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(siren blaring)

(muffled voice speaking on PA system)

(tense music)

- [Alien] Attention.

People of Earth, this is a voice speaking to you

from thousands of miles beyond your planet.

(people screaming)

- [Ursula] Fantasy and science fiction,

when I began writing, were, particularly in America,

strictly genre.

The magazines were pulp magazines.

It had no respect from the critics.

- What Ursula was having to navigate

was the societal prejudices against science fiction,

against the fantastic and against children's fiction.

All of these things were marginalized.

- People would think ray guns and silly things.

This can't be serious.

- A genre label can be a very useful tool for a critic

who wants to dismiss a writer

or not take a writer seriously.

- The critics had dismissed science fiction and fantasy

as essentially worthless and I knew better.

I knew that my work was not second rate,

that it was of literary value.

I'd like us not to be resigned but to be rebellious.

I want to see science fiction step over the old walls

and head right into the next wall

and start to break it down, too.

Imaginative fiction, it trains people

to be aware that there are other ways to do things

and other ways to be, that there is not just one

civilization and it is good and it is the way we have to be.

I think it trains the imagination.

(exciting orchestral music)

(train chugging)

- [Charles] Okay, we're almost there.

- [Ursula] Si.

- [Charles] Now, you're going in the back door.

- Yeah, that's right.

(attendees applauding)

Thank you, Powell's, dear Powell's.

It's so nice always to come back here.

There are an awful lot of books about writing here

and they tend to be very full of rules,

do this, don't do that.

I don't talk about rules because I have come to believe

that every story must make

its own rules and obey them.

(light lively music)

- Ursula, she was going to be a writer.

That's what she needed to do.

That was what life was for her.

We started at Radcliffe in the fall of 1947.

Ursula had a kind of earthy manner of speech

which was very refreshing.

And not so common in that environment.

She could also be a little frightening

because it was this very sharp, keen mind.

And very strong feelings about what she cared about.

- People always say,

"When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?"

And I never wanted to be a writer.

I just wrote.

It's what I did.

It's the way my being was.

- She didn't see herself as a science fiction writer.

She wanted to write imaginatively about what interested her.

- She worked on the literary magazine

for a little while at Radcliffe

but they wouldn't publish any of her stuff.

The important writers of the moment were these very macho,

very masculine writers.

I think everyone was still under the influence of Hemingway.

It was all realism, it was all male

and she went looking for a space

that she could make her own.

(cheerful music)

I think the first couple years in Portland, it was just,

you know how it is when you have little kids.

You really don't do much of anything else

except the kids but she managed to work all the time.

- My mother was very disciplined about her writing schedule

so she would help us get out of the house in the morning,

then write in the morning

then do housework in the afternoon.

- She had her study and she would go in there

and shut the door.

- They knew not to bother mama when she was working.

I knew not to bother her when she was working too.

- [Ursula] Charles would read it

and maybe my mother would read it

and then I'd send it to the editor

and then the editor would reject it.

I don't know how many times I was told I write well

but we don't know quite what you're doing.

I was beginning to feel a little desperate,

like if I can't publish anything

except an occasional poem in a tiny, tiny poetry magazine,

what am I doing?

Am I kidding myself?

I did keep methodically sending them out.

One of them got accepted by a pulp science fiction magazine

and they paid $30.

Back then, that was really important to us,

we were just getting by.

It definitely encouraged me to look more seriously

at fantasy and science fiction

as a definition of the kind of thing I was writing,

which was never really mainstream realism.

There was always something a little off-key about it.

- The more they sold, the more she wrote

and she was kind of experimenting

with interplanetary travel and world building.

She turned out to be an excellent world builder.

- My editor Don Wollheim at Ace Books

was also the first person to publish

Ursula's science fiction.

At around 1965 or '66, I had come into the office

at Ace Books and Don said,

"Oh, we're publishing a new writer.

"I think she's really very good,"

and he handed me Rocannon's World

which was her first novel.

- Ursula's early work it's fertile in detail.

They are written by a young person

with a young person's vivacity.

Let's give this a go and let's have some flying cats

and big teeth.

- I confess I was not blown away by them

but I did think something is going on here.

- These early novels are still written from the perspective

of kind of heroic men.

That was what science fiction was like at the time

and Le Guin wasn't stepping outside that quite yet.

Even though they do have that flavor

of kind of just action adventure in space,

you can already see her developing a lot of the themes

that she becomes known for later on

where she has these truly alien characters,

futures and alternate worlds.

- It's really well realized stuff

and it's better than a lot of writers' best

but she was on quite a steep

near vertical trajectory, artistically.

- I had written a couple of short stories

that took place on these islands

where there were wizards and dragons.

In 1968, when the publisher, Parnassus Books,

came to me and said, "Would you write a young adult novel?"

These islands grew and boom,

this is a whole archipelago of islands

and now, I draw the map

and I would name the rivers and the mountains and the cities

but I didn't know anything about them

until I went there with my characters.

(light mellow music)

As a boy, our hero was called Sparrowhawk

because the wild hawks would come when he called them

but his true and secret name is Ged.

Ged sails to Roke Island, the Isle of the Wise,

hidden in the heart of the archipelago.

From all over Earthsea, young men come to Roke

to learn the art of magic, the craft of wizardry.

This was not, at that time, a well-known concept,

the idea of a wizard school.

- I don't think Harry Potter

could have existed without Earthsea having existed.

That was the original, the finest and the best.

- In winter, he was sent across Roke Island

to the farthest northmost cape,

where stands the Isolate Tower.

There, by himself, lived the Master Namer Kurremkarmerruk

sat on a high seat, writing down lists of names

that must be learned before the ink faded at midnight,

leaving the parchment blank again.

He might say, he who would be seamaster

must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea.

Magic exists in most societies in one way or another.

And one of the forms it exists in a lot of places

is if you know a thing's true name,

you have power over the thing or the person.

And of course, it's irresistible because I'm a writer.

I use words and knowing the names of things is, I do magic.

I do make up things that didn't exist before by naming them.

I call it Earthsea and there it is.

It exists.

So I had this total parallel

between wizards and artists to play with.

- I bought Wizard of Earthsea and I was in love.

It felt right, the idea that naming things was magic.

- I love how in Earthsea the strongest magic

is made of the same thing that the books are made of.

It's words.

If you are a proficiently gifted wizard,

you can become a different kind of being.

You can become a hawk or a fish.

But be careful, if you stay there too long,

you can't come back.

- In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged has to find out who he is.

He's a kid with a tremendous gift and he knows it.

He knows he has a power that most people don't have.

When you're young you're kinda, nothing can kill you,

nothing can really hurt you.

You're going to get away with it.

He really thinks that way

until he gets nearly killed by his own folly.

- It's an internal evil.

It's Ged's own worst self

that becomes the evil presence in his life.

- Well, a lot of kids go through something like that

and then they have to kind of struggle on and figure out,

okay, actually, I'm not quite who I thought I was.

Who am I?

How do I be a good person?

Seems like a real simple question

but most of us spend our lives working at it

because every time you think you've found your way,

the way changes.

I start pretty much with place

and then the people grow up in the place.

Our first trip out here in '68.

I'd just never been in country like this

and it just knocked me over.

All I knew was that I had to come back.

That's about as far as I wanna go.

That is big hole in the ground.

So, when the book did well and the publisher

asked me for another one, I thought,

I know what the next Earthsea story has to be.

I needed a desert for the book

and the Kargish islands looked as if

they might have some deserts.

It's a community of women only, isolated in the desert.

No men.

The Kargish people don't believe in magic.

Instead, they worship the Nameless Ones,

the old powers of the Earth.

Our main character is a young girl

who was taken from her family as a baby

to serve the Powers of the Tombs.

She doesn't remember the name her mother gave her, Tenar.

One of the places she alone can go

is called the Undertomb and it leads to the labyrinth.

In the first book, darkness often implies evil.

In the second book, darkness is an equal power with light

and the girl Tenar is the priestess of that great power.

She went forward in the pitch dark,

easy as a little fish in dark water.

Down the slanting passage, a faint gray bloomed,

the echo of an echo of a distant light.

She halted then very slowly,

took the last step and looked and saw,

saw what she had never seen.

The great vaulted cavern beneath the tombstones.

The light burned at the end of a staff of wood,

smokeless, unconsuming.

She saw the face beside the light,

the dark face, the face of a man.

Tenar meets Ged in the Undertomb.

He knows what her real name is

and he can give it back to her.

And that in a sense is what frees her, frees them both.

That's a very good, polite horse.

That's a sweetie, yes it is.

I don't live in a dreamworld, a kind of woowoo place at all.

I think you can see that in my fantasy writing.

I don't feel so much as if I were making it up.

I know I am but that isn't what it feels like.

It feels like being there and looking around and listening.

When you say what's the name of that flower?

Why do you want to know the name?

What does it matter?

Somehow it connects you to the flower.

Even the scientists, they do have to name the species

and the individuals and so on.

A lot of people think that fantasy is just escapism

and has nothing to do with the real world

and I don't feel that at all

partly because my father was a scientist, an anthropologist

and I grew up with a profound respect for and liking for

the way scientists' minds work.

- Alfred Kroeber was the founder of academic anthropology

in the early years of the University of California

Ursula K. Le Guin and she always keeps the K, for Kroeber,

was a precocious faculty brat.

- [Ursula] There were a lot of anthropologists around.

It was, you know, it was just shop talk

and I'm listening in.

It was such a mixture of exciting minds and backgrounds.

So I'm sure that did something to my head.

Something good.

- Ursula was very much the youngest, the only girl,

always trying to get a word in edgewise in this family.

She really learned to debate and to argue

and to hold her own in a way that was probably unusual

for girls of her generation.

- As soon as school and college were out,

we packed up and drove the very long 60 miles

up to the Napa Valley.

It's 40 acres with an old ranch house on it.

Those hills are very wild.

You can feel like you're in the absolute wilderness.

It was heaven for an introvert.

My father would, he would tell us Indian stories

translating in his head sometimes

from the language that he'd learned them in.

It was what, my father spent years of his life doing

was going around California on foot, by horse

talking to survivors, to survivors of destroyed peoples

or almost destroyed peoples trying to save

what was left of their culture from the white tide.

Just taking down what they would and could tell him.

Just writing it down.

- It probably was the darkest chapter

for all of Indian country.

And I think anthropologists were on the forefront

of what they saw was saving Natives.

- [James] It was plausible to think

we had better record these cultures and these languages

because in a generation, they wouldn't be there.

Kroeber will always be identified

with the best-known survivor of the decimated populations

of native California, a man who came to be known as Ishi.

- [Alfred] April 14, 1900.

("Deer Song (Not for Dancing)")

- [James] In 1911, the last of his kin died

and Ishi walked south down toward Oroville

and the anthropologists in San Francisco

heard about this wild man

who they thought must be perhaps

the last really authentic uncorrupted,

unchanged California Indian.

- Ishi's people were among those people who,

you don't tell a stranger your name.

My father said, "What would you like us to call you?"

And Ishi means man.

Male person.

So we don't know Ishi's name.

We'll never know his name.

- [James] Ishi and Kroeber had a complex friendship.

They respected each other, they liked each other

and in some ways, they needed each other

but it was a friendship that was crosscut

by relations of power and authority.

Ishi died in 1916 of tuberculosis

and it was traumatic for Kroeber.

There's I think no question about that.

- I had not heard the name of Ishi when I was a child.

That was a long ago chapter in my father's life,

an unhappy one.

So I just never heard about Ishi.

Till all of a sudden, you know, they were sorta saying,

hey, Kroeber, you oughta write about, you know,

you're one of the last people who knew Ishi

and you knew him well, you oughta write it.

He said, "I cannot do it.

"Ask my wife."

My mother began to work on the story of Ishi

and to live through in her imagination.

How Ishi not only survived in a terrible solitude

for a while but also, then came alone into a strange world.

My mother was not an anthropologist

but she was a very good writer.

- [Karen] The ultimate impact was to humanize

Ishi the man, although somewhat romantic

and certainly incomplete.

Her book kept at least one version of that story alive.

- My mother's book opened many people's eyes

including my own, to the appalling history

of the white conquest of California.

Some people

are quick to see injustice

and cruelty but I was slow to see it.

I had to put the pieces together myself

and it took a long time.

It's kinda hard to admit that your people

did something awful.

When I absorb something like that I,

what I do with it,

the way I handle it is probably to put it into a novel.

(explosions bang)

There were a lot of violent struggles

around power and domination going on in the world

and so also in my novels.

But I was more interested in exploring alternatives

to violence and exploitation

and this is the basic purpose of the Ekumen,

a peaceful consortium of worlds.

The Ekumen was a device that let me send

intelligent people all over the universe

to find out interesting things.

- This pan-galactic association of worlds

is one of Ursula's great inventions,

one of science fiction's great inventions as well, I think.

- The Ekumen provides this huge laboratory

in which the writer herself is the scientist

who's conducting a kind of experiment, a thought experiment

on human beings and humanity

and their other ways of interacting with each other.

And so, like, what if we just change this one little thing

and that little thing?

What would happen?

What would it be like?

- I wrote a book in the 60s called Left Hand of Darkness

where I was first asking myself,

okay, what is the difference between men and women?

And the means I used to talk about it

was to invent a race of people who are androgynous,

fully androgynous.

You only become sexually active once a month

and may become sexually active as a man or as a woman.

You don't know which.

- And so in the course of someone's lifetime,

they can father a child, they can mother a child,

they can have lovers of all different types,

- [Ursula] In The Left Hand of Darkness, we meet Genly,

the first envoy from the Ekumen to the planet of Winter.

As he tries to navigate this ice-bound world

of genderless people,

Genly becomes entangled in a political web.

He is forced to flee across a glacier along with Estraven,

a native of Winter who has become his ally.

- As they cover the miles over the ice, they also

close the miles between themselves

as individuals, as different subspecies of homo sapiens.

- [Ursula] After all, he's no more an oddity,

a sexual freak than I am.

Up here on the ice, each of us is singular, isolate.

I, as cut off from those like me

from my society and its rules, as he from his.

- It's not just a geographical journey.

It's a journey into human cooperation,

into a human relationship.

- When Left Hand of Darkness came out,

it was perceived rightly as having changed things,

as being a completely new work,

as being something that was unlike anything else

that had been published.

- It was extremely popular, especially among young readers.

Those were the right readers that first,

I think, were drawn to her.

- Nowadays, there is a lot more interest

in kind of gender querying and gender fluidity.

I wonder if it might be difficult

for a young reader now to realize quite how extraordinary

and powerful that was when she did it.

- She's like, what about this?

What if this was the way it played out organically

and everyone could just experience and see it?

So that was a really formative book for me.

- Readers and critics have thought about

Left Hand of Darkness as a feminist novel.

I absolutely think it was for its time

but there were other writers,

feminist science fiction writers and critics as well,

who were saying, you didn't quite go far enough.

- She got in trouble with Left Hand of Darkness

because when you weren't changing into some other gender,

you were he.

- It started getting criticism.

Why are you forcing us to think of a masculine default

all the way?

Couldn't you have done it a different way?

Do I think that The Left Hand of Darkness

that Ursula would write now

would be The Left Hand of Darkness that I read in 1971?

No, obviously not.

She has changed and the world has changed.

- At first, I felt a little bit defensive

but as I thought about it,

I began to see that my critics were right.

I was coming up against how I could write

about gender equality.

Just because you've written a book about something

doesn't mean you're done thinking about it.

There's always room to keep expanding your ideas,

to keep learning.

My job is not to arrive at a final answer

and just deliver it.

I see my job as holding doors open or opening windows

but who comes in and out the doors,

what you see out the window?

How do I know?

- There you go.

- [Man] Thank you, I'ma turn about.

- Ursula LeGuin, she doesn't set herself up

as a giver of answers but she is one of the very finest

explorers of questions.

- [John] Let's get ready.

We're gonna start right away, okay?

- There's a story by Ursula

called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

which begins as a thought experiment.

She tells you that she is going to describe

an imaginary place, an imaginary city

and also tells you that she's going to work with you

and your imagination to make it the most wonderful city

you have ever imagined or experienced.

You are part of this, you are creating this with her.

And you experience for several pages,

this wonderful city of noble people,

the city of cities, Omelas.

And then she says, and there's one more thing.

Somewhere in the city, there is a cellar with a child in it

who is being mistreated horribly

and the joy of all of the people depends

on this one child being forced to suffer, degraded,

abused and that everybody in the city knows it.

- The terms are strict and absolute.

There may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

The instant the child is let out, the city is gone.

They're not naive.

They're not stupid, right?

The joy is real.

The city is righteous

but it also relies on the suffering, right?

- So basically, their happiness comes from

somebody else's misery?

- [John] Yes, and it's just one person, just one child.

- Right. - For the entire city.

- They don't even need government.

They don't need religious institutions.

They really need laws.

They don't need weapons, they don't need war.

You know what I mean?

It like--

- It's a utopia.

- It's kind of a utopia.

Right, but it's not a utopia.

- And it sets out and it says,

this is a thought experiment,

and then it goes in and it breaks your heart

and it leaves you with a world that is changed.

It leaves you shaken if you read it right.

- It made me feel really upset

that this child was being so mistreated

because he was, or she was,

the price of happiness for the entire town.

- This moral dilemma was really compelling to me

because it was impossible to pick out,

like what the right course of action would be.

Like there was nothing that would be completely

morally right.

- This child is seen

and some of them go back to their lives

and then there are the ones who walk away from Omelas.

- I would try and help the child.

I really would not care if it would disrupt

the whole nature of the city 'cause it's a young child,

like, barely holding on.

So I would do anything to help the child.

- I think I would forget about the child.

I would be one of the people who stays in the town

and, like, puts it in the back of my mind

and continues to live happily and peacefully

because I have the privilege to do that.

- I would walk away.

I think the ones who walk away,

they can reflect on this kid again and again

and know that they're not a part of it

and they're not supporting it.

Maybe they make their own home, that everything's perfect.

- In Omelas I was setting up a question

about where they might be going,

the ones who walk away from injustice.

In my novel The Dispossessed,

I wanted to go deeper into that question.

This was the late 60s, people were asking,

what might a perfect society look like?

A society that was not based on oppression.

Thinking about that question brought me

to non-violent anarchism.

I think anarchist thinking is one of those

profoundly radical

ways of thinking that is very fruitful, very generative.

The more I read in anarchism, the more I realized

that it was the only major political theory

that hadn't had a utopia written about it.

Well, that would be fun.

That would be cool.

Then I could kind of begin figuring out

what would a genuine, working anarchist society be like.

In The Dispossessed, a revolutionary group

has abandoned their capitalist, Earth-like world

to create a just and free society on their moon,

with no gender dominance, no coercive government,

no private ownership.

- I think The Dispossessed gives us a chance

to experience what it would be like to live

outside of capitalism.

It reminds us that the way we live right now

is not the only possible way for humans to live.

At first we're drawn to the anarchist society

but then we can see the flaws

that keep the individual from being entirely free.

I think it's a foundational book.

Like any organizer I ever meet,

I'm like, you have to read this book.

This is what we're trying to figure out.

- It's a flawed utopia.

It's messy.

The crooked timber of humanity is still crooked there.

- I knew from the start that it contained its own betrayal.

No human society can just find perfection and sit there.

That's not how things work.

- Certainly, The Dispossessed has this political foundation

about inequality, about class, about hierarchy.

But if you just want that,

then a political tract will do the job.

I'd read a lot of science fiction,

the good, the bad and the ugly

but I'd never seen the form used that intelligently,

that artfully.

- [Adrienne] In the span of just a few years,

we see Ursula release this torrent of major novels

back to back, each more original than the last.

She's pushing the boundaries

of what science fiction could do.

She kind of took the whole scene by storm.

(lively music)

- [Ursula] I won both prizes in science fiction

and got a good deal of notice.

I was up on a whole other level at that point,

which was very nice because I was by then well in my 30s

and kind of like it's time I was getting somewhere.

And as it happened, I was hitting my stride

at a very interesting moment for science fiction.

- Science fiction has always been a very strange ragtag

area of literature,

with tension between what gets called hard science fiction

which is nuts and bolts and soft science fiction

in which the fiction part is the most important part.

In the '30s and the '40s, it was basically nuts and bolts.

- There was an older generation of science fiction

sort of led by people like Heinlein and Asimov.

They were expanding the public's understanding

of what space flight might be like,

they were championing science at a time

when people were not always sure

that science was a cool thing

but they were not super aware

of how culture worked

beyond a very narrow perspective

which was their perspective as white guys,

many of whom had been scientists.

- [Ursula] And then there was us

who were kind of being a little bit uppity.

Who were willing to kind of change the terms.

A bunch of young Turks.

We sort of came in and shook it up.

- You have people like Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin,

Joanna Russ, women who were writing, people of color

and they have different stories to tell

but also specifically, bringing in areas

of scientific and cultural inquiry

that hadn't really been the purview

of science fiction before.

- It's during that period

that she was starting to do conferences

and a lot of science fiction-related public speaking.

She really began to move into herself,

to own herself as someone who has a voice

and the authority that goes with that voice

and the right to use it.

- [Ursula] It was a ball.

It was a very small world and when we had a meeting,

most of us came and everybody was intensely interested

in what we were doing.

And a lot of us were quite young.

So, those meetings were very lively.

- I remember she used to smoke a pipe

and I thought that was great.

- [Elisabeth] There was an opening out.

She was putting herself into conversation

with other writers.

- I think it would make sense if I went on

and spoke as what I am, a writer.

A writer of science fiction.

A woman writer of science fiction.

You know, I am a very rare creature.

My species was at first believed to be mythological

like the Tribble and the unicorn.

(attendees laughing)

I'd been a bit of a lone wolf.

It was kind of nice to find that there was a real community

of both readers and writers in science fiction

and that you hear from your readers

where so many writers don't ever hear from their readers.

So, that was all kind of a discovery.

- In The Tombs of Atuan,

you've got a female central character

and yet she certainly doesn't emerge as a liberated woman.

- No, the Earthsea books as feminist literature

are a total, complete bust.

From my own archetypes and my own cultural upbringing,

I couldn't go down deep and come up with a woman wizard.

Maybe I'll learn to eventually

but when I wrote those, I couldn't do it.

I wish I could have.

(mellow piano music)

When I started writing, which is in the 1940s

and when I started publishing which was in the 1960s,

the sort of basic assumption about fiction

was that men were at the center of it.

In fantasy and science fiction, the heroes were all male.

There really were no female heroes.

There were female characters

but they were secondary characters, they were marginal.

Sometimes, there were whole books with no women in them.

And that is true of the first trilogy of Earthsea,

even Tombs of Atuan, which is all about women

but look at the women.

Tenar is supposed to have all this power

but what is her power?

She controls nothing.

The world is actually being run by men, as it usually was.

- You have this really pretty masculine,

pretty male-dominated world in The Earthsea Trilogy.

Just about everything in it, including the dragons is male.

- There's a famous bit in the first book

where she mentions in passing that there's a saying,

as weak as a woman's magic,

and I think, it's wicked as a woman's magic.

And this is just sort of thrown in there.

- What I'd been doing as a writer

was being a woman pretending to think like a man.

I had to think now why have I put men

at the center of the books almost entirely?

And the women are either marginal or are in some way,

essentially dependent on the men.

I started to write the fourth book in the series, Tehanu.

And it just wouldn't go.

I knew that Tenar didn't stay to learn

from the great wizard.

I knew she'd go on and married a farmer

and had kids but I didn't know why.

It took me 17 years to figure out

why Tenar did that and what she was doing,

what her way to go was.

And during that time, that gap,

a lot of things happened in my life.

A lot of things happened in the world, naturally.

(lively music)

Along comes the revival of feminism in the '70s.

People started writing books saying, you know,

where are women?

Women are marginal in society and of course,

also in literature.

But I was not part of it as a movement,

partly because as a housewife

and mother of three kids at home,

I was not behaving the way a proper feminist should.

There was a considerable feeling that we needed to cut loose

from marriage from men and from motherhood

and there was no way I was gonna do that.

So, I felt a little defensive for a long time in the '70s

and it was kind of only as I began getting more

confidence in who I was I began to feel more at home

in it as a movement.

Of course, I can write novels with one hand

and bring up three kids with the other.

Yeah, sure, watch me.

There's a lot of pride and self respect involved.

I can do it, I will do it, by god.

- The modern feminist movement

had just sort of hit science fiction

and some people embraced it and some people

were pretty upset about it.

There was a big argument about

whether there was room for women in science fiction,

they meant as readers, as writers and as characters.

- It was almost like taking a cork out of a bottle

of champagne that you'd just shaken up.

It was a kind of explosion of ideas and opinions

that had been bottled up for a while.

- By the way, I want to state I think Ernest Hemingway

was unjust and full of shit.

So I kind of had to rethink my entire approach

to writing fiction.

I learned to read other women's writings.

It was important to think about privilege and power

and domination in terms of gender,

which was something that fantasy had not done.

After letting Tenar sit on the shelf for all those years

because I didn't know what to do with her,

I found that I was ready to go on with her story.

And that's what finally led me to writing Tehanu.

All I changed is the point of view.

All of the sudden, we are seeing Earthsea

not from the point of view of the powerful

but from the point of view of the powerless.

- And you read it and you go,

okay, everything that she said in the first three books

is true but it wasn't the whole picture.

- Earthsea becomes less magic.

It becomes colder, harder,

grittier, earthier place.

There is child abuse there.

It's not really feeling like a fantasy world,

it perhaps mirrors your own process of growth

as a human being.

- We can see Le Guin growing in front of our eyes,

examining the constructs of gender in Earthsea,

the world that she herself created.

You can feel a kind of simmering rage,

a simmering rage at injustice.

- It was a very interesting book to write, not an easy one,

the way I handled it upset many of my older readers,

particularly men because they saw it as a feminist statement

and they were alarmed.

That they perceived it as a kind of betrayal

because my hero, Ged, had lost his power

and a male hero that has lost his power

is degraded in some people's eyes.

It was a radical revision from within

of my whole enterprise in writing.

And for a while, I thought it was going to kinda silence me.

But I think if I hadn't gone through with it

and learned how to write from my own being as a woman,

I probably would have stopped writing.

- Come on back at you.

Okay.

Now, let's see if it works.

- I didn't even know that my father actually

read her manuscripts until relatively recently,

that he's generally the first person who reads

whatever she writes.

- Mostly you just say, that's good.

Which is what I want to hear.

- Yeah.

- I do remember very animated conversations

where we would say, don't argue with each other

and they would say, we're not arguing,

we're just discussing.

- Yes, reaching for it.

- [Theodore] About the time we were sort of emerging

from doing our homework and getting hungry,

they would be sitting on either side of the fireplace,

as they do to this day.

- And that will be fine too.

- [Charles] I got a Fulbright Scholarship to go to France.

I was doing French history and that's how we met

'cause she had one too.

I think there were like 20 grantees

going to France that year and we were all put in steerage

- And at the end of dinner, I said,

would anybody like to go to the bar

and have an after dinner drink?

And there was this great silence among these young kids.

And this little voice said, "Yes."

- I thought she was interesting.

She was bright and articulate.

She seemed very sophisticated.

She knew what to order, I didn't.

- He was really good company and really handsome

and not like anybody else I'd ever met,

partly because he was Southern, I think.

I hadn't known Southerners.

So, I would say I was in love by the third night out.

And then when we came back to Paris and got married,

we didn't have to go anywhere for our honeymoon.

We were there.

Perfect.

- [Charles] We lived in a little hotel that whole year.

- [Ursula] I tell you, we were kings and queens that year.

- [Charles] Tell them, so when where there.

- We met at sea.

We married in a foreign language.

What wonder if we cross a continent on foot

each time to find each other at secret borders,

bringing all of all my streams and darknesses of gold

and your deep graves and islands,

a feather, a fleck of mica,

a willow leaf that is our country,

ours alone.

(light steady music)

My mother died in 1980.

My children were all out of the house by then.

It just was time for me to come home somehow.

We just moved down here in January

and stayed a whole spring here,

the only time I lived here for week after week after week

except those the summers of my childhood.

I had to look around for a long time

and circle like a turkey vulture,

gradually narrowing until I realized

what I wanted to write about was here, my place.

Above all places, this is mine.

This is sort of the center.

When I'm up here, I think about my father and my mother

and us when we were kids.

This place is full of presences for me.

- [Phillips] Maybe her magnum opus

although it's not her easiest book is Always Coming Home

which is a book set in the world

of her family's summer house in the Napa Valley.

- It started with the idea of of writing a utopia

but a different kind of utopia,

a utopia that wasn't a kind of political blueprint.

It's a sort of ecological utopia.

It's an imagination of this beautiful valley

being beautifully used by its human population.

Pre-white California was, to a small extent,

a model for Always Coming Home.

A lot of those Californian peoples

seemed to have been very settled

in rather more peace and quiet than a lot of peoples.

It was entirely a process of imaginative exploration.

There was that sense of living in two worlds,

their voices were around me sometimes

and that the poems would come as if I,

you know, I'd just write them down as if I'd been told that.

(mellow ambient music)

- Always Coming Home is barely a novel as we understand it.

- [Ursula] It's a grab-bag.

A bag of scraps and pieces

and I had a kind of conviction

that this was a good way to write a book.

- One of the incredibly exciting things

about Le Guin's fiction is that it's radically experimental.

She gives us all these forms,

all these different ways of thinking about fiction itself

and it's a kind of freedom that she gives to other writers.

It's as though she says, look, I got away with it.

If I got away with it, maybe you can get away with it too.

In the '90s and in the early noughties,

it really felt like a new book from her every year

and it was like she just was on fire again.

We're seeing the same themes that we know and love

about alien worlds and dealing with issues

around feminist identity

but everything is much more shaded in gray than ever before.

- The style becomes more autumnal.

The later work, it haunts you in more subtle ways

and more nuanced ways.

Truth is a muddy thing now.

What if you aren't a wizard?

What if you can't fix things by a spell?

what if the only language you've got

is the language of compromise, of mess, of misunderstanding?

- The fact of the matter is there was nobody who was moving

as brilliantly from genre to genre, as Ursula K. Le Guin.

- So what's happened most recently

is the broadening of Le Guin's audience and readership.

She's being recognized

not just as one of our great science fiction

and fantasy writers but one of our great American writers.

- As a giant of literature,

who is finally getting recognized,

I take enormous pleasure in awarding the 2014 Medal

for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

to Ursula K. Le Guin.

(attendees applauding)

- All too often, people who are writers and artists

who are marginalized and, or radical,

are basically ignored or mocked or denigrated

for a long time and then passed directly from there

to being national treasures.

Essentially, you go from outsider to full domestication

and one of the things that's so wonderful about Le Guin

is that she would not and will not allow that to happen.

- I rejoice in accepting it for and sharing it with

all the writers who were excluded

from literature for so long,

my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction.

- This is why that speech that she gave when she won

the, sort of, lifetime achievement,

welcome to the canon award,

to give it its invisible subtitle,

was that it was a perfectly courteous

but full-on swingeing attack

on the undermining of art and aesthetics for profit,

within the publishing industry.

- Books, they're not just commodities.

The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.

We live in capitalism.

It's power seems inescapable,

so did the divine right of kings.

- I was there, giving her the medal for literature

which was one of the hugest honors of my life

and then going and sitting down and listening

as Ursula took apart, primarily Amazon.com,

in front of an audience of booksellers,

many of whom were there from Amazon.com

and who were also bankrolling the evening.

- I was so scared before I gave that speech.

It was awful.

I was not saying what they expected

the old lady from Oregon to say.

I have had a long career and a good one.

In good company.

Now here, at the end of it,

I really don't want to watch American literature

get sold down the river.

Well, a writer can certainly choose to simply

serve capitalism and put their writing

entirely in the service of success and making money.

That's a legitimate choice

but it's not a choice that all writers want to make.

Thank goodness.

Because there are more interesting choices

to make that are of more general good to more people.

- That took an immense amount of guts.

The same amount of guts that Ursula has shown

time and time again,

just addressing subjects that are not to be spoken of.

- We don't have very many of these in this country

but she is a public intellectual.

She has spoken out on behalf of artistic freedom

for other writers.

She has spoken out against systems of government

that repress public discourse.

She has been a consistent voice for the human spirit.

- I guess I have a sort of long term hope

and short term terror.

We don't have to keep the door shut.

We could live in a different way than we do.

- In the last 10 years, Ursula has wielded her status,

which is considerable, very, very skillfully,

very much like a warrior.

One reaches a certain age where you can just kind of

sit back and let 'em have it.

- I don't offer any 10 easy steps

to fame and fortune as an author because I know that in art,

there are no easy steps.

To learn to make something well

can take your whole life and it's worth it.

That'll do, I think.

(attendees laughing)

So, shall we do Q and A?

The big thing that has happened to both fantasy

and science fiction in my lifetime

is that they have come all the way out of that genre closet

that they were forced into

and are recognized as literature.

- You now have a generation that grew up

that doesn't quite understand

why these artificial divisions ever existed.

- Le Guin was ahead of her time

and we needed to catch back up to her.

- The only question that should matter is,

is this any good or not?

I read A Wizard of Earthsea and,

just little things rearranged in my head,

that's when I powerfully, hungrily,

more than anything else I'd ever felt,

wanted to be a writer.

- You cannot deny Ursula Le Guin's influence

on writers now of all kinds.

And I think that in the final analysis

is much more important than whether she was being reviewed

as she should have been reviewed in 1975

because she was being read

by the people who would grow up

to change opinions and change the world.

- It's certainly a remarkable writer

who can meet you when you're 10 years old

and give you something wonderful to read

and still be there for you when you're 45 years old

and everywhere in between.

I think she's one of the greatest writers

that the 20th century American literary scene produced.

- [David] It's like that famous Earth shot called Earthrise

where we see our Earth just rising over the moon,

this little, blue, fragile circle.

Ursula's usage of science fiction,

I feel is to make these Earthrise photographs

so we can perhaps for the first time see our world

from a different perspective.

If a world is dreamable, maybe it can be dreamed into being.

(light mellow music)

- When I take you to the valley,

you'll see the blue hills on the left

and the blue hills on the right,

the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow

late in the rainy season and maybe you'll say,

there it is, that's it.

But I'll say, a little farther.

We'll go on, I hope, and you'll see the roofs

of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats

and maybe you'll say, let's stop here, this is it!

But I'll say, a little farther yet.

We'll go on and you'll hear the quail calling

on the mountain by the springs of the river.

And looking back, you'll see the river running downward

through the wild hills behind, below and you'll say,

isn't that it, the valley?

And all I'll be able to say is,

drink this water of the spring, rest here a while.

We have a long way yet to go and I can't go without you.

(light mellow music)

(light exciting music)