SPEAKER_00: Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
This month we're talking about women of science fiction.
These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions, revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Today's Womanican is a novelist and poet.
You could call her a science fiction writer, but that'd be like cramming an octopus into a pigeonhole. Tentacles will come out in all directions.
Her genre-defying work explores everywhere from far-off planets to an archipelago inhabited by wizards and a utopian California that resembles the past.
Let's meet Ursula K. Le Guin.
Ursula was born on October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California.
Her father, Alfred, was an influential cultural anthropologist. Her mother, Theodora, was a writer.
As such, Ursula's childhood was filled with storytelling and robust conversation.
At dinnertime, Alfred would ask his four children philosophical questions and puzzles.
Ursula, the youngest, was often overshadowed by her older, louder siblings.
She was painfully shy, but she learned she had to be boisterous if she was going to be heard.
By the time she was six years old, Ursula knew in her bones that she was going to be a writer.
She wrote poems and fantasy stories.
She and her brother pooled their coins together to buy pulpy sci-fi magazines.
She liked mythology and science fiction, but soon lost interest because she didn't like that all the stories were about white men conquering the universe.
When Ursula entered high school, she felt awkward, lonely, and out of place.
She felt a sense of belonging between the pages of books.
Ursula spent her days at the public library, reading Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.
She once cut up a book so she could lovingly gaze at a still of Mr. Darcy from the 1940 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in the privacy of her bedroom.
In 1947, Ursula traveled across the country to attend Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She worked on the school's literary magazine, but it never accepted any of her submissions, and her peers left scathing, unfriendly critiques of her work.
Ursula graduated in 1951 with a degree in French and then went to Columbia University to earn a master's degree in Romance Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
After that, she won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris.
There she met and married Charles Le Guin, another Fulbright scholar.
For the next decade, while she raised three children and taught classes at Portland State University, Ursula tried to make it as a writer.
But the literary world at the time was focused on confessional literature, realism, and memoir.
Ursula had no interest in confession.
Her strengths, according to her, were transformation and invention.
Rather than try to fit into the literary canon of the time, Ursula would have to blaze her own trail.
Through her writing, Ursula liked to try on different ideas and ways of life.
Her first novel took place in an imaginary Eastern European country called Orsinia. In her made-up world, she explored real-world issues like communist repression and McCarthy-era politics.
She submitted the book to Alfred Knopf, a publisher and family friend.
He wrote back,
This is a very strange book, but you're going somewhere.
By the early 1960s, Ursula had written five unpublished novels. In 1966, she had her first success, a science fiction novel called Ro Cannon's World.
Two years later, she published A Wizard of Earthsea.
It was the first installment in what would become a trilogy about a society of wizards.
The books were young adult fiction, but Ursula didn't use that as an excuse to dumb down her stories. The series' themes included the power of language and the importance of balance, inspired by her lifelong study of Taoism.
In 1969, she released The Left Hand of Darkness.
Again, Ursula explored the theme of balance, this time on a planet inhabited by beings who were genderless except for during periods of reproduction.
For the book, Ursula won two major awards in science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Her 1971 novel, The Lathe of Heaven, told the story of a man whose dreams could alter reality.
It was adapted into a made-for-television film twice, once in 1980 and again in 2002.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Ursula suffered from periods of depression that made it hard for her to write.
And the second wave feminism movement made Ursula rethink her work.
Ursula had always written male protagonists to make her books more digestible for publishers and readers. She struggled to learn how to write as a woman rather than an honorary man.
Ursula overcame this period of discomfort and dispiritedness. In the 1980s, she produced some of her most daring and well-regarded work.
Like her feminist parable, she unnames them and Always Coming Home, a part-narrative,
part-pseudo textbook recording the life and society of the imaginary Keshe people in California.
Sometimes her political messages were wrapped up in metaphor and subtlety.
Other times, it was like she was screaming through the page, losing patience with her readers.
As she got older, she felt she had lost her stamina for writing novels and focused more on poetry and short stories.
After spending decades in the literary world, Ursula became vocal about her criticisms of the publishing industry.
In 2014, she traveled to New York City to accept the Distinguished Contribution Medal at the National Book Awards ceremony.
She had spent six months fretting over and rewriting her six-minute acceptance speech.
When she took to the podium, she didn't spend time thanking the organization for her medal or her family and confidants for their support.
Instead, she admonished editors for choosing profit over creativity. I really don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river, she said. She also dedicated her award to her fellow science fiction and fantasy authors, who she felt had been excluded from literature for so long.
The crowd gave her a standing ovation.
Ursula passed away on January 22, 2018, in her home in Portland, Oregon. She was 88 years old.
Over the course of her career, she wrote 20 novels, more than 100 short stories, poetry, literary criticism, and children's books.
All month, we're talking about women in science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow.
