Five Ways to Forgiveness

Chronology

1929

Born in Berkeley, California, on St. Ursula’s Day, October 21, to Alfred Louis Kroeber and Theodora Covel Kracaw Brown Kroeber. (Father, born in 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia College under Franz Boas in 1901 and moved to Berkeley to create a museum and department of anthropology at the University of California. In 1911, Ishi, a Yahi Indian and the last survivor of the Yana band, came to work with Kroeber and others at the Museum of Anthropology, where he remained until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1916. Mother, born in 1897 in Denver, Colorado, completed a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of California in 1920 and married Clifton Spencer Brown in July 1920; they had two children: Clifton Jr., born September 7, 1921, and Theodore “Ted,” born in May 1923. Brown died in October 1923, and mother began taking anthropology courses from Alfred Kroeber. They married in March 1926, and Kroeber adopted both sons. They bought a house designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck at 1325 Arch Street on the north side of the university campus. Le Guin will later cite (in an essay in the journal Paradoxa) the beauty and “integrity” of its design as an early influence. Parents took a field trip to Peru for eight months, shortly after marriage, living in a tent. Brother Karl Kroeber born in Berkeley on November 26, 1926.)

1930

Parents buy a ranch in the Napa Valley, later named Kishamish from a myth invented by brother Karl. Family will spend summers there entertaining visiting scholars, including physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and both native and white storytellers.

1931

Juan Dolores, a Papago Indian friend and collaborator of A. L. Kroeber’s, spends the first of many summers with the Kroeber family at Kishamish.

1932–1939

Is taught to write by her brother Ted and goes on doing it. Ursula and Karl, along with Berkeley neighbor Ernst Landauer, invent a world of stuffed animals. Later discovers science fiction magazines, including Amazing Stories. Father tells her American Indian stories and myths; she also reads Norse myths. Mother later recalls, “The children wrote and acted plays; they had the ‘Barn-top Players’ in the loft of the old barn. They put out a weekly newspaper.”

c. 1940

Submits first story to Astounding Science Fiction and collects her first rejection letter.

c. 1942

With her brothers in the armed services (Clifton joins in 1940, before the war starts for America, Ted in ’43, and Karl in ’44), Ursula is left without imaginative co-conspirators. In a later interview she recalls, “My older brothers had some beautiful little British figurines, a troop of nineteenth-century French cavalrymen and their horses. I inherited them, and played long stories with them in our big attic. They went on adventures, exploring, fighting off enemies, going on diplomatic missions, etc. The captain was particularly gallant and handsome, with his sabre drawn, and his white horse reared up nobly. Unfortunately, when you took one of them off his horse, he was extremely bow-legged, and had a little nail sticking downward from his bottom, which fit into the saddle…. So my brave adventurers lived entirely on horseback. Also unfortunately, there were no females at all for my stories; but when I wrote the stories down, I provided some.”

1944–46

In fall, begins attending Berkeley High School. Socially marginal, a good student, reads voraciously outside school, Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century writers, including Austen, the Brontës, Turgenev, Dickens, and Hardy, as well as the Taoist writings of Chinese writer Lao Tzu. Her mother introduces her to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which she says she didn’t really get until much later. In spring 1946, father retires from Berkeley. Parents travel to England, where father receives the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.

1947

Graduates high school in class of 3,500, which includes Philip K. Dick. The two never meet, although they later correspond. Father accepts a one-year appointment at Harvard University, and it is decided that, with parents nearby, Ursula will attend Radcliffe College instead of the University of California. Spends summer with parents and Karl in New York City, where father teaches at Columbia University until Harvard appointment begins. They rent an apartment from parents’ friends near 116th and Broadway and spend the summer seeing many plays and Broadway shows. Takes recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf. Moves to Radcliffe in the fall. Lives last three college years in Radcliffe cooperative Everett House with close friends Jean Taylor and Marion Ives.

1948

Father returns to Columbia, where he will teach until 1952. Spends summer with parents in New York City, this time in another apartment rented from parents’ friends, near 116th and Riverside Drive.

1950

A relationship in her senior year at Radcliffe results in an unplanned pregnancy; an illegal abortion is arranged with the help of friends and parents.

1951

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Graduates cum laude from Radcliffe in June, writing a senior thesis titled “The Metaphor of the Rose as an Illustration of the ‘Carpe Diem’ Theme in French and Italian Poetry of the Renaissance.” College acquaintances include John Updike, who marries one of her housemates. Travels to Paris with Karl and begins writing novel A Descendance, about the imaginary Central European country of Orsinia, whose name reflects her own: both come from the Latin word for “bear.” Starts graduate work at Columbia in the fall. Begins writing and attempting to publish poetry and stories. Father helps her submit poems for publication, mailing her submissions and also investigating subculture of little magazines.

1952

Completes an M.A. in Renaissance French and Italian language and literature at Columbia University, writing a thesis titled “Ideas of Death in Ronsard’s Poetry” on the sixteenth-century French poet Pierre Ronsard. Begins work on a doctorate at Columbia on the early sixteenth-century poet Jean Lemaire de Belges. Submits A Descendance to Alfred Knopf, a friend of her father’s, and receives an encouraging rejection letter. In a 2013 interview, Le Guin will recall that “the first novel I ever wrote was very strange, very ambitious. It covered many generations in my invented Central European country, Orsinia. My father knew Alfred Knopf personally…. When I was about twenty-three, I asked my father if he felt that my submitting the novel to Knopf would presume on their friendship, and he said, No, go ahead and try him. So I did, and Knopf wrote a lovely letter back. He said, I can’t take this damn thing. I would’ve done it ten years ago, but I can’t afford to now. He said, This is a very strange book, but you’re going somewhere! That was all I needed. I didn’t need acceptance.” Begins writing new Orsinian novel called, variously, Malafrena and The Necessary Passion.

1953

Receives a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France. Departs from New York on September 23 on the Queen Mary. On the ship she meets fellow Fulbrighter Charles Alfred Le Guin (born June 4, 1927, in Macon, Georgia), who is writing his thesis on the French Revolution. On December 22, marries Le Guin in Paris after numerous delays in procuring a marriage license—later says there was “always another tax stamp we needed across the city.” (On the marriage license, a space between “Le” and “Guin” is restored, in a surname that had not had one in America.)

1954

Le Guins return to U.S. on the Ile de France ship in August. Ends graduate work and the Le Guins move to Macon, Georgia, where Charles teaches history and Ursula teaches freshman French at Mercer University. Meets Charles’s large extended family. Sees, and is first puzzled and then appalled by, her first sign for a “Colored Drinking Fountain.”

1955

Completes first version of novel Malafrena. Works as a physics department secretary at Emory University in Atlanta, where Charles is completing his Ph.D. Reads The Lord of the Rings.

1956

Charles receives his doctorate from Emory and they move to Moscow, Idaho, where they both begin teaching at the University of Idaho. Out of boredom in a rather insular community, together with friends they fabricate items about an imaginary poetry society (including poems by Le Guin’s alter ego Mrs. R. R. Korsatoff) and succeed in placing them on the society page of the local newspaper.

1957

Oldest child Elisabeth Covel Le Guin is born, July 25.

1958

Moves to Portland, Oregon, where Charles takes up position as professor of French history at Portland State University (then College). They buy a Victorian house below Portland’s Forest Park, where they will live for the next six decades.

1959

Spends summer at Berkeley with parents and Karl’s family. The Orsinian poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province” appears in the fall issue of the journal Prairie Poet. It is her first published work. Second child Caroline DuPree Le Guin is born, November 4. Mother publishes The Inland Whale, a book of retold legends from California Indians, including the title story, which was learned from Yurok storyteller (and frequent guest at Kishamish) Robert Spott.

1960

Father dies in Paris on October 5 after conducting an anthropology conference in Austria the previous week. Later refers to this as the time when she “came of age, rather belatedly, at age 31.”

1961

Mother publishes her most famous work, Ishi in Two Worlds, based on her husband’s memories and on her own research. Le Guin’s Orsinian story “An die Musik” is published in the summer issue of Western Humanities Review; she is paid five contributor’s copies. The same week it is accepted, she also makes her first commercial sale: the time-travel story “April in Paris” is accepted by editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli for Fantastic magazine, for which Le Guin is paid $30. Rewrites Malafrena.

1962

Encouraged by a friend, begins reading science fiction writers Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and Vonda McIntyre.

1964

Youngest child Theodore Alfred (Theo) Le Guin is born, June 4. (While the children are young she writes mostly after nine at night.) Moves for the academic year to Palo Alto, California, where Charles is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Writes her first science fiction novel, Rocannon’s World. Her turn to science fiction is partly stimulated by reading the American author Cordwainer Smith and her resultant discovery that the genre has become a vehicle for inward as well as outward exploration. In a 1986 interview, she will explain, “To me encountering his works was like a door opening. There is one story of his called ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ that was as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time.”

1966

Acting as her own agent, sells Rocannon’s World to Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books. It is published as half of a back-to-back edition, known as an Ace Double, with Avram Davidson’s The Kar-Chee Reign. Wollheim speaks proudly of finding Le Guin’s novel in the slush pile (of manuscripts sent without an agent). Soon afterward, Terry Carr creates the Ace Science Fiction Specials line to feature work by Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and R. A. Lafferty. The character Rocannon is a native of a world called Hain by its inhabitants and Davenant by others. In later books set in the same universe Hain is identified as the oldest human world, and the others (including Terra) as its colonies or (as in the case of Gethen) its experiments. Planet of Exile is published in October as half of an Ace Double with Thomas M. Disch’s Mankind Under the Leash.

1967

City of Illusions is published by Ace Books.

1968

Writes to literary agent Virginia Kidd, herself a writer and editor of science fiction and poetry, asking her to try to sell hardcover rights to a new novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Kidd replies that she will, but only if she can also represent the rest of Le Guin’s work. The two work together (though they meet in person only four times) until Kidd’s death in 2003. Publishes letter, along with eighty-one other science fiction writers (including Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Gene Roddenberry), in Galaxy magazine in June protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. An opposing prowar letter is signed by seventy-two writers, including Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. In fall, moves to England as part of Charles’s sabbatical. During that time she writes “The Word for World Is Forest,” set in the Hainish universe but depicting some of the moral issues of the Vietnam War. Fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea is published in November by Parnassus Books.

1969

A Wizard of Earthsea wins the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children’s literature. The Left Hand of Darkness is published by Ace Books as an Ace Science Fiction Special in March. The book’s vision of androgyny is criticized by some feminists as overly cautious, a critique to which Le Guin responds defensively at first and then with a serious rethinking of her concept of gender in essays such as “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” (1976, revised 1987) and the story “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995). The story “Nine Lives” appears in Playboy in November with the byline U. K. Le Guin. The initials are a deliberate ploy by Virginia Kidd, given the gender policies of the magazine. After the story is accepted, the magazine editors ask if they can keep the name in that form to veil the author’s gender from readers. Le Guin agrees, in part because of the large payment the magazine offers, but when asked for an autobiographical statement offers the following, which Playboy prints: “The stories of U. K. Le Guin were not written by U. K. Le Guin but by another person of the same name.” Children’s writer and critic Eleanor Cameron writes in praise of A Wizard of Earthsea and begins a decades-long correspondence with Le Guin. The two writers are both, at the time, beginning to come to terms with feminism and are working at learning how to write as women and about female protagonists. This friendship with an older writer presages the many supportive relationships Le Guin is to form with younger women writers such as Vonda McIntyre, Karen Joy Fowler, and Molly Gloss. Mother remarries, to artist and art psychotherapist John Quinn, who is forty-three years her junior, on December 14.

1970

The Left Hand of Darkness wins both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel, selected, respectively, by fans and fellow writers. The Science Fiction Foundation is created in England with Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke as patrons. The Tombs of Atuan, second Earthsea novel, is serialized in December in Worlds of Fantasy and published by Atheneum in June the following year.

1971

The Lathe of Heaven is serialized in the March and May issues of Amazing Science Fiction and published in October by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Le Guin’s first science fiction novel set on Earth, it incorporates her thoughts on dreaming (pioneering dream researcher William Dement is a consultant), ecological catastrophe, and Taoist ideas of inaction and integrity. At a Science Fiction Writers of America meeting in Berkeley meets Vonda N. McIntyre, who will become a close friend and collaborator. McIntyre invites Le Guin to teach science fiction writing at the first Clarion West workshop at the University of Washington.

1972

The Tombs of Atuan is selected as a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association. The Lathe of Heaven wins the Locus Award for best novel. “The Word for World Is Forest,” written in 1968–69, appears in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions in March. In part an allegory of the Vietnam War, the novella (published as a separate volume in 1976) influences James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar. Third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore, is published in September by Atheneum.

1973

The Farthest Shore wins the National Book Award for Children’s Literature. Le Guin’s acceptance speech, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?,” is a major defense of fantasy literature. “The Word for World Is Forest” wins the Hugo Award for best novella. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a story inspired by philosopher William James, is published in New Dimensions 3 in October.

1974

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” wins the Hugo Award for best short story. Douglas Barbour publishes an academic investigation of Le Guin’s work in Science Fiction Studies. Completes novel The Dispossessed, its main character Shevek partly based on a childhood memory of physicist Robert Oppenheimer; revises ending at the urging of her friend Darko Suvin, a Croatian literary critic. Senior editor Buz Wyeth acquires the novel for Harper & Row, which publishes it in May. Wyeth remains her editor for several years.

Takes part in a virtual symposium on “Women in Science Fiction,” organized by editor and fan Jeffrey D. Smith. Participants such as Suzy McKee Charnas, Virginia Kidd, Samuel R. Delany, Vonda McIntyre, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. write a round robin of letters and responses on a variety of topics, starting in October 1974 and continuing until May 1975. Their discussions are published in the fanzine Khatru in November 1975. Tiptree, believed by the other participants to be a man (the writer’s identity as Alice Sheldon is not revealed until 1977), expresses a number of challenging ideas about gender and power.

1975

Poetry collection Wild Angels is published in January. The Dispossessed wins the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards. In August, attends the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, in Melbourne, Australia, where she is a guest of honor, and also spends a week conducting a science fiction writing workshop using the Clarion method. In May, dystopian novella “The New Atlantis” is published as part of a triptych with novellas by Gene Wolfe and James Tiptree Jr. The first collection of Le Guin’s short stories is published under the title The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. The Le Guins spend another sabbatical year in London starting in the fall; Ursula is a visiting fellow in creative writing at the University of Reading. In November Science Fiction Studies devotes a special issue to her work.

1976

During their stay in England, the Le Guins travel to Dorset to meet writer Sylvia Townsend Warner; Ursula says later, “I hold it one of the dearest honors of my life that I knew her for an hour.” Young adult novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else published in August by Atheneum. A second collection of stories, Orsinian Tales, published in October by Harper & Row.

1977

At the invitation of utopian scholar Robert Elliott, teaches a term at the University of California, San Diego. Among her students are aspiring writers Kim Stanley Robinson and Luis Alberto Urrea.

1978

Again rewrites early novel Malafrena, finishing in December. Science fiction novella “The Eye of the Heron” appears in the original anthology Millennial Women, edited by Virginia Kidd, in August. Mother falls ill.

1979

Wins the Gandalf Grand Master Award for life achievement in fantasy writing. Susan Wood edits the first volume of Le Guin’s speeches and essays, The Language of the Night. Around this time she discovers the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite and acknowledged influence. Mother dies of cancer on July 4. Le Guin’s first children’s picture book, Leese Webster, is published with illustrations by James Brunsman in September by Atheneum. Malafrena is published in October by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Le Guin is invited to take part in a symposium on narrative at the University of Chicago, October 26–28, along with scholars and writers such as Seymour Chatman, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Robert Scholes, Victor Turner, Paul Ricoeur, and Hayden White. Her contribution at the end of the symposium is “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling Around the Campfire?”, a piece that is both a witty summary of the discussions and a metanarrative about the value of story. She wrote in a headnote to the published version that “I had bought my first and only pair of two-inch-heeled shoes, black French ones, to wear there, but I never dared put them on; there were so many Big Guns shooting at one another that it seemed unwise to try to increase my stature.” Short story “Two Delays on the Northern Line” is published in The New Yorker in the November 12 issue.

1980

On January 9, television movie of The Lathe of Heaven airs, filmed by PBS station WNET with a script by Roger Swaybill and Diane English with extensive contributions by David Loxton and Le Guin. Charles and Ursula appear as extras, an experience she writes about in an essay called “Working on ‘The Lathe.’” Le Guin likes the film and finds the whole experience quite positive, in contrast to later experiences with film adaptations of her work. Young adult novel The Beginning Place published in February by Harper & Row. It is reviewed in The New Yorker by John Updike in June. Collaborates with Virginia Kidd as editors of the anthologies Edges and Interfaces. From 1980 to 1993, teaches many times at The Flight of the Mind writing workshop for women in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, in her opinion her most valuable teaching experience.

1981

Poetry collection Hard Words published by Harper.

1982

“Sur,” a story that is not so much alternative history as crypto-history (the female explorers who are first to the South Pole keep their feat a secret), appears in The New Yorker in January. The New Yorker publishes two more of her stories this year, in July and October.

1984

Brian Booth founds the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts and invites Le Guin, along with Floyd Skloot and William Stafford, to become members of the advisory board.

1985

In January, The New Yorker publishes “She Unnames Them,” a story of a type that Le Guin has called a “psychomyth.” In October, publishes a major new science fiction novel, Always Coming Home, set in the future California. Novel involves collaboration with geologist George Hersh, artist Margaret Chodos, and composer Todd Barton, whose music of the imagined Kesh people is included on a cassette tape with the original boxed set (and creates problems with the Library of Congress, which objects to copyrighting the music of indigenous peoples). The book wins the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and is a runner-up for the National Book Award. It also creates a stir among more conservative science fiction readers and writers for being what they consider antitechnology; Le Guin points out that the book is pervaded with technology, though the technology is predicated upon a sustainable use of resources. Publishes a screenplay, King Dog, based on a segment of Hindu epic the Mahabharata. Composer Elinor Armer composes song settings of poems from Le Guin’s collection Wild Angels. The two meet and begin to collaborate on eight musical compositions for orchestra and voices called Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts.

1987

Novella “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story combines another critique of anthropocentrism with an homage to American Indian storytelling tradition.

1988

Publishes children’s picture storybook Catwings, illustrated by S. D. Schindler. The saga of a family of flying cats continues with Catwings Return (1989), Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994), and Jane on Her Own (1999). The origin of the whole set is a winged cat drawn as a doodle by Ursula, which prompts the writing of the first story. The Catwings are reminiscent of a much larger (and thus much less feasible) race of winged cats in Rocannon’s World.

1989

Receives the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association for her critical contributions, following in the footsteps of scholars such as H. Bruce Franklin and Thomas Clareson as well as writer-critics like James Blish and Joanna Russ.

1990

A fourth Earthsea novel, Tehanu, is published by Atheneum/Macmillan in March. It reexamines themes from earlier volumes such as the maleness and (implicit) celibacy of wizards and the relationship between dragons and humans. Despite controversy over what some see as a revisionist history of a beloved fantasy world, the novel receives much acclaim (in 1993 in “Earthsea Revisioned” Le Guin says she always knew there was more to tell about Earthsea, but the fourth volume had to wait until she was ready to tell a story about women’s lives: “I couldn’t continue my hero-tale until I had, as woman and artist, wrestled with the angels of the feminist consciousness”).

1991

Tehanu wins Nebula Award and Locus Award. Publishes Searoad, a linked collection or story cycle about a fictional coastal town in Oregon. Wins Pushcart Prize for short story “Bill Weisler,” which is collected in Searoad. In the fall, is writer-in-residence for a semester at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, holding the Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing.

1992

Searoad is shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Wins the H. L. Davis Fiction Award from the Oregon Library Association.

1993

With Karen Joy Fowler and Brian Attebery, edits The Norton Book of Science Fiction, which, though initially criticized for being too inclusive or “politically correct,” is widely used as a textbook not only in science fiction classes but also in courses in short fiction and fiction writing.

1995

Receives the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Publishes Four Ways to Forgiveness, a collection of four linked novellas set in a world within the Hainish universe. Charles retires from Portland State University.

1996

Publishes a volume of poetry, The Twins, the Dream (1996), in which she and Argentine poet Diana Bellessi translate each other’s work. Receives a Retrospective Tiptree Award from The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council for The Left Hand of Darkness.

1997

Short story collection Unlocking the Air is nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Stories in the collection include the 1982 New Yorker story “The Professor’s Houses”; the title story in which the postcommunist revolution comes to Orsinia; and “The Poacher,” an exploration of what it means to be an interloper rather than the hero of a fairy tale. Publishes a version of the Tao Te Ching, which she describes as a rendering in English, rather than a direct translation. Though she doesn’t know Chinese, she is a lifelong student of Lao Tzu’s enigmatic text and of Taoist philosophy, introduced to both by her father. In producing her English version she consults many translations, loose and literal, and consults with scholar J. P. Seaton.

1998

Publishes Steering the Craft, a guide to writing based on her own practice and on the many workshops she has conducted. Her examples of excellence include Kipling, Twain, Woolf, and a Northern Paiute storyteller whose name is not recorded.

2000

The U.S. Library of Congress honors Le Guin as a Living Legend in the Writers and Artists category. Awarded the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award by the Los Angeles Times. Publishes The Telling in September, the first new novel since 1974 to be set in the Hainish universe of her early science fiction. Many shorter works in the same universe have appeared over the years, including “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (1971), “The Shobies’ Story” (1990), “Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994), and the four linked novellas of Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995).

2001

The Telling wins the Endeavor Award for best book by a writer from the Pacific Northwest and the Locus Award. Le Guin is inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Publishes Tales from Earthsea and the final volume of the Earthsea story, The Other Wind.

2002

Tales from Earthsea wins the Endeavor Award and the Locus Award. The Other Wind wins the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Receives the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction. Fellow winner Junot Díaz acknowledges her influence. Participates in artists’ rallies against the Patriot Act, passed the previous year; she writes, “What do attacks on freedom of speech and writing mean to a writer? It means that somebody’s there with a big plug they’re trying to fit into your mouth.”

2003

Translates science fiction novel Kalpa Imperial by Argentine writer Angélica Gorodischer. Publishes Changing Planes, a linked collection of partly satirical stories about people who slip between realities while waiting in airports. Named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

2004

Changing Planes wins the Locus Award for best story collection. Publishes Gifts, the first of three volumes of the Annals of the Western Shore, a fantasy for young adults, in September. Receives the Margaret A. Edwards Award for contributions to children’s literature from the American Library Association and delivers the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture to the ALA’s subdivision, the Association for Library Service to Children.

2005

Gifts wins the 2005 PEN Center Children’s Literature Award.

2006

Publishes the middle volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Voices, in September. The Washington Center for the Book awards Le Guin the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers for a distinguished body of work.

2007

Publishes the final volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, Powers, in September. Works through Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, ten lines a day, in preparation for writing the historical novel Lavinia, a retelling of the Aeneid from the point of view of the hero’s Italic second wife, who is silent in the original version.

2008

Lavinia is published in April and wins the Locus Award. Powers wins the Nebula Award.

2009

Publishes Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays on fantasy and why it matters. Brother Karl dies on November 8 of cancer, age eighty-two, in Brooklyn, New York.

2010

Cheek by Jowl wins Locus Award for best nonfiction/art book. Is the subject of a festschrift, or celebratory volume, on the occasion of her eightieth birthday. 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin and includes essays and original works by many writers and scholars, including Kim Stanley Robinson, Andrea Hairston, Julie Phillips, Gwyneth Jones, Eleanor Arnason, and John Kessel. Publishes Out Here, Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country, with text, poems, and sketches by Le Guin, text and photographs by Roger Dorband.

2012

Publishes Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, her sixth book of poems. Publishes two-volume edition of selected short stories under the title The Unreal and the Real. Receives the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside.

2013

Interviewed in the Paris Review series “The Art of Fiction.” Publishes a translation of Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony (2013) by Romanian writer Gheorghe Sasarman, which is retranslated from the Spanish translation by Mariano Martín Rodríguez, with both translations being overseen by Sasarman.

2014

Awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her widely quoted speech she calls for “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

2017

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Note on the Texts

Five Ways to Forgiveness contains five linked stories: the four stories previously collected as Four Ways to Forgiveness (New York: HarperPrism, 1995), as well as “Old Music and the Slave Women.” They are published here as a complete story suite, as the author intended, for this first time.

Four Ways to Forgiveness contained four linked stories. The original publication of each of the stories is as follows:

“Betrayals,” Blue Motel, Vol. 3, edited by Peter Crowther (London: Little, Brown, 1994), pp. 195–229.

“Forgiveness Day,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, Vol. 18, Nos. 12 & 13 (November 1994), pp. 264–303.

“A Man of the People,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, Vol. 19, Nos. 4 & 5 (April 1995), pp. 22–64.

“A Woman’s Liberation,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 8 (July 1995), pp. 116–62.

The four stories were then collected as the story suite Four Ways to Forgiveness and published by HarperPrism in September 1995. A British edition was published by Gollancz in June 1996. The British edition is the same as the American edition except for changes to bring about conformity with British conventions of punctuation. The first American edition is the source of the text used here.

“Old Music and the Slave Women” was first published in Far Horizons: All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg (New York: Avon Eos, 1999), pp. 5–52. It was then included in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, the source of the text used here.

This e-book presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number of the print edition: 340.28, stole!“; 361.9, soon she; 362.31, somone; 428.17, doctors.); 480.20, owners’; 504.31, give; 546.5, inaccesible; 572.10, third and and; 585.10, tribesman.

Notes

In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the print edition (the line count includes headings, but not rule lines). No note is made for material included in the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, except for certain cases where common words and terms have specific historical meanings or inflections. Biblical quotations and allusions are keyed to the King James Version; references to Shakespeare to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blackmore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For further biographical background, references to other studies, and more detailed notes, see Elizabeth Cummins, Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, revised edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); John Wray, “Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221,” The Paris Review, No. 206 (Fall 2013); Richard D. Erlich, Coyote’s Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Rockville, MD: Borgo, 2010); Donna R. White, Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999); Mike Cadden, Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (New York: Routledge, 2005); Sandra Lindow, Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); and Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy, Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006).

338.10 Cyanid skins] Cyan is a greenish blue color; “cyanid” is different from cyanosis, a bluish skin condition caused by lack of oxygen.

353.5 aiji] A given name in Japanese, meaning “beloved child,” but here denoting a martial art.

417.26 There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.] “Local knowledge” usually refers to such minor items as weather patterns or road conditions, but Le Guin draws here on the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who uses the phrase to show how complex cultural patterns such as religion are built upon, and defined by, those smaller sorts of understanding.

424.15 the Terran Altiplano] The high plateau (averaging over 12,000 feet in elevation) that sits amid the Andes Mountains in Bolivia and extends into parts of Peru, Argentina, and Chile.

433.29 I believe in it because it is impossible.] Adapted from a line by Carthaginian Christian philosopher Tertullian (c. 155–240 C.E.): Certum est quia impossibile est, “It [the resurrection of Christ] is certain because it is impossible.”

459.36 “jump the ditch.”] An echo of the custom of jumping the broom, originally a joking term in Britain for an unsanctioned elopement but later a marriage ceremony practiced by American slaves who were not allowed to marry legally.

518.23–25 But how do you get there?… the problem with Utopia] In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”

572.25–26 cyanotic skin coloration] See note 338.10.

576.31 Kwan Yin–like] Kwan Yin or Guanyin, an East Asian Buddhist divinity commonly called the “Goddess of Mercy.”