philosophy, or actually a way of thinking, which is profoundly subversive and permanently anti-establishment. (It's a tough act to be a radical for 2000 years, but Lao Tzu did it.) If you want to know about the religion you'll need to find a priest. If you want to know about the way of thinking, read Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. You can read Lao Tzu in my own translation, if you like. Or there are about 50 others. I like mine best. The best complete Chuang Tzu translation is Burton Watson's.
Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with your contemporaries?
UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be "in step with" anybody? Am I in an army, or something?
Q: Last year I taught The Dispossessed as part of a course on Utopian literature. A lot of our discussion centred on the book's subtitle, 'An Ambiguous Utopia.' Critics have seemed to imply that this suggests both Anarres and Urras are ambiguously utopian, but this didn't satisfy us, as Urras seemed so bleak and oppressive. Anarres, for all its flaws, seemed to fit within the tradition of utopias far better. Why did you chose this subtitle?
UKL: Urras bleak and oppressive? With all that great shopping, and good food, and easy sex, and capitalism up the wazoo? Hey, you don't like WalMart, or something? I thought both Urras and Anarres had their virtues and their faults, so that each could serve to some extent as a corrective and model to the other - though obviously my heart belongs to Anarres! Therefore the utopia, instead of being prescriptive like most utopias, is ambiguous. Ambivalent. Ambidextrous. Two hands, each offering something different.
Q: Do you have a wide reader base in languages other than English?
UKL: Most of my fiction has gone into Dutch and Japanese (often the first countries to translate Anglophone SF), French, German, Spanish (in Latin America and Spain), Italian, and the Scandinavian languages; it used to be pirated in Russia, now it is obtained under copyright; altogether I think I have books of mine in 16 languages, including Urdu, Hebrew, and Chinese: but nothing in any Arabic language, alas.
Q: When you come to write a story, do you find that you start with an issue you want to address, and then find the world, the characters which will illustrate that issue? Or do the worlds and characters come to you first, bringing their issues?
UKL: That's it. Mostly. Really, the people and the issues all come together in a sort of clump or knot, and writing the story is untying, unwinding the knot.
Q: Your short story 'Solitude' is one of my favourites, as it brings to life a legitimate female solitude without loneliness that is very hard to claim, either from oneself or other people, on this planet! How did that story, for example, develop?
UKL: Thank you, I am fond of that story too. As well as I can remember - origins of stories get very misty very soon - the characters (the mother and the two children), and the general idea of a radically intraverted society, came all together: that was the knot. I looked for the right end to pull to undo the knot: that turned out to be who tells the story - the narrator's voice. She was going to tell me how it was. So I let her.
Q: My brothers and I felt 'included' when we read the Earthsea books. We were black children growing up in Britain in the 1970s and we perceived very early on that books like Lord of the Rings or Dune (as much as we loved them) didn't really 'include' us - indeed, they felt exclusive. You describe Ged as being dark-skinned, and my brothers and I have argued for years over whether he was black or not.
UKL: I see Ged as dark brownish-red, and all the other people in the book (except the Kargs and Serret) as brown or brown-red, to very dark or black (Vetch). In other words, in the Archipelago "people of color" are the norm, white people are an anomaly. Vice versa on the Kargish islands. That much is pretty clear in the books. How dark you want Ged to be is pretty much up to you! Why not? Readers rule, OK? But what drives me up the wall is cover illustrators - trying to get them not to make everybody white, white, white. Did you ever see the very first English edition of A Wizard of Earthsea? It was a Puffin paperback, I think. I was really excited about it - I think it was my first English publication - until I saw it. The Ged on the cover was this marshmallow-colored guy drooping like a lily in a sort of nightgown. Oh Lord! I think most white people have failed to notice that most of the people in most of my SF and fantasy are not white people. So. What else is new?
Q: Where did the inspiration for the Earthsea stories come from - your politics, your imagination, or simply a need to tell a good story?
UKL: I hate to admit it, but it came from a publisher. He asked me to write him a fantasy for "eleven up". Uh-oh, I never wrote for kids, I don't know how, I said. Then I went home, and thought about kids. Boys. How does a boy learn to be an old guy with a white beard who can do magic? - And there was my book. . . Come to think of it, Ged never did grow a beard.
Q: I've always appreciated the deeper dimension of the Earthsea trilogy, particularly the contemplation of the nature of life and death. Ged's message to Cob in The Farthest Shore on life after dying: "Here is nothing, dust and shadows. There, he is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle's flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live..." That has stayed with me, was a great comfort to me when my Dad died
UKL: Thank you for telling me that. Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being "consolatory" and "reassuring". Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted - foolish, soft, silly, childish - sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we've come by honestly?
I wrote the reviewer and told him what I thought, and that I thought I had Tolkien to back me up. He wrote back nicely enough saying that of course he hadn't been thinking of the book as being written for children. Apparently it is permissible to reassure or console children, but not adults.
Such an attitude seems to me to be based on a strange notion that the Common Reader is so happy, so foolishly confident, so stupidly trustful, that the Common Writer's whole duty is to convince him that life is hard and full of grief and that there is no consolation. Most adults I know already know that life is hard and full of grief; and they look for both confirmation of this knowledge, and consolation for it, in art.
Q: Years ago I travelled in Indonesia. I've sometimes wondered if that archipelago was the inspiration for Earthsea; if not, what was?
UKL: I think we all have archipelagoes in our minds.
Q: Do you agree that the world of 'Winter's King' - which, whether the pronouns are masculine or feminine, is all about good and bad kings and loyal and disloyal subjects - is not really the same as that of The Left Hand of Darkness, where 'the kings of Karhide are all mad' and no one takes them and their ideas of patriotism very seriously?
UKL: Yes, there is a shift between the story (written earlier than the novel) and the novel. I can partly justify it by pointing out that a generation has passed, during which attitudes and ideas might well change. But then, consistency is an ideal for which I have only very inconsistently striven.
Q: Were you pleased with the Radio adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea? I thought Michael Maloney made an excellent Ged.
UKL: Was that the one where they pronounced it "Jed"? If so, I stopped listening pretty soon, because I was screaming in pain. If not, I'm not sure I ever heard it. Remember, I live on a planet far, far away from BBC, called Oregon.
Q: Your recommendations got me into Lord Dunsany and Virginia Woolf. Could you suggest other books or authors?
UKL: Sure! Kipling's Kim? Patrick O'Brien? Dickens? Mark Twain? Jorge Luis Borges? Jose Saramago? Jane Austen?
Q: Do you pronounce your name the French way or, as most of your fans do, Luh Gwinn?
UKL: Een zees country we say Luh Gwinn. En France nous disons Le Guin, comme le vin or le gain; et en Bretagne - c'est un nom breton - je crois que c'est encore Luh Gwinn. (Like Gwyn in Welsh - I think it's the same word.) It is all my husband's fault, anyhow.
Q: A lot of your fiction could be described as anthropological accounts of fictional societies. I know your father was an anthropologist: do you still read anthropology, and are there any anthropologists whose writing you particularly admire?
UKL: Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind; so has Clifford Geertz.
Q: The austere, anti-materialistic, pioneering spirit of the anarchist settlers on Anarres, in The Dispossessed, reminds me a bit of accounts of the very early kibbutzim, set up by idealistic European socialists and anarchists. Did you have this, or any other experimental communities, in mind when you wrote the novel?
UKL: I did indeed "read up on" the kibbutzim when I was planning Anarres. A more important souce was the work of the American pacifist anarchist Paul Goodman and his brother.
Q: You have written about naming the islands of the Earthsea Archipelago, and mentioned that the names were all made up apart from two which were names you called your children when they were small. Which two, or is it a secret?
UKL: It's a secret. I should never have mentioned it.
Q: I confess that I most enjoy your stories of Orsinia. SF, even your own, tends to be tricksy or didactic, I think, but the escape from that framework into straight fiction frees the writer's attention for more interesting things - human relationships and human hearts, the stuff that Shakespeare wrote about.
UKL: Not being Shakespeare, some of us writers have to get to the heart of the matter by strange roads and roundabout ways. And to some of us, the disciplined use of the imagination is at the heart of the matter already.
Q: As for SF itself, why is it so dominated by right-wing politics? Is it the dark Campbell/Heinlein/Anderson influence, or is it something intrinsic to the form?
UKL: Are you only reading the old guys? Try China Miéville!
Q: In The Farthest Shore, Sparrowhawk still had a life of adventures; in Tehanu, he had essentially a life of troubles. I'm of course aware that 18 years or so separate these two books, but could you describe more precisely how time has allowed (or forced) you to reconsider Earthsea and its inhabitants during that period?
UKL: I think you will find some discussion of this on my website (www.ursulakleguin.com). Briefly, what happened in the 17 years between Farthest Shore and Tehanu was that feminism was reborn, and I became 17 years older, and learned a good deal. One of the things I learned was how to write as a woman, not as an honorary, or imitation, man.
From a woman's point of view, Earthsea looked quite different than it did from a man's point of view. All I had to do was describe it from the point of view of the powerless, the disempowered - women, children, a wizard who has spent his gift and must live as an "ordinary" man. The same place, but how changed it seems! Some people hate the book for that. They scold me for punishing Ged. I think I was rewarding him.
Q: How did you become a Taoist, if you would consider yourself one?
UKL: By reading Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, mostly. I don't have my library here so I don't dare try to give you any names of scholars and popularisers who helped me understand Taoism - I would forget most of them. I don't really know how one "is" a Taoist. I do know that Taoist ideas inform a great deal of my writing.
Q: What modern authors would you recommend who best represent the spirit of the Tao? Apart from Thoreau, obviously? (I remember in one book you call a character a "Thurrodowist" - ie Thoreau Taoist.)
UKL: I honestly don't know. I think part of what appeals to me so much in the novels of Jose Saramago is that his people go along with events without trying to "master" them - they do by not doing. The woman who is the central character of Blindness is truly a great hero to me.
Q: Someone wondered if Indonesia inspired Earthsea, which is interesting as I have always seen it as being almost exactly how I imagine ancient Greece, in terms of landscape and many cultural aspects. It must be strange, hearing other people's visualisations of something that is so yours, or do you feel that by publishing, things stop being yours in some essential way?
UKL: Well, yes, sort of - they become yours, the reader's - that is undeniable and inevitable. But does that in fact change them in my mind? Not a bit. Yours is Greek, mine is not; no matter. There are many Earthseas, many archipelagoes; as I said, we all have them in our heads. . .
If you want to see what my Earthsea looks like, you could sail past the Scilly Isles (handy for you Brits); or you could go to a little bay called Trinidad on the far north coast of California on a foggy morning (not so handy for you Brits). But these are both places I saw long after I had mapped and travelled in the Archipelago. It was pleasant to be able to say - ah! yes! that looks just like the West Reach!
Q: What effects have Ishi and his story had on your writing?
UKL: Nothing directly that I know of. I knew nothing about Ishi and his story until my mother began writing the biography, long after I was grown and writing and publishing. That a lot of my protagonists are alone of their kind among people of another kind - this is Ishi's situation; also the situation of a field anthropologist; also the situation (or so it seems to me) of most adolescents, most intellectuals, most artists . . . "I, a stranger and afraid/ In a world I never made."
Q: Did you base the various peoples inhabiting Earthsea upon any particular human cultures?
UKL: No, I didn't. Earthsea is one of the conventional pre-Industrial Revolution worlds of fantasy. The Archipelagans are generically farmer/merchant, village/small city folk, like most of us were all over the world until the 19th century. (But their magic works, which makes them a bit different!) The Kargs are a desert people, more warlike, more religious, and do not practise magic.
Q: Also, why did you make all the wizards male, and give them all those great big staffs? My colleague, Dr Freud of Vienna, would be most interested to hear your rationale behind this...
UKL: You might read what I said above about learning to write like a woman instead of like an honorary man. From me you can tell Dr F. to go smoke a big cigar.
Q: I read Tehanu as a fable about damage and oppression and as containing a lesson to society not to underestimate the damaged child, who contains a strange strength. The Other Wind, in conjunction with "Dragonfly", confirmed this for me. In Earthsea Revisioned you write that dragons are what is not owned: does this apply to women, too? Do the two last books of Earthsea imply that women cannot be owned, predicted, dismissed and disposed of - because they, too, can turn into dragons and fly on "the other wind", transcending ordinariness and reaching a wild transcendence?
UKL: This the kind of question I cannot answer. Or will not, I don't know which. What the book says, the book says best in its own words. For me to interpret it, translate it into generalities and abstractions, seems perverse and foolish. I am not a teacher, not a philosopher, not a scholar, I am a novelist. I think in story. I follow where the story takes me. I try to understand where I am going. I try to tell that. But what the story "means", in any language but its own, is for the reader to decide - no?
Q: I particularly would like to know what your current thoughts on The Left Hand of Darkness are.
UKL: Well, it's about 35 years since I wrote Left Hand, so it's been for a long time a fine, handsome, grown-up book, out earning its living, making its own way in the world; all its maba can do is wish it well. . .
I did have a lot of fun revisiting Gethen a few years ago in the story called "Coming of Age in Karhide", which is in my collection The Birthday of the World. I finally got inside a kemmerhouse.
Q: What I would most like to ask you is where you get your inspiration.
UKL: I sit and listen.
Q: Do you have a favourite planet or world out of the ones you have created? I am particularly fond of O, which hasn't had a war for five thousand years, and where almost all the architecture and technology (trains for instance) is ancient. Its four-way marriages also sound interesting, if difficult...
UKL: That is a nice question. Evidently I like Earthsea about as well as any, since I keep going back. I was very fond of going to Orsinia, but I can't seem to find the way there any more, or even to get news about what's going on there since they "unlocked the air" and the Iron Curtain went down. That troubles me.
I like O too. I felt quite at home there. The four-way marriages and all. They complicate their own lives emotionally, but they don't let uncontrolled, unconsidered complex technologies (the automobile, the airplane, weapons, electronic communications, genetic manipulation, etc) do it. They also control their population growth.
I like to dream about a people who have the wits and the strength of character to choose what they like and want from complex technology, and just leave what they don't need aside - instead of letting everything become a need and then an obligation and then a mess, as we've done and are doing.
The Kesh people, too, limit their numbers and choose their technologies; and I suppose the Valley of the Na, in Always Coming Home, is where I think I'd most like to live; but that's partly because I did live there, all the summers of my childhood.
Thank you all for your very interesting and difficult questions. I hope I didn't sound short or snippy with some of them; with so many to answer, I tried to be brief so as not to exhaust myself or you; and some of them really were hard to answer in anything under a 300-page tome! All the best - Keep reading!
Ursula
