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.
2
Erich von Daniken’s