Writer of the imagination
In Ursula K Le Guin’s care, fantasy and science fiction attained the age of majority
Science fiction was no longer exclusively in the hands of white men who dreamt the future in the regressive terms of colonisation and empire.
It would be a pardonable generalisation to suggest that until Ursula K Le Guin, fantasy and science fiction was a man thing. It featured intrepid exploration and space opera, which live on in Star Trek and Star Wars. And then in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness appeared, with this extraordinary sentence: “The king was pregnant.” It may not have got as much attention as it deserved at the time, in a world already struggling with the mind-altering effects of the Pill, the Bomb, LSD and Woodstock. But Le Guin’s imagination of a culture with mutable gender was a turning point in the genre.
Science fiction was no longer exclusively in the hands of white men who dreamt the future in the regressive terms of colonisation and empire. This, too, is a generalisation, for liberal, imaginative men have written F&SF, but it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Le Guin lighted the way to Margaret Atwood’s dystopia of reproductive politics in The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as to William Gibson’s razorgirl Molly in Neuromancer, who exists outside that framework.
The central difference Le Guin made concerned war and peace. In place of the lightsabre, she offered feminist politics and conciliation, across cultures, genders, species and interstellar distances. She was one of the few genre writers who knew that her clan wrote high literature, but were ignored because realism exclusively claimed authenticity. Le Guin broke out of the ghetto in 2014, accepting the US National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in the name of her peers, “writers of the imagination”. Long disparaged by the men who ruled science fiction in her time, she stood shoulder to shoulder with them in her finest hour.
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