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| Authors William Alexander and Ursula K. Le Guin |
Author Ursula K. Le Guin died while Cynsations was on winter hiatus.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018) from The Horn Book. Peek:
“Author Ursula K. Le Guin, who challenged the male-dominated fantasy and science fiction fields starting in the 1960s, died January 22, 2018, in Portland, Oregon. She was eighty-eight.
“Her YA novel A Wizard of Earthsea (which explored the struggle of good versus evil as an internal struggle, not an external one) won the 1969 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88 by Gerald Jonas from The New York Times. Peek:
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| (Parnassus , 1968)(reprint HMH Books) |
“Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict.
“But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.”
“She [Le Guin] collaborated a few times with my youngest daughter. Together they told stories about monkeys and cats…. Iris is five years old now. I told her that Ursula died today.
“‘I’m going to go invent a machine that makes dead people alive again,’ she announced, and then went into the playroom to get started. She’s still there, right now, reinventing the very first science fiction novel.
“I like to think that Ursula would be proud of her.”
Where to Start with Ursula K. Le Guin by Nicholas Parker from The New York Public Library. Peek:
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| (Scholastic, 2009) |
“If you’ve never read Le Guin before, you’re missing out on some great literature. You don’t have to be a hardcore fantasy fan to appreciate the beauty of Le Guin’s writing, her wonderful storytelling, or the vivid fictional worlds she creates… We’ll help you figure out where to start.”
A Book From Ursula Le Guin For Every Age by M. Lynx Qualey from Book Riot. Peek:
“Le Guin’s oeuvre is sprawling and it can be difficult to know where to step in.
“Although not if you’re six months old: In that case, you really should begin with Cat Dreams.”
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| (Harper Perennial, 2017) |
Ten Things I Learned from Ursula K. Le Guin by Karen Joy Fowler from The Paris Review. Peek:
“I can’t possibly provide a complete list of what she taught me, by word and example. But here is my starter list…
“1. There is no reason a book of ideas can’t also be deeply moving, gorgeously written, and inhabited by people who take rooms in your heart and never move out.”
Le Guin and the Sleeping Castle by Bonny Becker from Books Around The Table. Peek:
“She engages the reader…there’s almost no way to read [Ursula] Le Guin and not have one’s mind opened to ideas, feelings and possibilities that feel like your own explorations. That refresh and engage your mind and your emotions.”
“When I finally got the brilliant and renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin all to myself on a stage in Portland, some years ago, I asked her the question I’d always been longing to ask: ‘Where do the ones who walk away from Omelas go?’ Tricky question! She changed the subject….
“How do we build Omelas, minus the tortured child? Neither Ursula K. Le Guin nor I knew, but it was a question that Le Guin spent her lifetime trying to answer, and the worlds she so skillfully created in the attempt are many, varied and entrancing.”
(The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was originally published in 1973 in New Dimensions 3, a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg.)
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| (HMH, 2015) |