Two collected works by Ursula K. Le Guin
I recently finished The Language of the Night and The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin. The Language of the Night is an assembly of UKLG’s speeches and essays about fantasy, science fiction, and writing.1 This version of the essays was updated with notes that Le Guin made on her work decades later and it was interesting to see where she had shifted her views or leaned harder toward the same position. One of my favorite lines was “When you start screaming, you have stopped asking questions.”
In the back of the book, I noted the following thoughts as I was reading.
*UKLG thinks deeply and critically about stuff that others are overlooking. At the time of most of these writings, no one was taking science fiction or fantasy seriously. Writing it was a hack profession and reading it was a waste of time. She insisted on taking the genre seriously.
*She has a willingness to engage her past work and change her mind, even when ideas have already been printed and presented to the public.
*She clearly articulates appreciation for the people whose work she has loved and learned from.
*She calls up her own (science fiction) community to continual growth, hard work, and good art.
All of those aims, I can appreciate and use in my own field of work.
The Found and the Lost is a collection of novellas that I rated in a note on my phone as I finished them with a scale of “yes,” “ok,” “eh,” and “no.” It is, of course, a very scientific and quantitative scale. Of course it’s not; it’s not even a measure of how good the stories are. It’s a metric of how well I personally liked the stories. The ones that got marked with a “yes” were “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “Paradises Lost.” I also skipped three stories because they were in the gigantic collection of Earthsea works that I read earlier this year. There were 13 novellas altogether.
I’m planning to pause on my UKLG reading only because the library does not have more of her work currently.
- I did buy this book when I was in Pasadena for graduation. At Vromans, Pasadena’s oldest bookstore. It was a fabulous shop. ↩︎