le guin is not your unproblematic grandma

put some actual respect on her name

Because of my affection for Joanna Russ’s work—and because Russ was often fixated on the problems she saw in Ursula K. Le Guin’s work—I often worry about giving the impression I have it out for Ursula K. Le Guin in some sense. Actually, I probably give no impression of having any opinion about Le Guin unless you’re one of the handful of people I text about these things, but nevertheless. This is not the case. Like most people with a functioning brain, I revere her. (And so, in her way, did Russ.)

Of the various now-dead science fiction writers I like to read, I really doubt I could have been friends with any of them, but Le Guin is probably the most likely.¹ We have certain things in common—a temperamental conservatism matched with left-liberal political outlook—that make us sympathetic parties. (I think.) Whereas Joanna Russ would have taken one look at me and killed me with a single shot to the forehead.

Unfortunately, unless her writing is so aggressively unpleasant that you can’t even coax one cute pull quote from it, just about any great woman writer ends up getting turned into a lifestyle brand. When some sort of literary scandal breaks—currently, Neil Gaiman²—suddenly a bunch of people pop up to say, hey, did you ever read Ursula K. Le Guin, who never did anything wrong in her entire life?³ I am not exaggerating. Here’s what you get if you just type “ursula le guin” into BlueSky right now:

I left that last one in there because the other function of “Ursula K. Le Guin,” discursively, is to be a twee quote machine. She never did anything wrong ever! She never thought anything wrong ever! She was actually assumed up into heaven, like the Virgin Mary!

“Never did anything wrong ever and never thought anything wrong ever” is not an actual artistic legacy. The hard sugar candy shell with which people have surrounded Le Guin defines her almost entirely negatively and makes her seem, frankly, stupid. If you read her essays or her letters or—hell!—her fiction, you get somebody more complicated, more prone to self-criticism, and more interesting. But it’s like Le Guin is so virtuosic that unless you’re a bit of a crank (like Russ) people just sit there in awe. And I care about this because… I do think Le Guin is a great artist and I want to see her talked about like one, and not just with reverence.

Julie Phillips, who wrote an amazing biography of James Tiptree, is currently writing the Le Guin biography. I feel pretty confident that when Phillips’s biography of Le Guin comes out, it is not going to contain any giant bombshells about her sexually terrorizing her unpaid nanny. I imagine it will basically show that Le Guin was a very good and decent person who mostly lived true to her values and that the people who have admired her for that reason were right to do so.

However… there’s a cautionary tale here about Tiptree worth remembering.

As you may or may not know, Alice Sheldon (who wrote under the name James Tiptree) killed her husband and then herself. This may or may not have been the fulfillment of a pre-arranged suicide pact. (People who knew Sheldon seem to believe the former; in Phillips’s book, I find it genuinely ambiguous, and you can read her further reflections here.) After Sheldon’s death, some of her friends founded an award in her honor called “the Tiptree Award.”

Now, unlike Le Guin, Tiptree never became the unproblematic buddy of readers everywhere. But Alice Sheldon did become a kind of cheeky story about the woman who managed to get a lot of male writers to embarrass themselves by proclaiming Tiptree, whoever he was, could not ever possibly be a woman. And that was how things were until somebody⁴ read Alice Sheldon’s Wikipedia page in 2019 and freaked out because… she killed her husband. After about a week of angst, the name of the award was changed. Now it’s the “Otherwise” award.

Anybody who has read even one James Tiptree story knows that “bleak” doesn’t even begin to describe their tone. There is nothing very surprising about reading them and then finding out their author died the way she died. Furthermore, changing the name of an award is not some sort of great tragedy. What really matters here, to me, is that none of this was ever hidden. Tiptree’s work is thorny, violent, and dark; Alice Sheldon’s death was public knowledge.⁵ It was all there!

But many people don’t want complicated women writers. They want nice ones that make them feel good about themselves. And when Tiptree could be represented solely as sending up the gender binary, Tiptree could make people feel good about themselves. When that stopped being possible, the name of the award changed.

I sincerely doubt there will ever be something revealed about Le Guin so personally shocking that it will cause everybody to rethink their image of her. That is what makes her case much harder. Because she is a genuinely great writer and seems to have been a genuinely good person, she is easily diminished—by people who think they are promoting her—into the carob you can eat when you can no longer abide Problematic Author X’s chocolate. This is bad! I’m just going to keep saying it’s bad even if it makes it seem like I dislike her.

Now you might think “okay BDM but where’s your piece of writing that’s actually about Le Guin the artist and not grumping about her image.”

Well… stayed tuned, I guess.

1. I always operate off the assumption any writer I love would have found me annoying. In Joanna Russ’s case, frankly, it’s almost more of a “certain knowledge” than an assumption.

2. I don’t really like Gaiman’s work (outside of Coraline) and don’t have much to say about the rest of it beyond my previously stated opinion that sin is boring and makes you stupid.

3. I agree with friend of the newsletter Queen of Bithynia that people who want to blame “fannish adoration” for enabling bad behavior have sort of lost the plot here.

4. We aren’t going to get into the guy who did this because he is a whole other story frankly.

5. That’s why it was in her Wikipedia page.