Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic

 

"Even before her death, Ursula K. Le Guin had become one of the literary world’s secular saints. Since her passing, her halo has only grown brighter: In a rhapsodic piece for Literary Hub in 2022, four years after Le Guin died at 88, Susan DeFreitas characterized her as “an author whose work moves you so deeply that reading it is like going to church.” The sentiment is representative. In his introduction to “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” a 1979 collection of Le Guin’s essays that has just been handsomely reissued, fellow science fiction writer Ken Liu breathlessly declares it “a monumental classic — a book of criticism so influential that it has become a work of art itself.”

Well, why shouldn’t Le Guin’s reputation only grow? She managed to somehow be resolutely herself while appealing to nearly everyone. She was conventional in her private life — happily married with children — but faithfully left-wing in her politics. She was a staunch defender of the rights of the individual and of the worth of genre writing, but she also remained unrelentingly snobbish. (In an interview in 1984, she called “Star Wars” “anti-intellectual and sort of deliberately stupid.”) In her nonfiction writing, she was endearingly direct, speaking to audiences with a familiarity that never undercut her authority. She produced genre fiction of unimpeachable literary merit; she wrote children’s books that could be loved by adults.

In short, Le Guin can seem like a figure with whom nobody could possibly disagree.

What a pleasure it is, then, to open “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” and discover someone vigorously disagreeing with herself on almost every page. To say that the Le Guin we meet in this book is argumentative, sometimes unfair, sometimes wrong and even self-contradictory is not to diminish her greatness. It is rather to rescue her from the dullness imposed on her by her canonization."

more in the review by  B.D. McClay