Ursula K. LeGuin
Someone asked me my opinion of LeGuin. I thought my reply deserved its own entry.
I think Ursula K LeGuin is very nearly a perfect writer. I cannot wade through the feminist tripe of her more recent books, unfortunately, but I think everyone should read A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, THE FARTHEST SHORE, THE DISPOSSESSED and LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. But even in her recent books, her power as a storyteller, if anything, has grown beyond her earlier and more famous works. Read FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS to see a potent and subtle narrative.
As for her literary quality, she has a clean and luminous prose, a simple way of putting across striking characters and scenes and memorable images that a writer of my humble talents cannot even approach, much less imitate. No sentence is confused, no words are jarring, and yet there is a real fire of poetry, a divine fire, in what she writes. Compare her sentences to the bland journalistic style of Robert Heinlein or the tepid intellectual style of Isaac Asimov: you cannot because there is no comparison. The closest comparison one can make is to Ray Bradbury, and even there, she is the superior, because Bradbury often pauses to indulge in strange metaphors or intrusive description.
Her male characters never seem girlish, which is the plague of talentless female authors. Her characters are whole.
She is a mistress of the understatement. Le Guin can draw a tear from your eye merely by describing a scene where an old woman gets out of bed, and the gray light is coming in through the farmhouse windows.
Reading Ursula Le Guin at her best is like watching a ballet: it is so graceful, so seemingly effortless, you forget that you are looking at hard-working female athletes, and you think you are looking at swans.
It is merely a pity that she places her muse in the service of feminism, which is, after all, a rather peevish, unjoyful, and self-centered religion. Like the other members of her religion, she has to periodically interrupt her narrative to genuflect to her gods, and to scorn mine: but since she is a true craftsman of the first water, her interruptions are nigh unnoticeable. It is not like reading Ayn Rand or Bob Heinlein. Le Guin never preaches: she has strong opinions, but she shows, not tells.
Her silence is louder than all the thunder and hellfire of preachers like Ayn Rand. Her sermons are in stones and sunsets, the human souls and distant stars and the other things her quiet pen creates.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
