right hand of lightness

Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) “If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub.” That’s the first thing quoted on the dust jacket of Le Guin’s book of blogs, No Time to Spare (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Equally charming is the one I woke up thinking about this morning: “Eating an egg from the shelll takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime."

Her mind, of course, her huge intelligence, is challenging, as evidenced in her enormous output over her career. ? numbet of books etc.

“She influenced Booker Prize winners and other writers, such as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, and science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2003, she was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of a few women writers to take the top honor in the genre…..Her next novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, was a Hainish Universe story exploring themes of gender and sexuality on a fictional planet where humans have no fixed sex. According to scholar Donna White, the book "stunned the science fiction critics"; it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best novel, making Le Guin the first woman to win these awards, and a number of other accolades. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness were described by critic Harold Bloom as Le Guin's masterpieces. The novel was also a personal milestone for Le Guin: critics described it as her "first contribution to feminism". The fiction of the period 1966 to 1974, which also included the Hugo Award-winning The Word for World is Forest and "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and the Nebula Award-winning "The Day Before the Revolution", has been described by scholar Elizabeth Cummins as Le Guin's best-known body of work.” Wikipedia

List of her work:

Earthsea fantasy series

Main article: Earthsea

Hainish science fiction series

Main article: Hainish Cycle

Miscellaneous

Plus collections of short stories and poetry and a few translations and some non-fiction, including the one I just read. How did I miss her all these years? I didn’t even notice the correct spelling of her name until today.

After noting all this awesome achievement, I have to tell you again how much I enjoyed her blogs. She’s real and funny and honest and compassionate. And she would have been right with me - actually, ahead of me - on Anthropocene.

These blogs were written in 2013 and 2014. She wrote a couple about anger, public and private, thinking that the appropriate time for public anger was past. She thought that indignation “in the present (then 2014) moral climate seemed to be “most effective expressed through steady, resolute, morally committed behaviour and action”.

And here we are again, (October, 2018) with a new judge appointed to the highest judicial court in the United States, a man who is demonstrably biased against women. “If so,” wrote Le Guin, ”no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb.” Back to anger again, and Le Guin:

“What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?”