The language of the nigh.., p.14
The Language of the Night, page 14
from “Books Remembered,” Children’s Book Council Calendar xxxvi, no. 2 (November 1977)
I have found, somewhat to my displeasure, that I am an extremely moral writer. I am always grinding axes and making points. I wish I wasn’t so moralistic, because my interest is aesthetic. What I want to do is make something beautiful like a good pot or a good piece of music, and the ideas and moralism keep getting in the way. There’s a definite battle on.
from “An Interview with Ursula Le Guin: Creating Realistic Utopias,” by Win McCormack and Ann Mendel, Seven Days (April 11, 1977)
INTRODUCTION
Le Guin in the preceding essays has deplored biographical criticism and inquiry, saying in “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” that the answer to “Who are you?” is “It’s all there, in the book. All that matters.” In the essays that follow, Le Guin talks, not about herself, but about her work, with the object of finding out what this genre called “science fiction” is and how, given specific examples, it can be made better. Her specific concerns include the differences and similarities between SF and fantasy; the creation of characters, and experiments with gender and role; the dangers of relevance and of “inextricably confusing ideas with opinions”; and the strengths and limitations both of the genre and of the English language, as they affect her attempts to express a true vision. Her general concern is, as always, the responsibilities of freedom; as she says again in the introduction to The Word for World Is Forest, “The pursuit of art… is the pursuit of liberty.”
Rocannon’s World appeared in 1966 from Ace Books; this introduction was written for the 1977 hardcover edition published by Harper & Row, and is noteworthy particularly for Le Guin’s comments on the differences between SF and fantasy. Planet of Exile appeared in 1966 from Ace; this introduction was for the 1978 Harper & Row hardcover edition. Le Guin’s retrospective comments on feminism and her use of male protagonists are particularly interesting. Her views that in her work “the sex itself is seen as a relationship rather than an act” and that “both sex and gender seem to be used mainly to define the meaning of ‘person’ or of ‘self’ ” have a particular relevance to The Left Hand of Darkness. In Science-Fiction Studies 6 (July 1975), Le Guin defined the two ruling myths of The Left Hand of Darkness as “the myth of winter” and “the archetypal figure of the Androgyne,” which, she feels,
is one of the archetypes/potentialities of the human psyche which is of real importance now, which is alive now and full of creative-destructive energy; and so it is urgent that it be brought into consciousness.
In her own work, she continues to create characters through which to explore ideas about gender, sex, self, and archetype. As she says in the 1978 introduction to Planet of Exile: “I keep on digging. I use the tools of feminism, and try to figure out what makes me work and how I work, so that I will no longer work in ignorance or irresponsibly.”
City of Illusions appeared in 1967 from Ace; this introduction was also written for the 1978 Harper & Row hardcover edition. It is interesting because it indicates the ideas out of which the complete novel grew; because it raises the perennial problem of the distance between the vision and the final artifact; and because it touches on the problem of preaching, with which Le Guin deals in her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest. This novella was written in 1968, published in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (New York: Doubleday, 1972), and won the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella. This introduction was written for the 1977 single-volume reprint by Gollancz of London; the 1975 single-volume American edition from Berkley did not contain an introduction. Here, Le Guin gives a candid account of how easily “a pure pursuit of freedom and the dream” can be misdirected by “the lure of the pulpit,” as powerful a limitation as the lures of fame and money.
The artist needs freedom to seek and express the truth; and the nature of truth is the theme of Le Guin’s introduction to the 1976 Ace paperback reprinting of The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, first published by Ace in 1969, won both the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Hugo Award of the 28th World Science Fiction Convention as best science fiction novel of its year. It may well be Le Guin’s best-known work; certainly it is controversial. Le Guin deals with some of the issues raised by the ambisexual nature of her imagined people, the Gethenians, in the essay “Is Gender Necessary?” This essay, first delivered to a class in women’s studies at the University of Washington, taught by Susan Anderson, was published in Aurora: Beyond Equality, edited by Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1976), an anthology of stories attempting to depict nonsexist societies. (Le Guin also stresses that Left Hand is not “about” sexuality so much as “about betrayal and fidelity”; and that it does what SF is uniquely suited to do, that is, set up a human experiment and observe the results as they are demonstrated through individuals.) The criticism “that the Gethenians seem like men, instead of menwomen” was raised most notably by the Polish critic Stanislaw Lem, in an essay published in the German journal Quarber Merkur and translated, revised, and published in the Australian fanzine SF Commentary 24 (November 1971). In her reply published in SF Commentary 26 (April 1972), Le Guin commented: “Is it possible we tend to insist that Estraven and the other Gethenians are men, because most of us are unwilling or unable to imagine women as scheming prime ministers, haulers of sledges across icy wastes, etc.?” This, with the later self-criticism that she did not show Gethenians acting in “female” roles, shows Le Guin pushing again at the “limits” imposed on SF, and the SF writer, the experimenter, by the assumptions of contemporary society.
The Left Hand of Darkness opens with the protagonist, envoy Genly Ai, writing: “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.” Le Guin’s introduction discusses the paradoxical nature of Truth, a paradox borne out by the “real” story she discusses in her introduction to Star Songs of an Old Primate, a collection of short stories by James Tiptree Jr. (New York: Ballantine, 1978). This essay complements Le Guin’s own speculations about truth, reality, gender, social role, and the unimportance of the author’s biography. It also, like the tributes to Tolkien and Dick, shows Le Guin’s own values in action, as she discusses work that she respects. The Tolkien essay was a posthumous tribute published in Vector 67…68 (Spring 1974), the journal of the British Science Fiction Association, then edited by Malcolm Edwards. The essay on Philip K. Dick appeared in the New Republic 175 (October 30, 1976) under the heading “Science Fiction as Prophecy: Philip K. Dick.” I have restored Le Guin’s original title, “The Modest One.” Like Le Guin’s praise of Lem and the Strugatskys, this essay repeats her central idea that the highest task of the SF writer, of any writer, is to act as poet and prophet, expressing a clear moral vision in the most artistically satisfying way possible. If this can be accomplished, then indeed “all that matters” will be “there, in the book” for each reader.
INTRODUCTION TO ROCANNON’S WORLD
(1977)
When I set out to write my first science fiction novel, in the century’s mid-sixties and my own mid-thirties, I had written several novels, but I had never before invented a planet. It is a mysterious business, creating worlds out of words. I hope I can say without irreverence that anyone who has done it knows why Jehovah took Sunday off. Looking back on this first effort of mine, I can see the timidity, and the rashness, and the beginner’s luck, of the apprentice demiurge.
When asked to “define the difference between fantasy and science fiction,” I mouth and mumble and always end up talking about the spectrum, that very useful spectrum, along which one thing shades into another. Definitions are for grammar, not literature, I say, and boxes are for bones. But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper—I work on paper) you get purple, something else again. Rocannon’s World is definitely purple.
I knew very little about science fiction when I wrote it. I had read a good deal of science fiction, in the early forties and in the early sixties, and that was absolutely all I knew about it: the stories and novels I had read. Not many knew very much more about it, in 1964. Many had read more; and there was Fandom; but very few besides James Blish and Damon Knight had thought much about science fiction. It was reviewed, in fanzines, as I soon discovered, and in a very few—mainly SFR and ASFR—criticized; outside the science fiction magazines it was seldom reviewed and never criticized. It was not studied. It was not taught. There were no schools—in any sense. There were no theories; only the opinions of editors. There was no aesthetic. All that—the New Wave, the academic discovery, Clarion, theses, counter-theses, journals of criticism, books of theory, the big words, the exciting experiments—was just, as it were, poised to descend upon us, but it hadn’t yet, or at least it hadn’t reached my backwater. All I knew was that there was a kind of magazine and book labeled SF by the publishers, a category into which I had fallen, impelled by a mixture of synchronicity and desperation.
So there I was, getting published at last, and I was supposed to be writing science fiction. How?
I think there may have already existed a book or two on How to Write SF, but I have always avoided all such manuals since being exposed to a course in Creative Writing at Harvard and realizing that I was allergic to Creative Writing. How do you write science fiction? Who knows? cried the cheerful demiurge, and started right in to do it.
Demi has learned a few things since then. We all have. One thing he learned (if Muses are female, I guess demiurges are male) was that red is red and blue is blue and if you want either red or blue, don’t mix them. There is a lot of promiscuous mixing going on in Rocannon’s World. We have NAFAL and FTL spaceships, we also have Brisingamen’s necklace, windsteeds, and some imbecilic angels. We have an extremely useful garment called an impermasuit, resistant to “foreign elements, extreme temperatures, radioactivity, shocks and blows of moderate velocity and weight such as swordstrokes or bullets,” and inside which the wearer would die of suffocation within five minutes. The impermasuit is a good example of where fantasy and science fiction don’t shade gracefully into one another. A symbol from collective fantasy—the Cloak of Protection (invisibility, etc.)—is decked out with some pseudoscientific verbiage and a bit of vivid description, and passed off as a marvel of Future Technology. This can be done triumphantly if the symbol goes deep enough (Wells’s Time Machine), but if it’s merely decorative or convenient, it’s cheating. It degrades both symbol and science; it confuses possibility with probability, and ends up with neither. The impermasuit is a lost item of engineering, which you won’t find in any of my books written after Rocannon’s World. Maybe it got taken up by the people who ride in the Chariots of the Gods.
This sort of thing is beginner’s rashness, the glorious freedom of ignorance. It’s my world, I can do anything! Only, of course, you can’t. Exactly as each word of a sentence limits the choice of subsequent words, so that by the end of the sentence you have little or no choice at all, so (you see what I mean? having said “exactly as,” I must now say “so”) each word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, character, description, speech, invention, and event in a novel determines and limits the rest of the novel—but no, I am not going to end this sentence as I expected to, because my parallel is not exact: the spoken sentence works only in time, while the novel, which is not conceived or said all at once, works both ways, forward and back. The beginning is implied in the end, as much as the end is in the beginning. (This is not circularity. Fascinating circular novels exist—Finnegans Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, Dhalgren—but if all novels achieved or even attempted circularity, novel readers would rightly rebel; the normal run-of-the-mill novel begins in one “place” and ends somewhere else, following a pattern—line, zigzag, spiral, hopscotch, trajectory—which has what the circle in its perfection does not have: direction.) Each part shapes every other part. So, even in science fiction, all that wonderful freedom to invent worlds and creatures and sexes and devices has, by about page 12 of the manuscript, become strangely limited. You have to be sure all the things you invented, even if you haven’t mentioned them or even thought of them yet, hang together; or they will all hang separately. As freedom increases, so, alas, does responsibility.
As for the timidity I mentioned, the overcaution in exploring my brave new world: though I sent my protagonist Rocannon unprotected (he does finally lose his impermasuit) into the unknown, I was inclined to take refuge myself in the very-well-known-indeed. My use of fragments of the Norse mythology, for instance: I lacked the courage of experience, which says, Go on, make up your own damn myth, it’ll turn out to be one of the Old Ones anyhow. Instead of drawing on my own unconscious, I borrowed from legend. It didn’t make very much difference in this case, because I had heard Norse myths before I could read, and read The Children of Odin and later the Eddas many, many times, so that that mythos was a shaping influence on both my conscious and unconscious mind (which is why I hate Wagner). I’m not really sorry I borrowed from the Norse; it certainly did them no harm; but still, Odin in an impermasuit—it’s a bit silly. The borrowing interfered, too, with the tentative exploration of my own personal mythology, which this book inaugurated. That is why Rocannon was so much braver than I was. He knew jolly well he wasn’t Odin, but simply a piece of me, and that my job was to go toward the shared, collective ground of myth, the root, the source—by nobody’s road but my own. It’s the only way anybody gets there.
Timidity, again, in the peopling of my world. Elves and dwarves. Heroes and servants. Male-dominated feudalism. The never-never-Bronze Age of sword and sorcery. A League of Worlds. I didn’t know yet that the science in my fiction was mostly going to be social science, psychology, anthropology, history, etc., and that I had to figure out how to use all that, and work hard at it, too, because nobody else had yet done much along those lines. I just took what came to hand, the FTL drive and the Bronze Age, and used them without much thinking about it, saving the courage of real invention for pure fantasies—the Winged Ones, the windsteeds, the Kiemhrir. A lesser courage, but a delight; one I have pretty much lost. You can’t take everything with you as you go on.
I hope this doesn’t read as if I were knocking the book, or worse, trying to defuse criticism by anticipating it, a very slimy trick in the art of Literary Self-Defense. I like this book. Like Bilbo, I like rather more than half of it nearly twice as much as it deserves. I certainly couldn’t write it now, but I can read it; and the thirteen-year distance lets me see, peacefully, what isn’t very good in it, and what is—the Kiemhrir, for instance, and Semley, and some of the things Kyo says, and that gorge where they camp near a waterfall. And it has a good shape.
May I record my heartfelt joy at the final disappearance in this edition of the typographical errors which, plentiful in the first edition, have been multiplying like gerbils ever since. One of them—Clayfish for Clayfolk—even got translated into French. The Clayfolk, euphoniously, become Argiliens, but the misprint, “the burrowing Clayfish,” became “ces poissons d’ argilière qui fouissaient le sol,” which I consider one of the great triumphs of French Reason in the service of pure madness. There may be some typos in this edition, but I positively look forward to them. At least, with any luck at all, they’ll be new ones.
INTRODUCTION TO PLANET OF EXILE
(1978)
All science fiction writers are asked, with wonderful regularity, “Where do you get your ideas from?” None of us knows what to answer, except Harlan Ellison, who replies crisply, “Schenectady!”
The question has become a joke, even a New Yorker cartoon; and yet it is usually asked with sincerity, even with yearning; it isn’t meant to be a stupid question. The trouble with it, the reason why the only possible answer to it is “Schenectady” is that it isn’t the right question; and there are no right answers to wrong questions—as witness the works of those who attempted to discover the properties of Phlogiston. Sometimes the trouble is merely a matter of vague phrasing; what the asker really wants to know is “Do you get the science in your science fiction from knowing or reading science?” (Ans.: Yes.) Or, “Do SF writers ever steal ideas from each other?” (Ans.: Constantly.) Or, “Do you get the action in your books from having lived all the experiences the characters live?” (Ans.: God forbid!) But sometimes the questioners can’t specify; they just shift and say well, like, y’know… and then I suspect that what they’re really trying to get at is a complex, difficult and important thing: they are trying to understand the imagination, how it works, how an artist uses it or is used by it. We know so little about the imagination that we can’t even ask the right questions about it, let alone give the right answers. The springs of creation remain unsounded by the wisest psychology; and an artist is often the last person to say anything comprehensible about the process of creation. Though nobody else has said very much that makes sense. I guess the best place to start is in Schenectady, reading Keats.
Of recent years I (only I, in this case) am always asked a second question. It is “Why do you write so much about men?”
This is never a stupid question. Nor is it a wrong question, not at all, though sometimes there is a bias in it that makes it hard to answer directly. There are women in my books and stories, and often they are the protagonists or the central viewpoint characters; and so if people ask, “Why do you always write about men?” I reply, “I don’t,” and I say it rather crossly, because the question so phrased is both accusatory and inaccurate. I can swallow some accusation, or some inaccuracy, but the combination is poison.
But again and still, however the question is phrased, what it brings up is a real and urgent concern. A flip answer is detestable; a brief answer is impossible.
