Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

THE GIFT OF PLACE ^{INTERVIEW BY THE 10 POINT 5 EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE 10 POINT 5 MAGAZINE SPRING 1977}

Interview conducted by Karen McPherson, Peter Jensen, Alison Halderman, David Zeltzer, and Karen Kramer

PETER JENSEN: You write science fiction. Do you have any particular vision of the future?

URSULA K. LE GUIN: The thing about science fiction is, it isn’t really about the future. It’s about the present. But the future gives us great freedom of imagination. It’s like a mirror. You can see the back of your own head.

KAREN MCPHERSON: You’ve said that writing science fiction is sometimes like performing “thought experiments.” You establish a set of conditions and then see where they lead. For instance, in The Dispossessed you set up the conditions of an anarchist society, almost as though you’re working in a laboratory. Can you actually learn about anarchism from this—whether and how it could work? Its strengths and problems?

LE GUIN: Sure. Calling it a “thought experiment” is maybe a little scientific, clinical. When I said that, I was grasping at respectability. But it is a process, a technique. I used it fairly consciously in The Left Hand of Darkness. I wanted to see what would happen in an androgynous society. The Dispossessed was less experimental. I went into it thinking I knew where it would lead. But in The Left Hand of Darkness I kept getting stuck, because although I’d worked hard trying to plan out that world, I wasn’t sure how an androgynous person would think. And I would wonder: What would Estraven’s reactions be here? So I’d sit back and say all right, I won’t plan what I’m going to write next, and quite often one of those myths would come out. I can only interpret it by saying it was my unconscious instructing me as to how androgynes think. Anyway, whenever I’d written one of those myths I would put it aside and go on, and I would have gotten over this hump or this knot in the story. I didn’t intend to include them. They were just my problem-solving devices, but then when the book was done, and I looked at them, I thought, Well gee, some of them are kind of nice in themselves, and they might help other people read the book, so I did put most of them in. I was so deeply into that world while I was writing that book that I could even write in Karhidish. I could write poetry in Karhidish.

ALISON HALDERMAN: How did you conceive of the landscape in Earthsea?

LE GUIN: That’s a big question. You’re kind of getting at what fantasy creation is. I cannot say I invented it. That’s not what it feels like. It feels like discovering it. You’ve got this place inside yourself which is an ocean with a lot of islands in it. Islands with these peculiar people. And you find out about them as you write about them. It is certainly related to dreaming, or to deliberate fantasy in the psychologist’s sense. Not daydreaming, which is just wandering. But it’s a very odd business, and I can’t explain it.

MCPHERSON: You write a lot about dreams and reality in The Word for World Is Forest.

LE GUIN: Yes. The weird thing is after I wrote it Charles Tart sent me his book called Altered States of Consciousness and asked me if I knew anything about the Senoi tribe in Malaysia. An anthropologist in the 1930s went in and studied them—their culture was based on dreaming. But no one seems to have found them since, and I wonder if he dreamed them up. The Senoi use dreaming—they cultivate it. They are so close to my little green men! There are no tales of murder in that tribe. Their neighbors were warlike tribes but nobody would attack the Senoi because they were said to be magicians and sorcerers, although in fact they did not use magic—they used dreams. When they met at the breakfast table with their children, a little kid might say, “I dreamed that I fell,” and they’d answer, “How neat! Where did you fall and what did you see?” If he didn’t know where he fell to, he’d go back the next night and dream where he fell to. Or for instance if you meet a tiger in your dream there are all kinds of things you can do. You can let it eat you and see what that’s like, or you can eat the tiger. Or make friends with it. Jung wrote about the same sort of thing. When you meet a character in a dream, and you go back the next day and find out what he wanted. When I was trying to bring up my kids, the idea was never to take a dream seriously. You were supposed to tell your kid, “Oh, that was just a dream.” That never felt right to me. I never did it.

DAVID ZELTZER: You really got into the substance of dreams in The Lathe of Heaven.

LE GUIN: Yes, I wrote that in the sixties, right in the middle of all the sleep and dream research. They seem to have hit a plateau with that stuff now but back then it was a hot topic. I read all I could of the current research and the book just grew out of it. I’ve studied Jung just recently. He was a real shaman. He had great mana and power. It comes out through his books. I am under his influence for a week after reading one of his books; you have to be on your guard a bit, with a personality that strong. I had to start reading Jung: after I wrote the Earthsea trilogy, people would come up to me and say, “Of course, the Shadow is straight from Jung.” And I said, “The what from who?” Jung has been criticized for being too religious, too mystical. Actually, I think he’s no more religious than Taoism… I find Jung very useful. As a woman and an artist. And as a middle-aged person. Jung never discounted Freud. He just felt Freud placed too much importance on some things, like the Oedipus complex. Jung was interested in middle-aged people heading downslope after the Freudian battles of the twenties and thirties. By the time you’re thirty-five or older, you have it all, but then you have to put it all together. When you know how to do your work. I’m fascinated with the idea of the integrated person. Another fascinating thing is that I don’t think I could have written Earthsea if I’d read Jung first. But it’s completely “from” Jung. I can be reading along now and say, “Oh, is that what I was doing?” So my writing was almost like a proof of Jung’s theories.

ZELTZER: I notice there’s no anima in your books.

LE GUIN: Of course not—I’m a woman. But the animus writes my books. My animus, what inspires me, is definitely male. People talk about muses—well, my muse ain’t no girl in a filmy dress, that’s for sure. But of course this is all metaphor.[1]

MCPHERSON: In Earthsea there was the beginning of an anima figure in Arha except Ged didn’t follow her—he set her aside and pursued his own destiny.

LE GUIN: Yes. Ged shouldn’t connect. Sometimes I have no control over these things. Wizards usually have to be celibate or even virgin. I don’t know why. But when you draw on the unconscious as much as I do, you should trust it.

MCPHERSON: I wonder, though, whether some of the archetypes we accept are formed by stereotypes that we have to learn to break out of. Rulag, in The Dispossessed, was a similar character to Ged, unconnected and unconnectable, setting aside family ties to pursue her own destiny. But Ged’s actions seem natural; Rulag’s bother us, seem somehow unnatural.

LE GUIN: Yes, though I think if I had a witch in Earthsea she would have been like Ged, or probably more independent. But thank God for feminism. We are learning to separate the stereotypes from the genuine archetype.

MCPHERSON: I know you’re always hearing comments and questions about the fact that you write from men’s point of view in nearly all your books. But it strikes me that you come up with a lot of powerful women this way, perhaps more diverse than the men you create. In The Dispossessed there are three very vital women, Rulag and Takver and, indirectly, Odo. Each one seems to deal with a different part of what women are about, but all of them have something important to say about women’s liberation.

LE GUIN: I try to deal with women that way. I’m a woman, so naturally I write as a woman. I can’t help doing that. And the women I write about tend to be more varied, more complicated; the men are more conventional. I recently received a manuscript from Suzy McKee Charnas. She’s written a very good book, but she’s having trouble selling it because it has no men in it, and the publishers say, “No one will buy this; it’s just all women.” Suzy has set me thinking about this a whole lot. She says that it’s much harder to write from the point of view of women, because we write—in part—from all that we’ve read. There’s no tradition for us to follow. Most of the books about women were written by men. Who else do we have? George Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. So we take the easy way and take a man as the main character, and then have women around him who are strong, but sort of hidden, side characters.

JENSEN: There seem to be only two conventions in science fiction for men. They can be either soldiers or diplomats.

LE GUIN: Yes, well, we don’t have conventions either for new women or new men. This is something we have to work out of.

JENSEN: Or anthropologists. That’s a third alternative. Like Lyubov in The Word for World Is Forest. You use that alternative.

LE GUIN: That’s the kind of man I knew. These are the people I grew up with. They were always around the house—anthropologists and Indians. And they were fine people. Many of them were refugees from Germany. And then they were ethnologists as well, doing fieldwork: Twice displaced. And so they didn’t fit the conventional roles.

MCPHERSON: You talk about the lack of available models in literature to break the conventional roles. What about some of the contemporary women writers: Atwood, Lessing?

LE GUIN: I don’t read many contemporary novels. I tend to wait a while… Margaret Drabble is one contemporary woman novelist I really like. Doris Lessing drives me up a wall. I read Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, and the first fifty pages were just great, but then she cops out. She really blows it. I wanted to throw the book across the room!

MCPHERSON: I wouldn’t judge Lessing on the basis of that book. But some of the others—like the Children of Violence series—The Four-Gated City is really science fiction.

LE GUIN: And her newest one [Memoirs of a Survivor] is too, isn’t it? But she’s avoided the science fiction label. By writing straight fiction first.

KAREN KRAMER: Do you ever think that label limits your audience? Do you ever resent it?

LE GUIN: It does limit the audience, of course. And some science fiction writers are very angry about that. But that’s changing too. More people are overlooking the labels. And it’s essentially a marketplace thing. It’s a publisher’s convenience—if they stick that label on it, it’s a sure sale, if you want to know the filthy truth. That is why such a label means nothing anymore. I feel very free in science fiction, probably more free to write with the label than without, though I think of myself simply as a novelist. But if I had to write for money, and it were up to me—I might demand the science fiction label. The point is to get the books out and read, isn’t it?

JENSEN: In the Soviet Union, [dissident writers Andrei] Sinyavsky and [Yuli] Daniel have said that it’s common to use science fiction as a cover for social satire.

LE GUIN: Yes, but the Soviet government has caught on to that. The Strugatsky brothers are really good writers. They write science fiction and they even use the U.S. or Canada instead of Russia, in order to disguise it one step further, but it’s obvious social satire; and they are being shut up now. Their manuscripts are not being approved. Here we don’t need those covers, but science fiction is a natural medium for social satire.

JENSEN: I just finished reading The Word for World Is Forest. I’m coming from an anti-war background. Did this book come from your other works, a composite, or was it based on something you were told about Vietnam?

LE GUIN: I wrote that in 1968 in England when things were getting hotter and hotter in Vietnam. I was always in the peace movement in Portland. Not that it was much of anything, but at least we went down and walked around once or twice a year. In England there were peace marches, but it was different for an American. My hands were sort of tied. I felt trapped, so it came out in that story, I guess. It’s the most topical story I ever wrote, the pain and outrage that wouldn’t be put down.

JENSEN: You write about anarchism in The Dispossessed. Are you in touch with any international anarchist movements?

LE GUIN: I’ve received magazines from a lot of anarchist groups since I wrote The Dispossessed. London is full of anarchists, so is New York, and the Southwest. But I guess it’s inherently impossible to organize anarchists, isn’t it? And it’s discouraging, because all these groups seem to be falling apart with internal dissension. Perhaps the anarchists have gotten so defensive, being a small, essentially unorganized movement, that they end up getting defensive with each other, among themselves.

KRAMER: Some people criticize science fiction as being too fatalistic.

LE GUIN: There’s a trend in a lot of science fiction to be extrapolative—the doomsday visions. This kind of work is very depressing. It doesn’t open up the future. Some of it has been very powerful. John Brunner is a doomsday writer. He’s a moral, concerned man. He says that what he’s saying is, “Don’t go this way!” Books like that are stop signs. But people do get tired of being faced with that again and again.

ZELTZER: How much do you draw on fairy tales or myths?

LE GUIN: Well, it’s useless to differentiate them; you always end up with the same damn archetypes… Someone told me once there are only five themes for science fiction.

MCPHERSON: What are they?

LE GUIN: He didn’t say. One was the “first contact” story, of course.

HALDERMAN: Don’t people tend to choose an archetype they like and then seek out books that use that theme?

LE GUIN: Sure. Because people always need new symbols and metaphors.

ZELTZER: You use the idea of time displacement in a lot of your books, where people travel through outer space at less than light speed and then come back to find that in their short time in space their home planet has aged a few hundred years.

LE GUIN: Yes, and this is a very old theme in fairy tales: going under the hill with the fairies overnight, coming back in the village and it’s been a hundred years.

HALDERMAN: Science fiction likes to take traditional old fairy tales and magic and to explain them in a scientific context.

LE GUIN: I don’t like that at all. Things like Chariots of the Gods? really put me off. It’s not a real explanation. It seems to destroy the magic when people try to give scientific rationalizations. That’s different from taking an old myth and dressing it up in new metaphors.[2]

ZELTZER: A lot of science fiction seems to equate new metaphors with new technology. You’re much more of a humanist.

LE GUIN: I’ve never seen why science fiction can’t have people in it. Unless all you want is a wiring-diagram type of story. But I don’t write those. And they very soon get boring, unless you’re sixteen years old. There’s got to be SF written for grownups. And that means making the characters recognizably human.

ZELTZER: In The Wizard of Earthsea, did you know what that thing was going to be—the thing that attacked Ged?

LE GUIN: No, I didn’t. I mean, of course I had some idea. You have to have a feeling of the shape of a book before you begin it. But I didn’t know what the thing was going to be. After I finished the book, people would tell me: “Oh, I knew right away what it was!” This really annoyed me, because I didn’t. I didn’t know until just sometime before Ged did.

And do you want to know where that thing came from? I had gotten a microscope about six years ago to look at animals in drops of water. I put a drop of water from some moss on the slide and got it into focus and there it was! It looked like a furry bear with six legs but no face. It looked very large under the microscope—a monster. There it was, staring up at me, with no face. It was terrifying. Have you ever felt that? I looked it up later and found out what it was—they’re called water bears. Eight or ten cells, I think.

ZELTZER: You write scary scenes well. That one in Planet of Exile about the snowghoul was really effective.

LE GUIN: That’s a nice compliment. I’ve never been able to do villains very well so I guess I do monsters. I haven’t had too many villains.

JENSEN: Davidson, in The Word for World is Forest, was a villain.

LE GUIN: Yes, Captain Davidson is my only real villain. I don’t know why I can’t write villains. I enjoy them in other people’s books. Dickens has the best villains.

ZELTZER: The wizard Cob, at the end of the Earthsea trilogy, the one that was pulling the plug on the world…?

LE GUIN: The wizard that went wrong. But you don’t see very much of him. He wasn’t really developed as a villain.

JENSEN: It didn’t take Ged much to overcome him.

LE GUIN: It took Ged everything. He had to give up all his power.

MCPHERSON: One of your major themes seems to be distinguishing truth from lies—the idea that there exists some basic, unassailable truth.

JENSEN: There’s a Vietnamese saying that it’s impossible to lie in poetry…

LE GUIN: That’s a nice one. Well, you’re not supposed to be able to lie in mindspeech—this appears in many of my books—how can you lie when you’re communicating directly mind to mind? And in the Earthsea books the old language which the dragons speak is the language in which things have their true names. This is the source of the magic and power of the wizards of Earthsea. They learn the true names. This is where Ged derived his power.

ZELTZER: In The Left Hand of Darkness you use another psycho-spiritual concept. How did you come up with the business of foretelling the future in that book?

LE GUIN: The means I gave the foretellers for foretelling the future actually came from reading some stuff about schizophrenia. Some people think that schizophrenics may be slightly displaced in time, which is perhaps a little mystical for most psychologists to swallow, but it seems to work sometimes. And so I threw in a couple of schizophrenics among the foretellers and tried to play with that idea. Philip K. Dick plays with it, you know, in a marvelous book called Martian Time-Slip. And if you want to know—I hope you don’t know—what it’s like to be mad from inside, read that book. Because he knows, and he puts it down, and he brings you out the other side. I think he’s one of our best SF writers, and one of the best American novelists.

HALDERMAN: What do you think of Harlan Ellison?

LE GUIN: Harlan is very strong meat, and if you like it, of course you love it. Harlan is a volcano in perpetual eruption, and if you can take a lot of lava in the face, if you don’t mind that, it’s tremendous. If you get a little singed sometimes you have to draw back now and then.

HALDERMAN: Have you ever been approached about making a movie from any of your books?

LE GUIN: Oh yeah, everybody’s approached about movie rights, and then they go away again. I personally don’t think my books are film stuff. Except I have a dream. If you have read my book The Lathe of Heaven, I would like to see Mel Brooks make a movie out of it. With Gene Wilder as George. Gene Wilder is George.

MCPHERSON: The Lathe of Heaven is a very funny book.

LE GUIN: I’ve been locked into an image of being either depressing or extremely moral, and that’s boring. The Lathe of Heaven was the first funny book I wrote and the most despairing. I think a lot of writers take refuge in humor when it’s something that is pretty horrible or that they’re scared of. And humor is a marvelous defense, isn’t it? Well, look at dirty jokes; everybody’s kind of scared of sex one way or another so we all tell dirty jokes and laugh at them wildly.

MCPHERSON: When did you first get a sense of yourself as a writer?

LE GUIN: I always wrote. And I was so arrogant. I didn’t even say I wanted to be a writer. I thought to myself: I am a writer. I took a creative writing course in college. It was taught by a man who wrote for The Saturday Evening Post under a feminine pen name. I decided I was allergic to creative writing at that point. Writing my books has had nothing to do with any teaching. I qualified myself to earn a living otherwise, because I knew I wouldn’t do it with my books. And I just wrote and sent it out to editors and got it back again. For about ten years. I hate to tell people that. It sounds so discouraging.

KRAMER: Do you ever sit down to write and nothing comes?

LE GUIN: Yeah, it’s a disease all writers have, and it’s called writer’s block. The longest period I have had it, so far, was over two years. And it’s miserable.

MCPHERSON: Once you’re into a major work, like a novel, that has to be written over an extended period of time, how do you maintain the creative flow and deal with the constant interruptions?

LE GUIN: Hemingway, l think it was, had a definite and useful word of advice here. When you stop in the middle of a story or a novel, he said, never stop at a stopping place; go past it a little or stop short of it. Stop even in the middle of a sentence. Tomorrow when you come back to it you can read back the last few paragraphs, or pages, until you come to the “oh yeah, this is what happened next” and you can hook back up into your unconscious flow. That starting and stopping is sometimes a very hairy business.

MCPHERSON: How about the problem of never seeming to finish anything?

LE GUIN: This happens to young writers in particular (though I hate to use terms like “younger writers”), but the real trouble again may be getting started. It’s not that you don’t have an idea. But you write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is—Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. Then take it and tear it to pieces and squeeze it till the blood runs and rewrite it fifty times. But I think what you’ve got is perfectionism trouble, and perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.

MCPHERSON: But I suppose the other danger is that you will write two hundred pages of something and then have to admit that it won’t work, that you’re going to have to trash it completely.

LE GUIN: I’m much more that kind of writer. I do many, many false starts. In fact, everything I wrote before I was twenty-nine is like that. I keep it in boxes. That’s what big empty attics are good for. But it was all learning. I was a late bloomer. There were at least four novels in those early years. They were probably the worst novels that have ever been written.

JENSEN: How can you tell when a book you’re writing is finished?

LE GUIN: Well, it varies… it’s just like making a pot on a wheel, which I can’t do by the way, but I’ve watched other people do it—there comes a point when the pot is done, and you’d better take your hands off it. You’ve got the shape you want. Now with a pot it’s lovely, because it’s all there at once. The writing of a book takes place in time. But it really is the same thing. There comes a point when it’s done. You’ve got to know when to stop. Which means that before you start you’ve got to have some vague general idea about what that shape is.

JENSEN: Do you usually let people in your stories write the story for you?

LE GUIN: Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Sometimes I feel myself in control of them, manipulating them. But characters do take over. Most novelists talk about this phenomenon, with a little awe. It is a little scary, when you’ve got a character and you can’t shut him up.

JENSEN: Do you just allow that to happen?

LE GUIN: Up to a point. The character I’ve written that gave me the most trouble is the wizard Ged, in the Earthsea books. He is completely autonomous. And in [The Farthest Shore] I had to do an awful lot of revising, cutting out stuff that Ged was telling me but that everybody would have gotten real bored reading.

ZELTZER: You use a lot of dialogue.

LE GUIN: I think I am not very good at dialogue and therefore I work on it as hard as I can. I don’t have the real ear for dialogue, which is probably just a gift from God. I would say my gift is the gift of place. I’m extremely place-conscious. For instance, when I am homesick, I don’t really think of the people, I think of the rooms that those people are in. I want to be in that room—it kind of implies the people that belong in that room. But this seems to be how my imagination works. And so I am good at that.

HALDERMAN: You do invent wonderful landscapes. The Earthsea trilogy creates such a vivid picture of the sea—have you done a lot of sailing?

LE GUIN: All that sailing is complete fakery. It’s amazing what you can fake. I’ve never sailed anything in my life except a nine-foot catboat, and that was in the Berkeley basin in about three feet of water. And we managed to sink it. The sail got wet and it went down while we sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” We had to wade to shore, and go back to the place we’d rented it and tell them. They couldn’t believe it. “You did what?” You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.

KRAMER: Do you read a lot of science?

LE GUIN: I don’t have a head for math so I can’t get very far. I wanted to be a biologist when I was a kid, but I got stuck on the math; I’ve got one of those blockheads. But I read the works for peasants, and I follow what interests me.

MCPHERSON: What about all that physics in The Dispossessed?

LE GUIN: I had to get very deeply into that—using mainly [J. T.] Fraser’s The Voices of Time, have you heard of it? It’s a sort of general compilation of works about time. There hasn’t been a whole lot written about time that a peasant can understand. I didn’t show The Dispossessed to any scientists before it was printed, but later I took it to a friend at Portland State, a physicist, and he read it. He told me, “Your prediction is not too unlikely” and he said it was good gobbledygook though maybe I’d squeezed quantum mechanics a bit out of shape. It’s funny, I understood what I was writing back then. It was incredible, holding it all in that precarious balance in my mind. I don’t think I could follow it all now.

ZELTZER: Do you write science fiction because this is the kind of fiction you like to read?

LE GUIN: Sure. Writers are often asked, “Why do you write?” which is, you know, an impossible question. But a lot of them give that very answer. I wrote it because nobody else would, and I wanted to read it. Tolkien, as a matter of fact, said that—he said, “I knew nobody else could write it, because nobody else knew about Middle Earth.”

MCPHERSON: I guess if you take that approach you’re a lot less likely to end up boring your readers. You really have an extraordinary versatility—you don’t seem to get stuck with one story or one theme or one character type.

LE GUIN: I hate to repeat myself. If I start repeating myself I hope I just have the guts to stop.

JENSEN: Would you say there’s any kind of statement you’re making in the things which you write?

LE GUIN: Of course, I suppose in everything I write I am making some sort of statement, but I don’t know just what the statement is. Which I can’t say I feel guilty about. If you can say exactly what you meant by a story, then why not just say it in so many words? Why go to all the fuss and feathers of making up a plot and characters? You say it that way, because it’s the only way you can say it.

KRAMER: Can you tell us anything about your new book?

LE GUIN: It isn’t out yet. You’ll be interested, the main character is a woman. Talk about characters taking over your book… It’s short and humble. Only 40,000 words. It takes place on a prison planet with two exiled communities. First a shipload of hard-core criminals had been dropped off there, and fifty years later a group of pacifists. It’ll be called Outcasts, or maybe Ringtrees or—does anybody know a good title? War and Peace, maybe?[3]