GILBERT: Do you spend much time sorting out words, testing them? Testing names, that is?
LE GUIN: I have to for the main characters’ names. This whole naming magic is partly just a reflection of my own; a reflection of the way I work. If I can’t find a character’s name, I can’t write the book. The name has to be right—and when I get the name, it usually means the story’s going to come clear. Which is totally mystical; I have no explanation of this whatever.
GILBERT: Do you mean that it’s a sort of parallel development? You’re thinking of the story, and you’re also searching for the name?
LE GUIN: It’s as if the name were a key. And I know there’s a door there, and if I get the name right, it means I’m going to be able to get the door open, and go on in and find the story on the other side. But why this is so, I have no idea.
GILBERT: And then the other names start going?
LE GUIN: Yes, and the lesser names are always—they’re quite easy. And I can change them without doing any harm. But when I wrote A Wizard of Earthsea, I had considerable trouble finding what Ged’s truename was. And until I found it, I couldn’t go on. He had to lose his child’s name. Writing that part took—I had a whole page of names.
GILBERT: Do you often make lists of names?
LE GUIN: Oh, yes. Sometimes I think I’ve found it—oh, yes, that’s it—but no, that’s not quite right. [Laughs] And then I can’t write about this person.
GILBERT: You try a few names for a couple of days?
LE GUIN: Yes. Yes.
GILBERT: Have you a favorite among your books? Maybe that’s a terrible question, like asking if you have a favorite among your children, but do you have a favorite work?
LE GUIN: [Laughs] Well, in general it’s the one that I’m working on, of course, as all writers will admit. I think probably the best put-together book I’ve written is A Wizard of Earthsea. It moves with the most clarity and strength from beginning to end. I think perhaps my favorite of the ones I’ve written is The Dispossessed. I put most into it. It’s also the most faulty—probably for that reason—of my grown-up books.
GILBERT: Do you actually think of The Dispossessed as an “ambiguous Utopia,” as it’s described on the cover?
LE GUIN: That was my suggestion. I told the publisher to use that description as a subtitle. They were a little afraid of it, because “ambiguous” is a big word, for one thing. And Utopia does suggest to most of us—eeeuuuuuw—you know, dull stories. With morals. And so—one of the publishers used it, one didn’t. One of them used it in the blurb for the jacket, or something like that. And I think the English publisher printed it as a subtitle. I just sort of said, if you want to use this as a subtitle, do. Yes, I do think the book is an ambiguous Utopia—in all senses.
GILBERT: I am particularly fond of The Left Hand of Darkness; it evokes so many things so well. I like the names, and the evocation of the planet Winter, and the feeling of danger—political danger—of the trip across the ice at the end. Also, of course—I’m sure you’ve heard this many times—the imagination and daring of creating those androgynous beings. I like that very much.
LE GUIN: It was a very exciting book to write. It was kind of my breakthrough; in my first three science fiction books, I bit off much less, and did much less, and I think that with The Left Hand of Darkness I hit my stride, in a way. And it was very exciting to realize how much you could say in science fiction, how much of a real novel you could write. This form does lend itself to the novel, not just to the adventure story. And that was a delight. The Winter part was easy because I’m an Antarctic fan and that grew out of a long obsession with reading Captain Scott’s diaries and journals.
GILBERT: Have you been to that kind of country?
LE GUIN: No! As I say, I never left Berkeley until I was seventeen, I’d never seen snow until I went east. That’s why I like it so much, I suppose. [Laughs a little] But the androgyny part was hard, because I wrote that in 1967, and, as I’ve said elsewhere, it was when the present feminist movement was just beginning, just getting started. Some of the major books—modern books on feminism—were being written at about that same time, and this apparently was my approach. I’m not a theorist or activist, but—[pauses to think]—I wanted to find out what the differences between men and women really were, and so I used this sort of experimental situation of having people who were both men and women at once.
GILBERT: Sorting out new roles.
LE GUIN: Yes, and finding out what it would be like to be a man-woman, or a woman-man. And it was great fun; but it was rough, and I had to do a lot of homework on sex roles and on physiology, and on all sorts of things, which was fun. So I did some early feminist reading then, which I’d never done before.
GILBERT: You mean people like Mary Wollstonecraft?
LE GUIN: Yes, and Margaret Mead, and Ashley Montagu, and so on. The books that came just before our modern surge of feminist books. So it was a good education for me.
GILBERT: Did it take you a long time to think up the psychology of the androgynous characters in The Left Hand of Darkness?
LE GUIN: It took a long time to work out. For that book I really had to spend about six months, planning the people, the geography, the culture, everything. It was a long time before I could sit down and write the book.
GILBERT: You took notes, then?
LE GUIN: Yes, for that book I really had a notebook full of maps, and history, and all sorts of junk that didn’t get into the book—or only got in because I knew—you know, you’ve got to know, whether it gets into the book or not, how long the last king reigned and stuff like that.
GILBERT: Yes, I can see that you must work that way. When someone reads your books, or when he reads Tolkien, he feels that there is a whole atmosphere around him, a whole history around him. That’s part of the great fascination of the Earthsea books—with their maps of the Archipelago and so on—and of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. You’re surrounded by all sorts of things that would surround a whole life; you’re in a completely different world, but a whole one. Or so it seems.
LE GUIN: Yes. Somehow it’s a solid satisfaction, both for writer and reader, I think, to have this totally illusory perception of a non-existent reality. Another odd thing about that book is that—you know those myths that come into it, the little chapters which are local myths and legends?
GILBERT: Some of them very moving.
LE GUIN: They were not meant to go into the book, at first. I would hit snags with these people’s psychology, as I was writing the book, and I would think, well, now, how would Therem [Estraven, the main character] really feel about this? And I would be snagged up. So, one of these myths would sort of pop out and write itself, and it would explain something to me, obviously working on a kind of unconscious level. Then I stuck most of them into the book; I finally decided that if they were a help to me they might help the reader, too.