Birthday of the World

September 10, 2014 10:03 AM

There are previouslys enough to fill an FPP but this deserves mention and honour in its own right.

In recognition of her transformative impact on American literature, Ursula K. Le Guin is the 2014 recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She is the Foundation’s twenty-seventh award recipient.

Long live the Ekumen.
posted by infini (37 comments total)

YAY!

So pleased.

If you haven't read LeGuin, a worthy place to start is her newish Annals of the Western Shore, Gifts, Voices, and Powers, which are YA but deal honestly and complexly with issues like slavery, war, occupation, and racial prejudice.
posted by suelac at 10:27 AM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

The utility boxes around Berkeley High School have been painted with notable students. This one's my favorite.
posted by Zed at 10:43 AM on September 10, 2014

woo!
posted by rebent at 11:09 AM on September 10, 2014

The utility boxes around Berkeley High School have been painted with notable students. This one's my favorite.

I had no idea that LeGuin and Philip K. Dick went to high school together! That could make for one heck of an English class.
posted by bassooner at 11:18 AM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

They didn't know each other. 2012 Le Guin interview in Wired:

We talked on the telephone, and we corresponded some, but we never actually met. Except, we must have met in high school, because we were at Berkeley High School at the same time, but nobody I know remembers him. He is the unknown man from my class at Berkeley High.

But I have a Century Dictionary from the '20's that was discarded from the Berkeley High School Library and I like to imagine they looked things up in it.
posted by Zed at 11:28 AM on September 10, 2014 [3 favorites]

HOORAY!

My personal LeGuin book rec is another YA book, The Tombs of Atuan. It's actually the second book in the Earthsea series, but it works fine as a stunning standalone novel with a complex and thoughtful heroine.
posted by nicebookrack at 11:37 AM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also I will always have fond feelings for The Left Hand of Darkness, both because it is a fantastic novel and because I was the only student (a wee first-year among sophisticated upperclasswomen) in my 300-level English class to pick up on the telegraphed Genly/Estraven UST before we finished the book. Boo-yah, lit crit slash goggles!
posted by nicebookrack at 11:44 AM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

He is the unknown man from my class at Berkeley High.

Perhaps he only dreamed he went there.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:55 AM on September 10, 2014 [5 favorites]

I first read A Wizard of Earthsea in 6th grade and fell in love with it. I promptly lost it. I've bought and lost more copies of that book than I care to count. It is almost a curse.

But I buy it again because I hope that by losing a copy it will fall into some kid's (or adult!) hand and they too can fall in love.

This is fantastic news!
posted by Twain Device at 12:02 PM on September 10, 2014 [3 favorites]

This is awesome news! Le Guin is one of my all time favourite authors, and I've always felt she was underappreciated. My personal favourite is The Left Hand of Darkness too (I actually started crying on a train when I read the ending), but The Dispossessed is a close second.
posted by Dysk at 12:11 PM on September 10, 2014 [3 favorites]

Love The Left Hand Of Darkness, love The Dispossessed, love the Earthsea Quartet (the fourth one signals quite a tone shift, but ended up being my favourite - really powerful, closely observed stuff). Her book of non-fiction essays, The Language Of The Night, is amazing - if you haven't read it, do so. It's the best writing on SFF I've ever read. I've mislaid my copy somewhere in my study, but the moment it surfaces again I'm rereading it from beginning.

I do hope this award attracts new readers to her work. They're in for a treat.
posted by RokkitNite at 12:15 PM on September 10, 2014

Always Coming Home is one of my favorites of hers, I also love the Annals, and it will always be my hope that my descendents someday live in the Ekumen.

In fact, I'm starting to read Iain Banks since so many Mefites recommend him, and though he's great fun, I do still prefer LeGuin's Ekumen to his Culture.

Even when her stories fall flat, which they sometimes do, her writing has a sort of arresting moral clarity to it. She takes conventional stories about heroism or war and shows you all the unspoken bits; the suffering, the servititude, always the role of women or the oppressed, the secret life of real people who never make it into history books. She makes you wonder what history would be like if it really included everything that had happened to everyone and told the truth. It would not be glorious. It would have lots of surprising bits in it. Those are the kinds of stories she tells.

She really fucks up one's ability to like Tolkein, or any hero narrative, that's for sure.

But she's not depressing; she likes her people, she often lets them have happy endings or peace. And she is often funny.

Ugh, it's so hard to be coherent about something you really like.
posted by emjaybee at 12:49 PM on September 10, 2014 [10 favorites]

She will always sit on my nightstand, just under my third pair of reading glasses.
posted by infini at 1:07 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

This award is so well deserved (although also depressing, because they only give you those lifetime achievement awards when they think you're going to die.)

I love Earthsea (especially The Farthest Shore), but my favourite work of hers will always be Solitude, a short story from her collection The Birthday of the World. It is such a good story, a memoir of a life lived in a culture of introversion, whose protagonist concludes "...the heart of my life has been my being alone."

After a day of receiving and dealing with textual information of various sorts, reading Le Guin is like drinking from a well of clear water. I've never met her, but I love her more than I can say.
posted by Pallas Athena at 1:54 PM on September 10, 2014 [6 favorites]

I like her because she's a SF&F wiper over the age of 60, who is NOT a libertarian monarchist who thinks young people and women are ruining science fiction. There can't be more then what, four or five authors like that?

Oh yeah, and she's a brilliant writer too.
posted by happyroach at 2:01 PM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

She really fucks up one's ability to like Tolkein, or any hero narrative, that's for sure.

I don't think Le Guin would agree with you. Here she talks in an interview about the filmed versions of the Lord of the Rings:

What I found unsatisfactory in the film was its increasing obsession with scenes of war and battle; and most of all, its failure to catch any hint of what I think may be the secret of Tolkien's narrative magic: the constant and powerful alternation of tension and relaxation, war and peace, the public and the domestic, fear and reassurance, light and dark... His book has the pace of a heartbeat; of a person walking; of day and night succeeding each other... That is why people reading it "live in the book" — it has the rhythm of life. — Film, of course, is a kind of drama, and must be more concentrated, faster in its pacing; but the film goes too far that direction. It is all action, little thought; all noise, no stillness; all Yang, no Yin. And therefore, though beautiful and entertaining, it is profoundly untrue to Tolkien's story.

posted by Celsius1414 at 2:01 PM on September 10, 2014 [11 favorites]

Excellent.
posted by homunculus at 2:10 PM on September 10, 2014

Wow, that blows my mind that LeGuin and Dick went to the same high school at the same time. I am hard-pressed to think of any two authors whom I regard as highly. Left Hand of Darkness may be my favorite novel, period. I can't choose a favorite Dick novel, though, because they're basically all the same book (normally that would be a huge put-down, but for some reason, I still love every PKD book that I've read).
posted by Edgewise at 2:13 PM on September 10, 2014

Second variety.
posted by infini at 2:24 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ah but I never had much patience for Tolkein. I've no doubt she found good stuff in him, but reading him was always like a long narrative slog to get to the good bits, for me. Except for maybe hanging out in a Hobbit house, I never wanted to live in Tolkein's world, where everyone was always saying how much nicer things used to be, but nowadays, well, everything is simply less heroic and beautiful and magical and getting less so all the time. And the women and people doing the hard work are mostly invisible extras or victims.

I did often want to live in LeGuin's universe, though. Still do.
posted by emjaybee at 2:28 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

My gateway drug to her was Always Coming Home. One of the best books I've ever read.

This honour is long overdue, but huzzah that it finally happened!
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 3:43 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I was destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:26 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Some of my favorite SF was written by her, but I think I like her even more as an author and philosopher.

Incidentally, I wondered what the "K" stood for, for the longest time, but didn't think it was worth looking up. Then I read the foreword to one of her books where she said that she liked trees better than any author she knew. Suddenly it all made sense: Ursula means "little bear"; she likes trees; and there's a certain physical resemblance. I was disappointed to learn that no, K stands for "Kroeber".
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:04 PM on September 10, 2014

I was aware of Kroeber and Ishi, and I was aware of Le Guin, but, for the longest time I was unaware of the connection. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness were to me more than good science fiction--they were expeditions into sanity, masterfully told.

When I realized who her father was, it seemed like the final line in some sort of haiku. Her family life was the perfect fodder for her budding genius.

I've always held her in awe. I measure good narrators, in part, by their ability be invisible and elegant at the same time. In this way profound notions can be fed to the reader in bite-sized morsels that perform for the reader the way a good meal performs for the diner. That's to say that you continue to enjoy the meal long after you've left the table.
posted by mule98J at 6:12 PM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

I was disappointed to learn that no, K stands for "Kroeber".

Her father, A. L. Kroeber, was one of the greatest, most humane, and most influential anthropologists and ethnographers of his generation.
posted by jamjam at 6:14 PM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

Four Ways to Forgiveness evokes such deep feelings/thought and wonderment. Le Guin is a genius and so...human.
posted by Fibognocchi at 6:19 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

Her father, A. L. Kroeber, was one of the greatest, most humane, and most influential anthropologists and ethnographers of his generation.

Yes, but how much cooler would it have been if all those things were true, but he were also a koala? Think about that.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:33 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

I gave up on Le Guin after The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. The jolt I had from reading this story was much like my experience with Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations. Or with my reading of Lovecraft or Ligotti. (What a strange design! Lovecraft to Godwin to Le Guin!) Too much truth hurts my soul.

I mostly take solace in history, now. At least, Galileo's Daughter lived in the past. I can take comfort that her story is done.
posted by SPrintF at 7:59 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Old Music
posted by infini at 2:04 AM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

I will devour as much Le Guin as I can get my hands on. Started with Rocannon's World many years ago. My elder sister was mad for science fiction and had reams of it. The Lathe of Heaven was the first of the genre I read that made absolute sense to me. Le Guin, Wynne Jones, my art books, popular anthropology, essays from loved authors: the books in my bedroom.

I just now discover some f***er has nicked my copy of The Birthday of the World. That f***** better watch out tomorrow.
posted by glasseyes at 4:51 PM on September 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

I loved 'Always Coming Home'! Did you know that she knew Ishi?
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 5:53 PM on September 11, 2014

Looks like I waaaay underestimated my fellow MeFites! :) y'all DID know! :)
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 7:53 PM on September 11, 2014

I gave up on Le Guin after The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

That's a tough one, but you should read Four Ways to Forgiveness to feel better. Still dark stuff, but also hope in that book.

Changing Planes veers between ridiculous and serious. I particularly like the story about the migrating bird-people, that's a really nice one.
posted by emjaybee at 11:44 AM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's a tough one, but you should read Four Ways to Forgiveness to feel better. Still dark stuff, but also hope in that book.

'Four Ways to Forgiveness' is a deep look at the human damage in the aftermath of political revolutions. Really worth reading.

'Always Coming Home' is my fave epic novel. Such an immersive world. I heard that someone made a recording of folk chants inspired by the story which was released on cassette with a special edition. I haven't seen it on YouTube yet?

With a Little Help From My Friends
posted by ovvl at 3:08 PM on September 12, 2014

I heard that someone made a recording of folk chants inspired by the story which was released on cassette with a special edition.

This is one of my favorite ever Le Guin anecdotes, actually. From her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview last year, where she was asked by the interviewer, "Didn’t you publish a version [of Always Coming Home] that came with a cassette tape that actually re-created some of the folk songs from the novel?"

The record is called Music and Poetry of the Kesh. It was composed by Todd Barton, who was the music director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He and I made it with some of his singers. It’s all in fourths, fifths, and ninths, and things like that, because that’s how the Kesh would do it. We had a hell of a lot of fun making that album, and then we wanted to copyright it. We heard back from the copyright office, and they said, You cannot copyright folk music. It’s the music of an indigenous people. So we had the pleasure of saying, Well, we made up the indigenous people. Can we copyright them, too?

posted by Celsius1414 at 4:01 PM on September 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is, I think, not Le Guin at her best. As a parable, it's kind of heavy-handed. I think she's far better writing about attempted egalitarian societies that don't work (Anarres, Orgoreyn) than pointing out the obvious flaws of capitalist societies (Urras, Aka, Omelas.) Not that The Telling isn't great, but it only becomes great once you get past the flashing neon CAPITALISM IS EVIL sign that takes up the whole first chapter.

(I mean, I agree with Le Guin that capitalism *is* evil. But I think that she has trouble writing on that theme in a way that's at all nuanced.)
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:12 AM on September 16, 2014

Is Omelas necessarily capitalist? It's been quite a while since I read the story, but I had the impression it was all lovey-dovey peace and beauty, full of public parks with hippies dancing in tie-dyed gowns. I don't recall that it was tied down to any economic system particularly, and in fact the idea of other people being made to suffer for the public good is one of the faults that becomes evident in The Dispossessed. I'd say it's more of a general theme in her stories: that sometimes you need to fight, but sometimes if you can't do that then you need to walk away.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:57 AM on September 16, 2014