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Ursula K. Le Guin
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 Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the reigning masters of science fiction, winner of many Hugo and
Nebula Awards (most recently, Tehanu: The Last Book of
Earthsea won the 1991 Nebula award for Best Novel), author
of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The
Dispossessed (1974), Always Coming Home (1985), and other
innovative science fiction novels and stories. She also wrote the modern classic of fantasy, The Earthsea
trilogy, and a number of provocative essays on sf and fantasy. A fantasist, a feminist, a literate and humane writer,
Le Guin has often been portrayed as having left science fiction for greener pastures, although sf has always
been only one of her major modes. In a recent interview, Le Guin said:
I hope I've never been, and am never, perceived as being in any way 'anti-science' in my work. Confusion often arises concerning what science and technology are. For example, I thought Always Coming Home was a rather interesting work in the technological mode; I had tried to think out carefully and consistently a highly refined, thoroughly useful, aesthetically gratifying technology for my invented society of the Valley. Being an anthropologist's daughter, I think of technology as encompassing everything a society makes and uses in the material sphere. However, a lot of people now use 'technology' simply to mean extremely high-tech inventions that are predicated on and depend on an enormous global network of intense exploitation of all natural resources, including an exploited working class, mostly in the Third World. Technology in this sense doesn't strike me as having much of a future, I must admit." Her essay, "On Theme," written to accompany "Nine Lives" in Robin Scott Wilson's anthology
Those Who Can, describes how reading about early experiments in cloning generated the main idea: exploring the
human implications of what was at the time a biological experiment in reproducing carrots. Le Guin
magnifies the meaning of the idea and investigates its rich possibilities by extrapolating it into a future in which it
has larger scale, broader, bigger implications, in her words sounding "the great bells of love and death." Le
Guin uses technological extrapolation here to explore the relationship between individual identity and
personal uniqueness, postulating a protagonist who is not unique and who must confront both the problems of
being alone and of being alone. Inverting the supernatural story of the doppeganger, Le Guin shows us how
uncanny it is not to meet ourselves at every turn.
Le Guin's influence on hard science fiction over recent decades has been evident in its movement
toward deeper and richer characterization. This story is perhaps her most famous.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | |||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.