Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018) - full transcript

(siren blaring)

(muffled voice
speaking on PA system)

(tense music)

- [Alien] Attention.

People of Earth, this is
a voice speaking to you

from thousands of miles
beyond your planet.

(people screaming)

- [Ursula] Fantasy
and science fiction,

when I began writing, were,
particularly in America,

strictly genre.

The magazines were
pulp magazines.



It had no respect
from the critics.

- What Ursula was
having to navigate

was the societal prejudices
against science fiction,

against the fantastic and
against children's fiction.

All of these things
were marginalized.

- People would think ray
guns and silly things.

This can't be serious.

- A genre label can be a
very useful tool for a critic

who wants to dismiss a writer

or not take a writer seriously.

- The critics had dismissed
science fiction and fantasy

as essentially worthless
and I knew better.

I knew that my work
was not second rate,

that it was of literary value.



I'd like us not to be
resigned but to be rebellious.

I want to see science fiction
step over the old walls

and head right
into the next wall

and start to break it down, too.

Imaginative fiction,
it trains people

to be aware that there are
other ways to do things

and other ways to be,
that there is not just one

civilization and it is good and
it is the way we have to be.

I think it trains
the imagination.

(exciting orchestral music)

(train chugging)

- [Charles] Okay,
we're almost there.

- [Ursula] Si.

- [Charles] Now, you're
going in the back door.

- Yeah, that's right.

(attendees applauding)

Thank you, Powell's,
dear Powell's.

It's so nice always
to come back here.

There are an awful lot of
books about writing here

and they tend to be
very full of rules,

do this, don't do that.

I don't talk about rules
because I have come to believe

that every story must make

its own rules and obey them.

(light lively music)

- Ursula, she was
going to be a writer.

That's what she needed to do.

That was what life was for her.

We started at Radcliffe
in the fall of 1947.

Ursula had a kind of
earthy manner of speech

which was very refreshing.

And not so common
in that environment.

She could also be a
little frightening

because it was this
very sharp, keen mind.

And very strong feelings
about what she cared about.

- People always say,

"When did you decide you
wanted to be a writer?"

And I never wanted
to be a writer.

I just wrote.

It's what I did.

It's the way my being was.

- She didn't see herself as
a science fiction writer.

She wanted to write
imaginatively about
what interested her.

- She worked on the
literary magazine

for a little while at Radcliffe

but they wouldn't
publish any of her stuff.

The important writers of the
moment were these very macho,

very masculine writers.

I think everyone was still under
the influence of Hemingway.

It was all realism,
it was all male

and she went looking for a space

that she could make her own.

(cheerful music)

I think the first couple years
in Portland, it was just,

you know how it is when
you have little kids.

You really don't do
much of anything else

except the kids but she
managed to work all the time.

- My mother was very disciplined
about her writing schedule

so she would help us get out
of the house in the morning,

then write in the morning

then do housework
in the afternoon.

- She had her study and
she would go in there

and shut the door.

- They knew not to bother
mama when she was working.

I knew not to bother her
when she was working too.

- [Ursula] Charles would read it

and maybe my mother
would read it

and then I'd send
it to the editor

and then the editor
would reject it.

I don't know how many times
I was told I write well

but we don't know quite
what you're doing.

I was beginning to feel
a little desperate,

like if I can't publish anything

except an occasional poem in
a tiny, tiny poetry magazine,

what am I doing?

Am I kidding myself?

I did keep methodically
sending them out.

One of them got accepted by a
pulp science fiction magazine

and they paid $30.

Back then, that was
really important to us,

we were just getting by.

It definitely encouraged
me to look more seriously

at fantasy and science fiction

as a definition of the kind
of thing I was writing,

which was never really
mainstream realism.

There was always something
a little off-key about it.

- The more they sold,
the more she wrote

and she was kind
of experimenting

with interplanetary
travel and world building.

She turned out to be an
excellent world builder.

- My editor Don
Wollheim at Ace Books

was also the first
person to publish

Ursula's science fiction.

At around 1965 or '66, I
had come into the office

at Ace Books and Don said,

"Oh, we're publishing
a new writer.

"I think she's
really very good,"

and he handed me
Rocannon's World

which was her first novel.

- Ursula's early work
it's fertile in detail.

They are written
by a young person

with a young person's vivacity.

Let's give this a go and
let's have some flying cats

and big teeth.

- I confess I was not
blown away by them

but I did think something
is going on here.

- These early novels are still
written from the perspective

of kind of heroic men.

That was what science
fiction was like at the time

and Le Guin wasn't stepping
outside that quite yet.

Even though they
do have that flavor

of kind of just action
adventure in space,

you can already see her
developing a lot of the themes

that she becomes
known for later on

where she has these
truly alien characters,

futures and alternate worlds.

- It's really well
realized stuff

and it's better than
a lot of writers' best

but she was on quite a steep

near vertical
trajectory, artistically.

- I had written a
couple of short stories

that took place on these islands

where there were
wizards and dragons.

In 1968, when the
publisher, Parnassus Books,

came to me and said, "Would
you write a young adult novel?"

These islands grew and boom,

this is a whole
archipelago of islands

and now, I draw the map

and I would name the rivers and
the mountains and the cities

but I didn't know
anything about them

until I went there
with my characters.

(light mellow music)

As a boy, our hero
was called Sparrowhawk

because the wild hawks would
come when he called them

but his true and
secret name is Ged.

Ged sails to Roke Island,
the Isle of the Wise,

hidden in the heart
of the archipelago.

From all over Earthsea,
young men come to Roke

to learn the art of magic,
the craft of wizardry.

This was not, at that
time, a well-known concept,

the idea of a wizard school.

- I don't think Harry Potter

could have existed without
Earthsea having existed.

That was the original,
the finest and the best.

- In winter, he was
sent across Roke Island

to the farthest northmost cape,

where stands the Isolate Tower.

There, by himself, lived the
Master Namer Kurremkarmerruk

sat on a high seat,
writing down lists of names

that must be learned before
the ink faded at midnight,

leaving the parchment
blank again.

He might say, he who
would be seamaster

must know the true name of
every drop of water in the sea.

Magic exists in most societies
in one way or another.

And one of the forms it
exists in a lot of places

is if you know a
thing's true name,

you have power over the
thing or the person.

And of course, it's irresistible
because I'm a writer.

I use words and knowing the
names of things is, I do magic.

I do make up things that didn't
exist before by naming them.

I call it Earthsea
and there it is.

It exists.

So I had this total parallel

between wizards and
artists to play with.

- I bought Wizard of
Earthsea and I was in love.

It felt right, the idea that
naming things was magic.

- I love how in Earthsea
the strongest magic

is made of the same thing
that the books are made of.

It's words.

If you are a proficiently
gifted wizard,

you can become a
different kind of being.

You can become a hawk or a fish.

But be careful, if you
stay there too long,

you can't come back.

- In A Wizard of Earthsea,
Ged has to find out who he is.

He's a kid with a tremendous
gift and he knows it.

He knows he has a power
that most people don't have.

When you're young you're
kinda, nothing can kill you,

nothing can really hurt you.

You're going to
get away with it.

He really thinks that way

until he gets nearly
killed by his own folly.

- It's an internal evil.

It's Ged's own worst self

that becomes the evil
presence in his life.

- Well, a lot of kids go
through something like that

and then they have to kind of
struggle on and figure out,

okay, actually, I'm not
quite who I thought I was.

Who am I?

How do I be a good person?

Seems like a real
simple question

but most of us spend
our lives working at it

because every time you
think you've found your way,

the way changes.

I start pretty much with place

and then the people
grow up in the place.

Our first trip out here in '68.

I'd just never been
in country like this

and it just knocked me over.

All I knew was that
I had to come back.

That's about as
far as I wanna go.

That is big hole in the ground.

So, when the book did
well and the publisher

asked me for another
one, I thought,

I know what the next
Earthsea story has to be.

I needed a desert for the book

and the Kargish
islands looked as if

they might have some deserts.

It's a community of women
only, isolated in the desert.

No men.

The Kargish people
don't believe in magic.

Instead, they worship
the Nameless Ones,

the old powers of the Earth.

Our main character
is a young girl

who was taken from
her family as a baby

to serve the Powers
of the Tombs.

She doesn't remember the name
her mother gave her, Tenar.

One of the places
she alone can go

is called the Undertomb and
it leads to the labyrinth.

In the first book, darkness
often implies evil.

In the second book, darkness
is an equal power with light

and the girl Tenar is the
priestess of that great power.

She went forward
in the pitch dark,

easy as a little
fish in dark water.

Down the slanting passage,
a faint gray bloomed,

the echo of an echo
of a distant light.

She halted then very slowly,

took the last step
and looked and saw,

saw what she had never seen.

The great vaulted cavern
beneath the tombstones.

The light burned at the
end of a staff of wood,

smokeless, unconsuming.

She saw the face
beside the light,

the dark face,
the face of a man.

Tenar meets Ged
in the Undertomb.

He knows what her real name is

and he can give it back to her.

And that in a sense is what
frees her, frees them both.

That's a very
good, polite horse.

That's a sweetie, yes it is.

I don't live in a dreamworld,
a kind of woowoo place at all.

I think you can see that
in my fantasy writing.

I don't feel so much as
if I were making it up.

I know I am but that
isn't what it feels like.

It feels like being there and
looking around and listening.

When you say what's the
name of that flower?

Why do you want
to know the name?

What does it matter?

Somehow it connects
you to the flower.

Even the scientists, they
do have to name the species

and the individuals and so on.

A lot of people think that
fantasy is just escapism

and has nothing to do
with the real world

and I don't feel that at all

partly because my father was
a scientist, an anthropologist

and I grew up with a profound
respect for and liking for

the way scientists' minds work.

- Alfred Kroeber was the
founder of academic anthropology

in the early years of the
University of California

Ursula K. Le Guin and she
always keeps the K, for Kroeber,

was a precocious faculty brat.

- [Ursula] There were a lot
of anthropologists around.

It was, you know, it
was just shop talk

and I'm listening in.

It was such a mixture of
exciting minds and backgrounds.

So I'm sure that did
something to my head.

Something good.

- Ursula was very much the
youngest, the only girl,

always trying to get a word
in edgewise in this family.

She really learned to
debate and to argue

and to hold her own in a way
that was probably unusual

for girls of her generation.

- As soon as school
and college were out,

we packed up and drove
the very long 60 miles

up to the Napa Valley.

It's 40 acres with an
old ranch house on it.

Those hills are very wild.

You can feel like you're
in the absolute wilderness.

It was heaven for an introvert.

My father would, he would
tell us Indian stories

translating in
his head sometimes

from the language that
he'd learned them in.

It was what, my father spent
years of his life doing

was going around California
on foot, by horse

talking to survivors, to
survivors of destroyed peoples

or almost destroyed
peoples trying to save

what was left of their
culture from the white tide.

Just taking down what they
would and could tell him.

Just writing it down.

- It probably was
the darkest chapter

for all of Indian country.

And I think anthropologists
were on the forefront

of what they saw
was saving Natives.

- [James] It was
plausible to think

we had better record these
cultures and these languages

because in a generation,
they wouldn't be there.

Kroeber will always
be identified

with the best-known survivor
of the decimated populations

of native California, a man
who came to be known as Ishi.

- [Alfred] April 14, 1900.

("Deer Song (Not for Dancing)")

- [James] In 1911, the
last of his kin died

and Ishi walked south
down toward Oroville

and the anthropologists
in San Francisco

heard about this wild man

who they thought must be perhaps

the last really
authentic uncorrupted,

unchanged California Indian.

- Ishi's people were
among those people who,

you don't tell a
stranger your name.

My father said, "What would
you like us to call you?"

And Ishi means man.

Male person.

So we don't know Ishi's name.

We'll never know his name.

- [James] Ishi and Kroeber
had a complex friendship.

They respected each other,
they liked each other

and in some ways,
they needed each other

but it was a friendship
that was crosscut

by relations of
power and authority.

Ishi died in 1916
of tuberculosis

and it was traumatic
for Kroeber.

There's I think no
question about that.

- I had not heard the name
of Ishi when I was a child.

That was a long ago chapter
in my father's life,

an unhappy one.

So I just never
heard about Ishi.

Till all of a sudden, you
know, they were sorta saying,

hey, Kroeber, you oughta
write about, you know,

you're one of the last
people who knew Ishi

and you knew him well,
you oughta write it.

He said, "I cannot do it.

"Ask my wife."

My mother began to work
on the story of Ishi

and to live through
in her imagination.

How Ishi not only survived
in a terrible solitude

for a while but also, then came
alone into a strange world.

My mother was not
an anthropologist

but she was a very good writer.

- [Karen] The ultimate
impact was to humanize

Ishi the man, although
somewhat romantic

and certainly incomplete.

Her book kept at least one
version of that story alive.

- My mother's book
opened many people's eyes

including my own, to
the appalling history

of the white conquest
of California.

Some people

are quick to see injustice

and cruelty but I
was slow to see it.

I had to put the
pieces together myself

and it took a long time.

It's kinda hard to
admit that your people

did something awful.

When I absorb
something like that I,

what I do with it,

the way I handle it is probably
to put it into a novel.

(explosions bang)

There were a lot of
violent struggles

around power and domination
going on in the world

and so also in my novels.

But I was more interested
in exploring alternatives

to violence and exploitation

and this is the basic
purpose of the Ekumen,

a peaceful consortium of worlds.

The Ekumen was a
device that let me send

intelligent people
all over the universe

to find out interesting things.

- This pan-galactic
association of worlds

is one of Ursula's
great inventions,

one of science fiction's great
inventions as well, I think.

- The Ekumen provides
this huge laboratory

in which the writer
herself is the scientist

who's conducting a kind of
experiment, a thought experiment

on human beings and humanity

and their other ways of
interacting with each other.

And so, like, what if we just
change this one little thing

and that little thing?

What would happen?

What would it be like?

- I wrote a book in the 60s
called Left Hand of Darkness

where I was first asking myself,

okay, what is the difference
between men and women?

And the means I used
to talk about it

was to invent a race of
people who are androgynous,

fully androgynous.

You only become sexually
active once a month

and may become sexually
active as a man or as a woman.

You don't know which.

- And so in the course
of someone's lifetime,

they can father a child,
they can mother a child,

they can have lovers
of all different types,

- [Ursula] In The Left Hand
of Darkness, we meet Genly,

the first envoy from the
Ekumen to the planet of Winter.

As he tries to navigate
this ice-bound world

of genderless people,

Genly becomes entangled
in a political web.

He is forced to flee across a
glacier along with Estraven,

a native of Winter who
has become his ally.

- As they cover the miles
over the ice, they also

close the miles
between themselves

as individuals, as different
subspecies of homo sapiens.

- [Ursula] After all,
he's no more an oddity,

a sexual freak than I am.

Up here on the ice, each
of us is singular, isolate.

I, as cut off from those like me

from my society and its
rules, as he from his.

- It's not just a
geographical journey.

It's a journey into
human cooperation,

into a human relationship.

- When Left Hand of
Darkness came out,

it was perceived rightly
as having changed things,

as being a completely new work,

as being something that
was unlike anything else

that had been published.

- It was extremely popular,
especially among young readers.

Those were the right
readers that first,

I think, were drawn to her.

- Nowadays, there is
a lot more interest

in kind of gender querying
and gender fluidity.

I wonder if it
might be difficult

for a young reader now to
realize quite how extraordinary

and powerful that
was when she did it.

- She's like, what about this?

What if this was the way
it played out organically

and everyone could just
experience and see it?

So that was a really
formative book for me.

- Readers and critics
have thought about

Left Hand of Darkness
as a feminist novel.

I absolutely think
it was for its time

but there were other writers,

feminist science fiction
writers and critics as well,

who were saying, you
didn't quite go far enough.

- She got in trouble with
Left Hand of Darkness

because when you weren't
changing into some other gender,

you were he.

- It started getting criticism.

Why are you forcing us to
think of a masculine default

all the way?

Couldn't you have done
it a different way?

Do I think that The
Left Hand of Darkness

that Ursula would write now

would be The Left Hand of
Darkness that I read in 1971?

No, obviously not.

She has changed and
the world has changed.

- At first, I felt a
little bit defensive

but as I thought about it,

I began to see that
my critics were right.

I was coming up against
how I could write

about gender equality.

Just because you've written
a book about something

doesn't mean you're
done thinking about it.

There's always room to
keep expanding your ideas,

to keep learning.

My job is not to arrive
at a final answer

and just deliver it.

I see my job as holding
doors open or opening windows

but who comes in
and out the doors,

what you see out the window?

How do I know?

- There you go.

- [Man] Thank you,
I'ma turn about.

- Ursula LeGuin, she
doesn't set herself up

as a giver of answers but
she is one of the very finest

explorers of questions.

- [John] Let's get ready.

We're gonna start
right away, okay?

- There's a story by Ursula

called The Ones Who
Walk Away from Omelas

which begins as a
thought experiment.

She tells you that she
is going to describe

an imaginary place,
an imaginary city

and also tells you that
she's going to work with you

and your imagination to make
it the most wonderful city

you have ever imagined
or experienced.

You are part of this, you
are creating this with her.

And you experience
for several pages,

this wonderful city
of noble people,

the city of cities, Omelas.

And then she says, and
there's one more thing.

Somewhere in the city, there
is a cellar with a child in it

who is being mistreated horribly

and the joy of all
of the people depends

on this one child being
forced to suffer, degraded,

abused and that everybody
in the city knows it.

- The terms are
strict and absolute.

There may not even be a kind
word spoken to the child.

The instant the child is
let out, the city is gone.

They're not naive.

They're not stupid, right?

The joy is real.

The city is righteous

but it also relies on
the suffering, right?

- So basically, their
happiness comes from

somebody else's misery?

- [John] Yes, and it's just
one person, just one child.

- Right.
- For the entire city.

- They don't even
need government.

They don't need
religious institutions.

They really need laws.

They don't need weapons,
they don't need war.

You know what I mean?

It like--

- It's a utopia.

- It's kind of a utopia.

Right, but it's not a utopia.

- And it sets out and it says,

this is a thought experiment,

and then it goes in and
it breaks your heart

and it leaves you with
a world that is changed.

It leaves you shaken
if you read it right.

- It made me feel really upset

that this child was
being so mistreated

because he was, or she was,

the price of happiness
for the entire town.

- This moral dilemma was
really compelling to me

because it was
impossible to pick out,

like what the right
course of action would be.

Like there was nothing
that would be completely

morally right.

- This child is seen

and some of them go
back to their lives

and then there are the ones
who walk away from Omelas.

- I would try and
help the child.

I really would not care
if it would disrupt

the whole nature of the city
'cause it's a young child,

like, barely holding on.

So I would do anything
to help the child.

- I think I would
forget about the child.

I would be one of the
people who stays in the town

and, like, puts it in
the back of my mind

and continues to live
happily and peacefully

because I have the
privilege to do that.

- I would walk away.

I think the ones who walk away,

they can reflect on
this kid again and again

and know that they're
not a part of it

and they're not supporting it.

Maybe they make their own home,
that everything's perfect.

- In Omelas I was
setting up a question

about where they might be going,

the ones who walk
away from injustice.

In my novel The Dispossessed,

I wanted to go deeper
into that question.

This was the late 60s,
people were asking,

what might a perfect
society look like?

A society that was not
based on oppression.

Thinking about that
question brought me

to non-violent anarchism.

I think anarchist
thinking is one of those

profoundly radical

ways of thinking that is very
fruitful, very generative.

The more I read in anarchism,
the more I realized

that it was the only
major political theory

that hadn't had a
utopia written about it.

Well, that would be fun.

That would be cool.

Then I could kind of
begin figuring out

what would a genuine, working
anarchist society be like.

In The Dispossessed,
a revolutionary group

has abandoned their
capitalist, Earth-like world

to create a just and free
society on their moon,

with no gender dominance,
no coercive government,

no private ownership.

- I think The Dispossessed
gives us a chance

to experience what it
would be like to live

outside of capitalism.

It reminds us that the
way we live right now

is not the only possible
way for humans to live.

At first we're drawn to
the anarchist society

but then we can see the flaws

that keep the individual
from being entirely free.

I think it's a
foundational book.

Like any organizer I ever meet,

I'm like, you have
to read this book.

This is what we're
trying to figure out.

- It's a flawed utopia.

It's messy.

The crooked timber of humanity
is still crooked there.

- I knew from the start that
it contained its own betrayal.

No human society can just
find perfection and sit there.

That's not how things work.

- Certainly, The Dispossessed
has this political foundation

about inequality, about
class, about hierarchy.

But if you just want that,

then a political
tract will do the job.

I'd read a lot of
science fiction,

the good, the bad and the ugly

but I'd never seen the form
used that intelligently,

that artfully.

- [Adrienne] In the span
of just a few years,

we see Ursula release this
torrent of major novels

back to back, each more
original than the last.

She's pushing the boundaries

of what science
fiction could do.

She kind of took the
whole scene by storm.

(lively music)

- [Ursula] I won both
prizes in science fiction

and got a good deal of notice.

I was up on a whole other
level at that point,

which was very nice because
I was by then well in my 30s

and kind of like it's time
I was getting somewhere.

And as it happened, I
was hitting my stride

at a very interesting
moment for science fiction.

- Science fiction has always
been a very strange ragtag

area of literature,

with tension between what gets
called hard science fiction

which is nuts and bolts
and soft science fiction

in which the fiction part
is the most important part.

In the '30s and the '40s, it
was basically nuts and bolts.

- There was an older
generation of science fiction

sort of led by people
like Heinlein and Asimov.

They were expanding the
public's understanding

of what space flight
might be like,

they were championing
science at a time

when people were not always sure

that science was a cool thing

but they were not super aware

of how culture worked

beyond a very narrow perspective

which was their
perspective as white guys,

many of whom had
been scientists.

- [Ursula] And then there was us

who were kind of being
a little bit uppity.

Who were willing to kind
of change the terms.

A bunch of young Turks.

We sort of came in
and shook it up.

- You have people like Samuel
Delany, Ursula Le Guin,

Joanna Russ, women who were
writing, people of color

and they have different
stories to tell

but also specifically,
bringing in areas

of scientific and
cultural inquiry

that hadn't really
been the purview

of science fiction before.

- It's during that period

that she was starting
to do conferences

and a lot of science
fiction-related public speaking.

She really began to
move into herself,

to own herself as
someone who has a voice

and the authority that
goes with that voice

and the right to use it.

- [Ursula] It was a ball.

It was a very small world
and when we had a meeting,

most of us came and everybody
was intensely interested

in what we were doing.

And a lot of us
were quite young.

So, those meetings
were very lively.

- I remember she
used to smoke a pipe

and I thought that was great.

- [Elisabeth] There
was an opening out.

She was putting herself
into conversation

with other writers.

- I think it would
make sense if I went on

and spoke as what
I am, a writer.

A writer of science fiction.

A woman writer of
science fiction.

You know, I am a
very rare creature.

My species was at first
believed to be mythological

like the Tribble
and the unicorn.

(attendees laughing)

I'd been a bit of a lone wolf.

It was kind of nice to find
that there was a real community

of both readers and
writers in science fiction

and that you hear
from your readers

where so many writers don't
ever hear from their readers.

So, that was all
kind of a discovery.

- In The Tombs of Atuan,

you've got a female
central character

and yet she certainly doesn't
emerge as a liberated woman.

- No, the Earthsea books
as feminist literature

are a total, complete bust.

From my own archetypes and
my own cultural upbringing,

I couldn't go down deep and
come up with a woman wizard.

Maybe I'll learn to eventually

but when I wrote those,
I couldn't do it.

I wish I could have.

(mellow piano music)

When I started writing,
which is in the 1940s

and when I started publishing
which was in the 1960s,

the sort of basic
assumption about fiction

was that men were
at the center of it.

In fantasy and science fiction,
the heroes were all male.

There really were
no female heroes.

There were female characters

but they were secondary
characters, they were marginal.

Sometimes, there were whole
books with no women in them.

And that is true of the
first trilogy of Earthsea,

even Tombs of Atuan,
which is all about women

but look at the women.

Tenar is supposed to
have all this power

but what is her power?

She controls nothing.

The world is actually being
run by men, as it usually was.

- You have this really
pretty masculine,

pretty male-dominated world
in The Earthsea Trilogy.

Just about everything in it,
including the dragons is male.

- There's a famous
bit in the first book

where she mentions in passing
that there's a saying,

as weak as a woman's magic,

and I think, it's wicked
as a woman's magic.

And this is just sort
of thrown in there.

- What I'd been
doing as a writer

was being a woman pretending
to think like a man.

I had to think now
why have I put men

at the center of the
books almost entirely?

And the women are either
marginal or are in some way,

essentially
dependent on the men.

I started to write the fourth
book in the series, Tehanu.

And it just wouldn't go.

I knew that Tenar
didn't stay to learn

from the great wizard.

I knew she'd go on
and married a farmer

and had kids but
I didn't know why.

It took me 17
years to figure out

why Tenar did that and
what she was doing,

what her way to go was.

And during that time, that gap,

a lot of things
happened in my life.

A lot of things happened
in the world, naturally.

(lively music)

Along comes the revival
of feminism in the '70s.

People started writing
books saying, you know,

where are women?

Women are marginal in
society and of course,

also in literature.

But I was not part
of it as a movement,

partly because as a housewife

and mother of
three kids at home,

I was not behaving the way
a proper feminist should.

There was a considerable feeling
that we needed to cut loose

from marriage from men
and from motherhood

and there was no way
I was gonna do that.

So, I felt a little defensive
for a long time in the '70s

and it was kind of only
as I began getting more

confidence in who I was I
began to feel more at home

in it as a movement.

Of course, I can write
novels with one hand

and bring up three
kids with the other.

Yeah, sure, watch me.

There's a lot of pride
and self respect involved.

I can do it, I
will do it, by god.

- The modern feminist movement

had just sort of
hit science fiction

and some people embraced
it and some people

were pretty upset about it.

There was a big argument about

whether there was room for
women in science fiction,

they meant as readers, as
writers and as characters.

- It was almost like taking
a cork out of a bottle

of champagne that
you'd just shaken up.

It was a kind of explosion
of ideas and opinions

that had been bottled
up for a while.

- By the way, I want to state
I think Ernest Hemingway

was unjust and full of shit.

So I kind of had to
rethink my entire approach

to writing fiction.

I learned to read
other women's writings.

It was important to think
about privilege and power

and domination in
terms of gender,

which was something that
fantasy had not done.

After letting Tenar sit on
the shelf for all those years

because I didn't know
what to do with her,

I found that I was ready
to go on with her story.

And that's what finally
led me to writing Tehanu.

All I changed is
the point of view.

All of the sudden, we
are seeing Earthsea

not from the point of
view of the powerful

but from the point of
view of the powerless.

- And you read it and you go,

okay, everything that she
said in the first three books

is true but it wasn't
the whole picture.

- Earthsea becomes less magic.

It becomes colder, harder,

grittier, earthier place.

There is child abuse there.

It's not really feeling
like a fantasy world,

it perhaps mirrors your
own process of growth

as a human being.

- We can see Le Guin growing
in front of our eyes,

examining the constructs
of gender in Earthsea,

the world that she
herself created.

You can feel a kind
of simmering rage,

a simmering rage at injustice.

- It was a very interesting
book to write, not an easy one,

the way I handled it upset
many of my older readers,

particularly men because they
saw it as a feminist statement

and they were alarmed.

That they perceived it
as a kind of betrayal

because my hero, Ged,
had lost his power

and a male hero that
has lost his power

is degraded in
some people's eyes.

It was a radical
revision from within

of my whole
enterprise in writing.

And for a while, I thought it
was going to kinda silence me.

But I think if I hadn't
gone through with it

and learned how to write
from my own being as a woman,

I probably would
have stopped writing.

- Come on back at you.

Okay.

Now, let's see if it works.

- I didn't even know
that my father actually

read her manuscripts
until relatively recently,

that he's generally the
first person who reads

whatever she writes.

- Mostly you just
say, that's good.

Which is what I want to hear.

- Yeah.

- I do remember very
animated conversations

where we would say, don't
argue with each other

and they would say,
we're not arguing,

we're just discussing.

- Yes, reaching for it.

- [Theodore] About the time
we were sort of emerging

from doing our homework
and getting hungry,

they would be sitting on
either side of the fireplace,

as they do to this day.

- And that will be fine too.

- [Charles] I got a Fulbright
Scholarship to go to France.

I was doing French history
and that's how we met

'cause she had one too.

I think there were
like 20 grantees

going to France that year and
we were all put in steerage

- And at the end
of dinner, I said,

would anybody like
to go to the bar

and have an after dinner drink?

And there was this great
silence among these young kids.

And this little
voice said, "Yes."

- I thought she was interesting.

She was bright and articulate.

She seemed very sophisticated.

She knew what to
order, I didn't.

- He was really good
company and really handsome

and not like anybody
else I'd ever met,

partly because he was
Southern, I think.

I hadn't known Southerners.

So, I would say I was in
love by the third night out.

And then when we came back
to Paris and got married,

we didn't have to go
anywhere for our honeymoon.

We were there.

Perfect.

- [Charles] We lived in a
little hotel that whole year.

- [Ursula] I tell you, we were
kings and queens that year.

- [Charles] Tell them,
so when where there.

- We met at sea.

We married in a
foreign language.

What wonder if we cross
a continent on foot

each time to find each
other at secret borders,

bringing all of all my
streams and darknesses of gold

and your deep
graves and islands,

a feather, a fleck of mica,

a willow leaf that
is our country,

ours alone.

(light steady music)

My mother died in 1980.

My children were all out
of the house by then.

It just was time for me
to come home somehow.

We just moved down
here in January

and stayed a whole spring here,

the only time I lived here
for week after week after week

except those the
summers of my childhood.

I had to look around
for a long time

and circle like
a turkey vulture,

gradually narrowing
until I realized

what I wanted to write
about was here, my place.

Above all places, this is mine.

This is sort of the center.

When I'm up here, I think
about my father and my mother

and us when we were kids.

This place is full
of presences for me.

- [Phillips] Maybe
her magnum opus

although it's not her easiest
book is Always Coming Home

which is a book set in the world

of her family's summer
house in the Napa Valley.

- It started with the idea
of of writing a utopia

but a different kind of utopia,

a utopia that wasn't a kind
of political blueprint.

It's a sort of
ecological utopia.

It's an imagination of
this beautiful valley

being beautifully used
by its human population.

Pre-white California
was, to a small extent,

a model for Always Coming Home.

A lot of those
Californian peoples

seemed to have been very settled

in rather more peace and
quiet than a lot of peoples.

It was entirely a process
of imaginative exploration.

There was that sense of
living in two worlds,

their voices were
around me sometimes

and that the poems
would come as if I,

you know, I'd just write them
down as if I'd been told that.

(mellow ambient music)

- Always Coming Home is barely
a novel as we understand it.

- [Ursula] It's a grab-bag.

A bag of scraps and pieces

and I had a kind of conviction

that this was a good
way to write a book.

- One of the incredibly
exciting things

about Le Guin's fiction is that
it's radically experimental.

She gives us all these forms,

all these different ways of
thinking about fiction itself

and it's a kind of freedom that
she gives to other writers.

It's as though she says,
look, I got away with it.

If I got away with it, maybe
you can get away with it too.

In the '90s and in
the early noughties,

it really felt like a new
book from her every year

and it was like she
just was on fire again.

We're seeing the same
themes that we know and love

about alien worlds and
dealing with issues

around feminist identity

but everything is much more
shaded in gray than ever before.

- The style becomes
more autumnal.

The later work, it haunts
you in more subtle ways

and more nuanced ways.

Truth is a muddy thing now.

What if you aren't a wizard?

What if you can't fix
things by a spell?

what if the only
language you've got

is the language of compromise,
of mess, of misunderstanding?

- The fact of the matter is
there was nobody who was moving

as brilliantly from genre to
genre, as Ursula K. Le Guin.

- So what's happened
most recently

is the broadening of Le Guin's
audience and readership.

She's being recognized

not just as one of our
great science fiction

and fantasy writers but one
of our great American writers.

- As a giant of literature,

who is finally
getting recognized,

I take enormous pleasure
in awarding the 2014 Medal

for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters

to Ursula K. Le Guin.

(attendees applauding)

- All too often, people
who are writers and artists

who are marginalized
and, or radical,

are basically ignored
or mocked or denigrated

for a long time and then
passed directly from there

to being national treasures.

Essentially, you go from
outsider to full domestication

and one of the things that's
so wonderful about Le Guin

is that she would not and
will not allow that to happen.

- I rejoice in accepting
it for and sharing it with

all the writers
who were excluded

from literature for so long,

my fellow authors of
fantasy and science fiction.

- This is why that speech
that she gave when she won

the, sort of,
lifetime achievement,

welcome to the canon award,

to give it its
invisible subtitle,

was that it was a
perfectly courteous

but full-on swingeing attack

on the undermining of art
and aesthetics for profit,

within the publishing industry.

- Books, they're not
just commodities.

The profit motive is often in
conflict with the aims of art.

We live in capitalism.

It's power seems inescapable,

so did the divine
right of kings.

- I was there, giving her
the medal for literature

which was one of the
hugest honors of my life

and then going and
sitting down and listening

in front of an audience
of booksellers,

and who were also
bankrolling the evening.

- I was so scared before
I gave that speech.

It was awful.

I was not saying
what they expected

the old lady from Oregon to say.

I have had a long
career and a good one.

In good company.

Now here, at the end of it,

I really don't want to
watch American literature

get sold down the river.

Well, a writer can
certainly choose to simply

serve capitalism and
put their writing

entirely in the service of
success and making money.

That's a legitimate choice

but it's not a choice that
all writers want to make.

Thank goodness.

Because there are more
interesting choices

to make that are of more
general good to more people.

- That took an immense
amount of guts.

The same amount of guts
that Ursula has shown

time and time again,

just addressing subjects
that are not to be spoken of.

- We don't have very many
of these in this country

but she is a public
intellectual.

She has spoken out on
behalf of artistic freedom

for other writers.

She has spoken out against
systems of government

that repress public discourse.

She has been a consistent
voice for the human spirit.

- I guess I have a
sort of long term hope

and short term terror.

We don't have to
keep the door shut.

We could live in a
different way than we do.

- In the last 10 years,
Ursula has wielded her status,

which is considerable,
very, very skillfully,

very much like a warrior.

One reaches a certain age
where you can just kind of

sit back and let 'em have it.

- I don't offer
any 10 easy steps

to fame and fortune as an author
because I know that in art,

there are no easy steps.

To learn to make something well

can take your whole
life and it's worth it.

That'll do, I think.

(attendees laughing)

So, shall we do Q and A?

The big thing that has
happened to both fantasy

and science fiction
in my lifetime

is that they have come all the
way out of that genre closet

that they were forced into

and are recognized
as literature.

- You now have a
generation that grew up

that doesn't quite understand

why these artificial
divisions ever existed.

- Le Guin was ahead of her time

and we needed to
catch back up to her.

- The only question
that should matter is,

is this any good or not?

I read A Wizard of Earthsea and,

just little things
rearranged in my head,

that's when I
powerfully, hungrily,

more than anything
else I'd ever felt,

wanted to be a writer.

- You cannot deny Ursula
Le Guin's influence

on writers now of all kinds.

And I think that in
the final analysis

is much more important than
whether she was being reviewed

as she should have
been reviewed in 1975

because she was being read

by the people who would grow up

to change opinions
and change the world.

- It's certainly a
remarkable writer

who can meet you when
you're 10 years old

and give you something
wonderful to read

and still be there for you
when you're 45 years old

and everywhere in between.

I think she's one of
the greatest writers

that the 20th century American
literary scene produced.

- [David] It's like that famous
Earth shot called Earthrise

where we see our Earth
just rising over the moon,

this little, blue,
fragile circle.

Ursula's usage of
science fiction,

I feel is to make these
Earthrise photographs

so we can perhaps for the
first time see our world

from a different perspective.

If a world is dreamable, maybe
it can be dreamed into being.

(light mellow music)

- When I take you to the valley,

you'll see the blue
hills on the left

and the blue hills on the right,

the rainbow and the
vineyards under the rainbow

late in the rainy season
and maybe you'll say,

there it is, that's it.

But I'll say, a little farther.

We'll go on, I hope,
and you'll see the roofs

of the little towns and the
hillsides yellow with wild oats

and maybe you'll say, let's
stop here, this is it!

But I'll say, a
little farther yet.

We'll go on and you'll
hear the quail calling

on the mountain by the
springs of the river.

And looking back, you'll see
the river running downward

through the wild hills
behind, below and you'll say,

isn't that it, the valley?

And all I'll be able to say is,

drink this water of the
spring, rest here a while.

We have a long way yet to go
and I can't go without you.

(light mellow music)

(light exciting music)