If we have to have segregated shelving, then it should be consistent. It should not shelve the “good” authors with “literature” and the “popular” ones in the genre ghetto. Who decided popular was not good and good was not popular? Of course there’s a lot of clearly commercial genre fiction — most long-running series mysteries; most modern fantasy trilogies; a terribly high percentage of romance novels; all Louis L’Amour — junk food at worst, comfort food at best. Little nourishment, much grease. But as soon as you get above the McBooks level, who makes the call?
Only somebody who really reads in that field, really knows that field, can do it. An expert. The reputation of the publisher means little anymore: all big publishers are intensely commercial, and most are subsidiaries of corporations that have no interest whatever in literature. Their lists are controlled by Barnes & Noble and Borders; their books are principally chosen not by editors but by the accounting department. What blurbs mean depends on the integrity of the blurber. How useful are critics and reviewers as a guide to quality in genre fiction? Almost useless, unless you read critics who know the field. Almost all literary and academic reviewers are appallingly ignorant of genre fiction, don’t know how to read it, and pride themselves on their ignorance. Kirkus and the other review factories tend to be fairly knowledgeable about mysteries and thrillers, totally erratic about science fiction, and blankly ignorant of most other genres, unless a Patrick O’Brian comes along and they have to admit he exists.
Some authors, they say, “transcend genre.” They say that about me, and I know they mean well, but I do not understand what they mean.
If a book gets called or shelved with “literature” because you think it transcends its genre, the implication is, it’s good because it’s more like realism. So it would be even better, more literary, if it was entirely realistic. Moby-Dick, or Frankenstein, or The Time Machine, or The Baron in the Trees, or The Lord of the Rings, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or The Man in the High Castle, or The Left Hand of Darkness, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or Carmen Dog, or The Dazzle of Day — would these books be better, be a “higher” form of literature, if all the events were mundane and all the characters were ordinary: if they were classifiable as realistic?
Realism is not a standard of excellence in fiction. Realism is not an adequate definition of literature. To use it as such is to misread every kind of fiction except realism. You can’t read Gulliver’s Travels the same way as you read War and Peace. That’s obvious to most critics and teachers — yet they try to read Tolkien the same way they read James Michener. No wonder they don’t get it!
Realism is a genre, just as fantasy is a genre or romance is a genre. It’s a recent one — much younger than either fantasy or romance. Though it’s a genre at which we in the West in the last couple of hundred years have excelled, there is no way in which it is superior to other genres — except in being more realistic. It is, accordingly, less imaginative, less mysterious, less romantic, less scientific, less magical, less Western, less thrilling, less. . .
As long as critics and the academy use realism as a single standard for the vast diversity of fictional modes, teachers will remain contemptuous of what most people read, ignorant of the particular beauties and devices of each genre, and incompetent to judge most fiction.
And libraries, by perpetuating shelving by genre, will perpetuate the bizarre and arbitrary limitation of literary fiction to one modern genre.
Why did I settle in the ghetto, or actually six or seven ghettos?
Well, I knew what I was good at: telling stories, mostly, in a free range between realistic and imaginative fiction — including SF, fantasy, kiddilit, YA, historical, etc. All ghettos. And I had no intention of living in some fancy literary gated community just to get respect from the ignorant.
But I do value the respect of the interested and informed. And when I wrote SF, or fantasy, or for children, or for young adults, I got real criticism from people knowledgeable in that genre, and also heard directly from readers — which many novelists never do. Genre and “popular” writers aren’t considered by their readers to be dead (an unfortunate side-effect of respectability). So, represented by an agent who was willing and able to sell work in any genre, and having some very broadminded editors, I could just sit around in Oregon and write. I had freedom. Why should I give that freedom up? What for?
Well, I know what for, every time they give an award to another brand name novel, or some lady says to me, “Oh, my son just loves your books — of course I don’t read Sci Fi.” And she stands there expecting me to say, “No, of course you don’t, you’re far too mature, intelligent, discerning, and, above all, tactful.” Then I usually find out she thought I was Madeleine L’Engle, anyhow. And the critics: “If it’s SF it can’t be good; if it’s good it can’t be SF.” And so they tell me that Left Hand of Darkness, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Dazzle of Day aren’t SF. What ignorance.
But, for getting on to forty years now I’ve published literary fiction in genres considered sub-literary and, though it’s getting harder and harder, I have gotten away with it. And I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Answers to a Questionnaire
What was your childhood like — was it happy? Were there any significant influences on you?
My childhood was what is called “happy.” My parents were loving, kind, and intelligent; I had an extra mother in my great-aunt; I had three big brothers to tag around after (and to have fights with the youngest of them); and everybody in the family was glad I was a girl, which made me able to be glad to be a woman, eventually.
My father was a university professor and we were well off, even during the Depression. We lived in a beautiful redwood house in Berkeley and summered on an old ranch in the hills of the Napa Valley. I went to public schools, where I got a good education (although I was shy and malingered a good deal in grade school; and high school was three years of social torture.)
There were lots of visitors, lots of talk and argument and discussion about everything, lots of books around, lots of music and storytelling. The life of the mind can be a very lively one. I was brought up to think and to question and to enjoy.
During the Second World War my brothers all went into service and the summers in the Valley became lonely ones — just me and my parents in the old house. There was no TV then; we turned on the radio once a day to get the war news. Those summers of solitude and silence, a teenager wandering the hills on my own, no company, “nothing to do,” were very important to me. I think I started making my soul then.
What inspired you to be a writer?
Learning to write, at five.
Who helped, who hindered you in your early career?
My parents never encouraged me in the sense of making a fuss about what I wrote or praising my determination to write. They encouraged me greatly in the sense that they believed that if you have a talent, you ought to work hard at it.
When I was getting near college age, my father talked with me about getting a “saleable skill” — learning a trade that I could live on. Because most writers don’t earn enough from writing to buy cat food, this was wise advice. I loved languages, so I went into French and Italian literature in college, and went on for higher degrees that would qualify me to teach.
Then, when I got married, my husband never questioned my right to write. This is fairly rare, especially in husbands. My advice to young writers is, if you can’t marry money, at least don’t marry envy.
When I was young, the few older writers I knew were encouraging; and the writers who are my friends now are generous people with a strong sense of community. I keep away from writers who think art is a competition for fame, money, prizes, etc. What matters is the work.
How do you feel about your life now? What would you
change or what do you wish had been different?
I love living almost as well as I love writing.
It was tough trying to keep writing while bringing up three kids, but my husband was totally in it with me, and so it worked out fine. Le Guin’s Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work.
The idea that you need an ivory tower to write in, that if you have babies you can’t have books, that artists are somehow exempt from the dirty work of life — rubbish.
What themes and ideas recur in your writing?
This is a question for critics, not for the author. Two obvious things often pointed out by critics: Taoist thought runs quite deep in the structure of many of my fictions. And many of them put the viewpoint characters into a different society and culture, where they have to figure out what’s going on, how things work. (Since all of us as children are in this situation, it is a reliably interesting and relevant one.)
Do you have a writing philosophy?
I guess it is: Write. Revise. If possible, publish.
Writing is my craft. I honor it deeply. To have a craft, to be able to work at it, is to be honored by it.
Do you weave events from your real life into stories or do you rely entirely on imagination?
Of course everything one writes about comes from experience. Where else could it come from? But the imagination recombines, remakes ... makes a new world, makes the world new.
I seldom exploit experience directly. I do what the poet Gary Snyder calls “composting.” You let everything you do/learn/think/read/feel sink down inside yourself and stay in the dark, and then (years later, maybe) something entirely new grows up out of that rich darkness. This takes patience.
One of my favorite things the poet Shelley said is, “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”
And while I’m quoting quotes, Socrates remarked, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”
That’s a good one to remember when listening to a politician or reading an advertisement.
Do you do research, visit places, when you are writing your books?
Stories and books have grown directly out of places that I happened to visit (my first trip to the Eastern Oregon desert led straight to The Tombs of Atuan.) If there is science in a science fiction story I’m writing and I need to check my facts, I do. But most of my research is into the geography of my own imagination, where Earthsea, and Gethen, and Orsinia, and all my other subworlds are.
Do you keep a journal or diary?
Used to. Don’t now. Just a poems notebook.
Do you revise many times?
As many times as necessary. With one story or novel, this may be five false starts and six or eight or ten full rewrites, beginning to end. With the next, it may mean just going back through it and over it, fiddling details until I think it’s as good as I can get it.
Rewriting is as hard as composition is — that is, very hard work. But revising — fiddling and polishing — that’s gravy — I love it. I could do it forever. And the computer has made it such a breeze. (Once I learned how to keep the computer itself from “correcting” my grammar, that is. Hey, butt out, Bill Gates, this is my syntax.)
Are there any events in your life that you would not want included in a biography?
If there were, would I tell you? Is this question an oxymoron or an Irish Bull?
A Few Words to a Young Writer
Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Storytellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more a 100 short stories, 2 collections of essays, 4 volumes of poetry, and 18 novels. Her best known fantasy works, the Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field of its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity.
Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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NOVELS AND STORY COLLECTIONS BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
NOVELS
Always Coming Home
The Beginning Place
City of Illusion
The Dispossessed
The Eye of the Heron
The Farthest Shore
The Lathe of Heaven
The Left Hand of Darkness
Malafrena
The Other Wind
Planet of Exile
Rocannon’s World
Tehanu
The Telling
The Tombs of Atuan
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
A Wizard of Earthsea
The Word for World is Forest
STORY COLLECTIONS
Buffalo Gals
The Compass Rose
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Four Ways to Forgiveness
Orsinian Tales
Searoad
Tales from Earthsea
Credits
Jacket design by Philip Lee Harvey
Jacket art by Getty Images
Copyright
“Coming of Age in Karhide,” copyright © 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in New Legends, edited by Greg Bear with Martin Greenberg (Legend Books, an imprint of Random House UK Limited).
“The Matter of Seggri,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Crank! (Spring 1994; Issue no. 3).
“Unchosen Love,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Amazing Stories (Fall 1994; vol. 69, no. 2).
“Mountain Ways,” copyright © 1996 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (August 1996; vol. 20, no. 8).
“Solitude,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1994; vol. 87, no. 6).
“Old Music and the Slave Women,” copyright © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in Far Horizons, edited by Robert Silverberg (Avon Eos).
“The Birthday of the World,” copyright © 2000 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in The Magazine ofFantasy and Science Fiction (June 2000; vol. 98, no. 6).
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse enginee
red, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“On Despising Genres,” “Answers to a Questionnaire,” and “A Few Words to a Young Writer” originate from Ms. Le Guin’s website — www.ursulakleguin.com — and are reprinted here by permission.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2002 ISBN: 9780061803925
Print edition first published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
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