(There were other writers who saw the genre’s potential for yielding enduring literature.) But Le Guin chose this “despised, marginal” genre, she once said, for a reason she couldn’t acknowledge to herself at the time: Because it was “excluded from critical, academic, canonical supervision, leaving the artist free.” Curry makes it look like Le Guin rescued science fiction and fantasy more or less single-handedly from a state of literary neglect, which isn’t exactly true. At the same time, Curry tracks the progress of Le Guin’s career from the margins of literature to the center.īorn in Berkeley, California, in 1929, Le Guin began publishing science fiction in the early 1960s and within ten years was acknowledged as one of the most important writers in the genre, particularly with the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and The Dispossessed (1974). We see Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon (and during a reading at Powell’s, her hometown bookstore) in the otherworldly high desert of eastern Oregon and at the rocky Oregon coast, all settings that inspired Le Guin’s writing. Curry filmed interviews over a period of several years with the essayist, poet, and novelist, who died at age 88 in January last year. The American West forms a stunning backdrop to Curry’s look at Le Guin’s life and work. It feels like being there and looking around, and listening.” Le Guin, she tells director Arwen Curry, “I don’t feel so much as if I were ‘making it up’ I know I am, but that’s not what it feels like. In the new documentary Worlds of Ursula K.

Real places inspired not only her realistic but also her speculative fiction, where the situations were imaginary but the emotionally charged landscapes were often based on ones she knew and loved.

Her first Earthsea fantasy novel began with a map of islands that she drew for herself in a paper-and-ink archipelago, which offered her the freedom to imagine who might live there.

No time to spare by ursula k le guin