HALDERMAN: You do invent wonderful landscapes. The Earthsea trilogy creates such a vivid picture of the sea—have you done a lot of sailing?
LE GUIN: All that sailing is complete fakery. It’s amazing what you can fake. I’ve never sailed anything in my life except a nine-foot catboat, and that was in the Berkeley basin in about three feet of water. And we managed to sink it. The sail got wet and it went down while we sang “Nearer My God to Thee.” We had to wade to shore, and go back to the place we’d rented it and tell them. They couldn’t believe it. “You did what?” You know, it’s interesting, they always tell people to write about what they know about. But you don’t have to know about things, you just have to be able to imagine them really well.
KRAMER: Do you read a lot of science?
LE GUIN: I don’t have a head for math so I can’t get very far. I wanted to be a biologist when I was a kid, but I got stuck on the math; I’ve got one of those blockheads. But I read the works for peasants, and I follow what interests me.
MCPHERSON: What about all that physics in The Dispossessed?
LE GUIN: I had to get very deeply into that—using mainly [J. T.] Fraser’s The Voices of Time, have you heard of it? It’s a sort of general compilation of works about time. There hasn’t been a whole lot written about time that a peasant can understand. I didn’t show The Dispossessed to any scientists before it was printed, but later I took it to a friend at Portland State, a physicist, and he read it. He told me, “Your prediction is not too unlikely” and he said it was good gobbledygook though maybe I’d squeezed quantum mechanics a bit out of shape. It’s funny, I understood what I was writing back then. It was incredible, holding it all in that precarious balance in my mind. I don’t think I could follow it all now.
ZELTZER: Do you write science fiction because this is the kind of fiction you like to read?
LE GUIN: Sure. Writers are often asked, “Why do you write?” which is, you know, an impossible question. But a lot of them give that very answer. I wrote it because nobody else would, and I wanted to read it. Tolkien, as a matter of fact, said that—he said, “I knew nobody else could write it, because nobody else knew about Middle Earth.”
MCPHERSON: I guess if you take that approach you’re a lot less likely to end up boring your readers. You really have an extraordinary versatility—you don’t seem to get stuck with one story or one theme or one character type.
LE GUIN: I hate to repeat myself. If I start repeating myself I hope I just have the guts to stop.
JENSEN: Would you say there’s any kind of statement you’re making in the things which you write?
LE GUIN: Of course, I suppose in everything I write I am making some sort of statement, but I don’t know just what the statement is. Which I can’t say I feel guilty about. If you can say exactly what you meant by a story, then why not just say it in so many words? Why go to all the fuss and feathers of making up a plot and characters? You say it that way, because it’s the only way you can say it.
KRAMER: Can you tell us anything about your new book?
LE GUIN: It isn’t out yet. You’ll be interested, the main character is a woman. Talk about characters taking over your book… It’s short and humble. Only 40,000 words. It takes place on a prison planet with two exiled communities. First a shipload of hard-core criminals had been dropped off there, and fifty years later a group of pacifists. It’ll be called Outcasts, or maybe Ringtrees or—does anybody know a good title? War and Peace, maybe?[3]
NAMING MAGIC
INTERVIEW BY DOROTHY GILBERT
THE CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY, NO. 13-14
SPRING/SUMMER 1978
This interview took place in December 1976 in the house on Arch Street in North Berkeley where Ursula Le Guin’s parents lived when she was born, and where she herself grew up. Ms. Le Guin met me at the door and led me through the living room and through the kitchen, where her mother looked up from some culinary project to greet us; Ms. Le Guin and I went into a small, sunlit room off the back garden, which had been her father’s study. It is now her room when she comes to Berkeley to visit. Through the windows one can look out at the garden and hear the sound of a small fountain. It is a room that suggests concentration, relaxation and practical comfort; it is decorated in blacks and browns, and contains a bunk bed, several comfortable chairs and a large table. Ursula K. Le Guin is a tall, slender woman with a neat cap of straight dark hair and large dark eyes. She speaks in a deep, low, musical voice with many inflections; it is a voice that conveys humor, or delight in small ironies, particularly well. As we talked, she smoked a briar pipe.
DOROTHY GILBERT: You grew up in this house. Does it have strong associations for you of your development as a writer, of when you first developed a sense of yourself as a writer?
URSULA K. LE GUIN: Well, sure. It’s a pretty strong-minded house.
GILBERT: Yes, I can see that.
LE GUIN: And a very livable house. Of course I lived here until I was seventeen, and didn’t move around. So, my whole beginnings are here. And in the Napa Valley.
GILBERT: Oh, yes, there was the family home called Kishamish, in the Napa Valley. The name came from a mythical figure that your brother made up, I gather.
LE GUIN: Yes. Sort of a legend.
GILBERT: Was there much of that kind of legend-making, of make-believe, among you and your brothers in your childhood?
LE GUIN: Well—yes. All my brothers were nutty in different ways. We were all nutty. That brother is the only one who made up myths.
GILBERT: You didn’t do that?
LE GUIN: Well, not in public. He told his aloud.
GILBERT: I see. Have you always assumed that you would be a writer?
LE GUIN: Yes.
GILBERT: You didn’t decide one day, “That’s what I’m going to do?”
LE GUIN: No, I just knew it.
GILBERT: What led you to science fiction?
LE GUIN: Trying to get published. The stuff I wrote has always been—it’s had what you’d have to call a fantasy element.
GILBERT: It always did?
LE GUIN: Always, right from the start, except for the poetry. It took place in an imaginary country or something like that, and the publishers didn’t know what to call it; they didn’t know what it was. And they didn’t publish it. And I got back to reading science fiction in my late twenties, and I thought hey, you know, maybe I could call my stuff science fiction. So I sent a story to Cele Lalli at Fantastic magazine, and she bought it. And from then on I was a science fiction writer. They found a label for me. I had a pigeonhole. You have to have a pigeonhole. You have to start with a pigeonhole.