WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.660 Okay, so let's unpack this. We're diving into 00:00:02.660 --> 00:00:05.459 a truly monumental figure today. Oh, absolutely. 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:09.160 Someone whose work is, I mean, it's so vast, 00:00:09.439 --> 00:00:13.000 so deep. Trying to categorize it feels, I don't 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:14.560 know, like trying to put the ocean in a bucket. 00:00:14.679 --> 00:00:16.899 Or trying to categorize a whole new language. 00:00:16.960 --> 00:00:19.760 It's that fundamental. Our focus is Ursula K. 00:00:19.859 --> 00:00:23.320 Le Guin, who lived from 1929 to 2018. And her 00:00:23.320 --> 00:00:27.230 career spanned... nearly 60 years. 60 years where 00:00:27.230 --> 00:00:30.410 she, well, she fundamentally redefined what science 00:00:30.410 --> 00:00:32.439 fiction and fantasy could even do. Yeah. And 00:00:32.439 --> 00:00:34.280 it's fitting you bring up categorization because 00:00:34.280 --> 00:00:37.159 while she is, you know, the undisputed master 00:00:37.159 --> 00:00:39.539 of speculative fiction, the architect of Earthsea, 00:00:39.700 --> 00:00:42.399 the sprawling, heinous universe, she always preferred 00:00:42.399 --> 00:00:44.780 to be called an American novelist. And that one 00:00:44.780 --> 00:00:47.100 detail, that insistence, it tells you everything 00:00:47.100 --> 00:00:49.460 you need to know about her intent. Exactly. She 00:00:49.460 --> 00:00:51.500 was using these fantastical tools, but not for 00:00:51.500 --> 00:00:55.780 escapism. It was for this really rigorous literary 00:00:55.780 --> 00:00:58.439 and philosophical look into how human societies 00:00:58.439 --> 00:01:01.060 actually work. That's the core tension we're 00:01:01.060 --> 00:01:03.640 going to be exploring. A major voice in American 00:01:03.640 --> 00:01:07.040 letters, but one who, for the most part, chose 00:01:07.040 --> 00:01:09.959 to work outside that conventional literary mainstream. 00:01:10.299 --> 00:01:13.799 And the output is just, it's mind -boggling. 00:01:13.879 --> 00:01:16.659 Over 20 novels, more than 100 short stories, 00:01:16.840 --> 00:01:20.420 poetry, criticism, translations, children's books. 00:01:20.500 --> 00:01:23.159 Starting all the way back in 1959. I mean, the 00:01:23.159 --> 00:01:26.400 sheer scale of that is just staggering to think 00:01:26.400 --> 00:01:29.099 about. And the recognition. It came fast and 00:01:29.099 --> 00:01:32.099 it was foundational. She hit major critical and 00:01:32.099 --> 00:01:34.500 commercial success almost right away with two 00:01:34.500 --> 00:01:36.519 books back to back. Right. A Wizard of Earthsea 00:01:36.519 --> 00:01:39.200 in 1968. And then The Left Hand of Darkness in 00:01:39.200 --> 00:01:42.180 1969. A fantasy novel and a science fiction novel, 00:01:42.340 --> 00:01:44.079 two completely different registers. And they 00:01:44.079 --> 00:01:46.400 really set the tone for her entire career. And 00:01:46.400 --> 00:01:47.760 it was The Left Hand of Darkness that, I mean, 00:01:47.780 --> 00:01:49.640 it didn't just get praise. It actually made history. 00:01:49.819 --> 00:01:52.879 Absolutely historic. That novel, which digs into 00:01:52.879 --> 00:01:55.579 the ambisexual society on the planet Gethen, 00:01:55.719 --> 00:01:58.200 made Le Guin the first. woman to win both the 00:01:58.200 --> 00:02:00.480 hugo award and the nebula award for best novel 00:02:00.480 --> 00:02:03.200 yeah this wasn't just a win you know it was a 00:02:03.200 --> 00:02:06.180 massive cultural benchmark it was a signal that 00:02:06.180 --> 00:02:09.060 her kind of work work that's focused on sociology 00:02:09.060 --> 00:02:13.240 cultural contact gender it just couldn't be ignored 00:02:13.240 --> 00:02:15.419 anymore so this is where we get into the depth 00:02:15.419 --> 00:02:18.180 that you're looking for to really appreciate 00:02:18.180 --> 00:02:20.900 the world she built to go beyond just enjoying 00:02:20.900 --> 00:02:23.800 the story you have to understand the blueprints 00:02:24.830 --> 00:02:27.710 And we've identified four, I say, distinct but 00:02:27.710 --> 00:02:30.590 really complementary pillars that shaped everything 00:02:30.590 --> 00:02:33.210 she wrote. These weren't just like casual interests. 00:02:33.330 --> 00:02:35.569 This was the intellectual DNA of her fiction. 00:02:35.770 --> 00:02:38.830 And those are cultural anthropology, Taoism, 00:02:38.849 --> 00:02:41.389 feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung. Exactly. 00:02:41.449 --> 00:02:43.789 And these are the scaffolding of her invented 00:02:43.789 --> 00:02:46.270 worlds. Her stories were always about balance, 00:02:46.409 --> 00:02:49.969 identity, power. Cultural communication. All 00:02:49.969 --> 00:02:52.250 ideas that spring directly from those four traditions. 00:02:52.629 --> 00:02:54.550 If you can get a handle on these pillars, you 00:02:54.550 --> 00:02:56.469 really have a shortcut to understanding the depth 00:02:56.469 --> 00:02:58.969 that made her such a foundational modern author. 00:02:59.449 --> 00:03:01.469 Let's start with cultural anthropology then. 00:03:01.530 --> 00:03:03.569 Because for her, this wasn't some academic topic 00:03:03.569 --> 00:03:05.949 she just picked up later. This was the air she 00:03:05.949 --> 00:03:09.240 breathed growing up. Precisely. Ursula Kroeber 00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:12.599 was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, into 00:03:12.599 --> 00:03:15.860 this intensely intellectual home. Her father 00:03:15.860 --> 00:03:18.479 was Alfred Louis Kroeber. A huge name in the 00:03:18.479 --> 00:03:21.240 field. A pioneer. one of the figures who really 00:03:21.240 --> 00:03:23.280 helped establish American anthropology as we 00:03:23.280 --> 00:03:25.560 know it today at UC Berkeley. So just imagine 00:03:25.560 --> 00:03:27.699 growing up in a house where the, you know, the 00:03:27.699 --> 00:03:31.000 rigorous non -judgmental study of human cultures 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:34.199 and myths and language was just daily background 00:03:34.199 --> 00:03:36.560 noise. It must have given her this radical early 00:03:36.560 --> 00:03:38.840 perspective on just how constructed our societies 00:03:38.840 --> 00:03:41.370 really are. And the family influence goes even 00:03:41.370 --> 00:03:43.909 deeper than that. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, 00:03:44.050 --> 00:03:46.389 was also an author. She found fame a bit later 00:03:46.389 --> 00:03:49.229 in life with her book Ishi in Two Worlds in 1961. 00:03:49.710 --> 00:03:51.629 Right. Theodora also had a graduate degree in 00:03:51.629 --> 00:03:54.030 psychology, and this book was the biography of 00:03:54.030 --> 00:03:56.789 Ishi. Exactly. Ishi was the last known member 00:03:56.789 --> 00:03:58.949 of the Yahoo tribe, a tribe that had been systematically 00:03:58.949 --> 00:04:02.409 killed by white colonizers. He literally walked 00:04:02.409 --> 00:04:05.610 out of the wilderness in 1911 and became, in 00:04:05.610 --> 00:04:08.349 a way, a living anthropological subject for her 00:04:08.349 --> 00:04:10.229 father forever. Alfred Kroeber. What a profound 00:04:10.229 --> 00:04:13.389 story. It's about trauma, cultural contact, loss, 00:04:13.610 --> 00:04:16.449 survival. And you can draw a straight line from 00:04:16.449 --> 00:04:19.250 that story to Le Guin's fiction. Absolutely. 00:04:19.449 --> 00:04:23.069 The trauma and the tension in Ishii's story. 00:04:23.430 --> 00:04:26.949 The cultural outsider. the last of his kind, 00:04:27.129 --> 00:04:30.129 trying to communicate with this, you know, an 00:04:30.129 --> 00:04:33.170 alien dominant world. It's a foundational theme 00:04:33.170 --> 00:04:36.050 for her. You see it everywhere. The alien context 00:04:36.050 --> 00:04:38.670 scenarios in the heinous novels like Planet of 00:04:38.670 --> 00:04:41.930 Exile, the cultural destruction in The Word for 00:04:41.930 --> 00:04:45.600 World. Even the entire journey of Shovek in the 00:04:45.600 --> 00:04:48.040 dispossessed, right? Moving between two totally 00:04:48.040 --> 00:04:50.399 isolated cultures. Yes. Anthropology gave her 00:04:50.399 --> 00:04:52.980 the tools to build whole societies. But you have 00:04:52.980 --> 00:04:55.480 to think, the story of Ishii gave her the emotional 00:04:55.480 --> 00:04:57.639 weight, the understanding of what happens when 00:04:57.639 --> 00:05:00.199 those societies clash. And we can't forget about 00:05:00.199 --> 00:05:02.300 the other people who were just, like, rotating 00:05:02.300 --> 00:05:04.399 through the Kruber household. The sources mention 00:05:04.399 --> 00:05:06.600 intellectual giants like Robert Oppenheimer. 00:05:06.759 --> 00:05:09.060 The father of the atomic bomb, a regular family 00:05:09.060 --> 00:05:11.639 guest. That's just a phenomenal detail. And it 00:05:11.639 --> 00:05:13.600 shows how she drew her greatest characters from 00:05:13.600 --> 00:05:15.560 life. It really does. She later confirmed that 00:05:15.560 --> 00:05:18.060 Oppenheimer was the model for Chevek, the physicist 00:05:18.060 --> 00:05:20.560 protagonist in The Dispossessed. And think about 00:05:20.560 --> 00:05:22.740 the complexity there for a minute. She takes 00:05:22.740 --> 00:05:26.000 this real life figure, a man responsible for 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:28.879 maybe the greatest hierarchical power structure 00:05:28.879 --> 00:05:31.740 in history. the scientific military complex. 00:05:32.079 --> 00:05:34.740 And uses him as the template for a physicist 00:05:34.740 --> 00:05:38.120 trying to build a truly anarchist society based 00:05:38.120 --> 00:05:40.959 on sharing. Her personal life was just constantly 00:05:40.959 --> 00:05:43.500 feeding her fiction, providing these incredible 00:05:43.500 --> 00:05:46.959 layered real -world anchors for her most complex 00:05:46.959 --> 00:05:49.379 ideas. And beyond the dinner table conversations, 00:05:49.879 --> 00:05:52.620 her early reading really solidified her interests. 00:05:53.019 --> 00:05:55.779 Norse mythology, Native American legends, her 00:05:55.779 --> 00:05:58.310 father told her. She loved Lord Dunsany, and 00:05:58.310 --> 00:06:00.670 she even sent her first story to Astounding Science 00:06:00.670 --> 00:06:03.050 Fiction when she was only 11. It was rejected, 00:06:03.129 --> 00:06:05.009 though. It was, and that apparently caused a 00:06:05.009 --> 00:06:07.189 long break in her submitting her work anywhere. 00:06:07.509 --> 00:06:10.329 And her academic path then gave her the literary 00:06:10.329 --> 00:06:13.220 muscle to back it all up. She didn't focus on 00:06:13.220 --> 00:06:16.300 science. She studied Renaissance French and Italian 00:06:16.300 --> 00:06:19.139 literature at Radcliffe. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa, 00:06:19.240 --> 00:06:20.800 which for anyone who doesn't know, is one of 00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:22.759 the most prestigious academic honor societies 00:06:22.759 --> 00:06:25.899 in the U .S. Then she got a master's in French 00:06:25.899 --> 00:06:28.560 from Columbia. She was all set to get her doctorate 00:06:28.560 --> 00:06:30.720 in France on a Fulbright grant. Right. But then, 00:06:30.759 --> 00:06:33.339 as she often told it, she met and married the 00:06:33.339 --> 00:06:37.120 historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. And that was, 00:06:37.240 --> 00:06:39.259 in her words, the end of the doctorate and the 00:06:39.259 --> 00:06:41.769 real beginning of her life as a novelist. They 00:06:41.769 --> 00:06:43.769 ended up settling for good in Portland, Oregon 00:06:43.769 --> 00:06:47.350 in 1959. So she had this anthropological lens. 00:06:47.569 --> 00:06:50.250 She had the literary technique. Now let's pivot 00:06:50.250 --> 00:06:53.329 to the deep psychological and philosophical frameworks 00:06:53.329 --> 00:06:55.649 that gave her characters their internal struggles. 00:06:56.069 --> 00:06:59.519 Jungian psychology and Taoism. What's so fascinating 00:06:59.519 --> 00:07:02.379 about Carl Jung is this idea of archetypes, these 00:07:02.379 --> 00:07:05.879 universal primitive images or ideas we inherit 00:07:05.879 --> 00:07:08.379 from our ancestors. And scholars consistently 00:07:08.379 --> 00:07:10.959 point to Jung's influence in her work. Especially 00:07:10.959 --> 00:07:13.079 the idea of the shadow architect. Yes. The most 00:07:13.079 --> 00:07:15.800 famous example is in A Wizard of Earthsea. The 00:07:15.800 --> 00:07:18.879 young wizard, Ged, in a moment of pride and wanting 00:07:18.879 --> 00:07:21.939 power, he accidentally summons this horrifying, 00:07:22.259 --> 00:07:25.139 shapeless evil. The shadow. That's it. That evil 00:07:25.139 --> 00:07:27.319 is seen as the perfect literary representation 00:07:27.319 --> 00:07:30.360 of the Jungian shadow archetype. It's the ultimate 00:07:30.360 --> 00:07:33.540 internal battle. Your greatest enemy is the dark, 00:07:33.540 --> 00:07:35.600 repressed part of yourself that you just refuse 00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:38.370 to accept. Right. But this is where the timeline 00:07:38.370 --> 00:07:41.110 gets a little sticky, right? Yeah. If Jung was 00:07:41.110 --> 00:07:43.389 such a clear influence, why did she claim she 00:07:43.389 --> 00:07:45.290 hadn't even read him yet? Yeah, that's where 00:07:45.290 --> 00:07:47.850 the nuance comes in. Le Guin was explicit. She 00:07:47.850 --> 00:07:50.050 said she had not read Jung before writing the 00:07:50.050 --> 00:07:54.170 first Earthsea books, which suggests she just... 00:07:54.490 --> 00:07:58.170 she grasped these psychological truths intuitively. 00:07:58.430 --> 00:08:00.490 Maybe she absorbed them through her mother's 00:08:00.490 --> 00:08:03.410 psychology degree or just the general intellectual 00:08:03.410 --> 00:08:06.209 air of the Kroger house. It seems likely. But 00:08:06.209 --> 00:08:08.470 regardless, she later fully embraced the concept. 00:08:08.750 --> 00:08:11.089 She even lectured on her interpretation of the 00:08:11.089 --> 00:08:14.209 shadow and published it in her 1974 essay, The 00:08:14.209 --> 00:08:16.680 Child and the Shadow. So it became a conscious 00:08:16.680 --> 00:08:18.980 tool for her, even if it started out as an intuitive 00:08:18.980 --> 00:08:22.180 one. The archetypal journey that need to reconcile 00:08:22.180 --> 00:08:25.319 the dark and light inside yourself is just fundamental 00:08:25.319 --> 00:08:28.149 to her work. Absolutely. And you see other Jungian 00:08:28.149 --> 00:08:30.529 ideas, too. Concepts like the animus and the 00:08:30.529 --> 00:08:33.230 anima, the unconscious masculine side of a woman 00:08:33.230 --> 00:08:35.730 and the feminine side of a man. You see those 00:08:35.730 --> 00:08:38.649 explored all over her work on gender, especially 00:08:38.649 --> 00:08:40.929 in The Left Hand of Darkness and later Earthsea 00:08:40.929 --> 00:08:43.710 books like Tehanu. So if Jung provided the inner 00:08:43.710 --> 00:08:46.309 scaffolding for her characters, Taoism provided 00:08:46.309 --> 00:08:49.309 the cosmic philosophy. Exactly. She described 00:08:49.309 --> 00:08:52.049 herself as being raised irreligious as a jackrabbit. 00:08:52.379 --> 00:08:54.940 But she adopted Taoism so deeply that she eventually 00:08:54.940 --> 00:08:57.139 published her own translation of the Tao teaching 00:08:57.139 --> 00:09:00.820 in 1997. Taoism is just central. It's what gives 00:09:00.820 --> 00:09:03.860 her worlds their unique moral compass. It's an 00:09:03.860 --> 00:09:06.620 explicit rejection of that typical Western good 00:09:06.620 --> 00:09:10.379 versus evil dualism. The core idea is equilibrium, 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:13.720 the balance. In Earthsea, the entire archipelago, 00:09:13.799 --> 00:09:16.259 the relationship between land and sea, life and 00:09:16.259 --> 00:09:18.840 death, light and dark, it's all based on this 00:09:18.840 --> 00:09:21.100 delicate balance. So if a wizard in Earthsea 00:09:21.100 --> 00:09:23.370 makes a mistake, They're not necessarily fighting 00:09:23.370 --> 00:09:26.210 some evil dark lord. They're disrupting a cosmic 00:09:26.210 --> 00:09:29.690 state of being. Precisely. The evil in Earthsea 00:09:29.690 --> 00:09:32.169 isn't an external force trying to conquer the 00:09:32.169 --> 00:09:34.690 world. It's the character's own misunderstanding 00:09:34.690 --> 00:09:38.110 or their overreach or their lack of respect for 00:09:38.110 --> 00:09:40.929 that necessary balance. Evil is a disturbance 00:09:40.929 --> 00:09:43.450 of the whole system, not some separate opposing 00:09:43.450 --> 00:09:46.419 entity. That is a crucial distinction from most 00:09:46.419 --> 00:09:49.419 conventional fantasy, which is always about absolute 00:09:49.419 --> 00:09:52.860 good versus absolute evil. For her, balance is 00:09:52.860 --> 00:09:55.620 the goal. And reconciling opposites, like the 00:09:55.620 --> 00:09:59.519 anarchist collective of Anaras versus the hierarchical 00:09:59.519 --> 00:10:02.360 wealth of Uras and the dispossessed, that's the 00:10:02.360 --> 00:10:05.100 path to truth. And that Taoist principle of non 00:10:05.100 --> 00:10:08.029 -meddling, wu -wei. That must translate directly 00:10:08.029 --> 00:10:10.350 into how she writes about power and intervention. 00:10:10.710 --> 00:10:12.370 It does. And this is where you see the anthropological 00:10:12.370 --> 00:10:14.529 pillar and the Taoist pillar just merge beautifully. 00:10:14.730 --> 00:10:17.269 Wu Wei literally means non -action or effortless 00:10:17.269 --> 00:10:19.690 action. It's about leaving things alone, letting 00:10:19.690 --> 00:10:21.730 nature take its course. Which is the ultimate 00:10:21.730 --> 00:10:23.830 goal of the heinous anthropologists, the members 00:10:23.830 --> 00:10:26.269 of the Ikumen. They try to observe and study 00:10:26.269 --> 00:10:28.789 alien cultures without interfering, to avoid 00:10:28.789 --> 00:10:30.870 that colonial imposition of their own values. 00:10:31.250 --> 00:10:33.009 Characters in a book like The Lathe of Heaven 00:10:33.009 --> 00:10:36.250 also embody this. And Gid in Earthsea learns... 00:10:36.269 --> 00:10:38.889 that lesson early on right magic should only 00:10:38.889 --> 00:10:41.210 be used when it's absolutely necessary right 00:10:41.210 --> 00:10:43.370 often for maintenance not for dramatic change 00:10:43.370 --> 00:10:46.389 this whole ethos of restraint is a direct import 00:10:46.389 --> 00:10:48.850 from taoist thought and it makes her narrative 00:10:48.850 --> 00:10:51.070 architecture fundamentally different from most 00:10:51.070 --> 00:10:53.309 western stories of intervention and conquest 00:10:53.309 --> 00:10:56.490 so moving into the chronology of her writing 00:10:56.490 --> 00:11:01.740 we can really see how these deep influences Struggled 00:11:01.740 --> 00:11:04.100 to find a voice at first. Yeah, that initial 00:11:04.100 --> 00:11:08.120 period, 1959 to 61, she was trying to write realistic 00:11:08.120 --> 00:11:10.799 fiction. It was set in a fictional European country 00:11:10.799 --> 00:11:13.759 she made up called Orsinia. She wrote five novels 00:11:13.759 --> 00:11:16.240 set there. Five. And publishers rejected all 00:11:16.240 --> 00:11:18.740 of them. They called them inaccessible. I think 00:11:18.740 --> 00:11:20.960 she had this complex anthropological approach 00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:22.919 to politics that just didn't fit into the commercial 00:11:22.919 --> 00:11:25.759 realism of the time. So she had this huge intellectual 00:11:25.759 --> 00:11:28.480 framework, but no marketplace for it. That must 00:11:28.480 --> 00:11:30.700 have been incredibly frustrating. It was a classic 00:11:30.700 --> 00:11:34.080 case of necessity driving innovation. She realized 00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:36.159 that science fiction and fantasy, with their 00:11:36.159 --> 00:11:38.480 established conventions for alien worlds and 00:11:38.480 --> 00:11:41.120 future societies, they gave her the vehicle she 00:11:41.120 --> 00:11:44.299 needed. The distance she needed to explore these 00:11:44.299 --> 00:11:47.480 radical ideas without being constrained by contemporary 00:11:47.480 --> 00:11:50.980 realism. Exactly. The genres gave her license 00:11:50.980 --> 00:11:53.440 to invent the rules of the society from the ground 00:11:53.440 --> 00:11:56.320 up and apply all that anthropological rigor. 00:11:56.759 --> 00:11:58.960 And that pivot led her pretty quickly to the 00:11:58.960 --> 00:12:01.759 heinous universe. Yep. Her first professional 00:12:01.759 --> 00:12:05.259 SF publication was a short story, April in Paris 00:12:05.259 --> 00:12:08.539 in 1962, and that led to the first three heinous 00:12:08.539 --> 00:12:11.639 novels, Rokannon's World, Planet of Exile, and 00:12:11.639 --> 00:12:13.679 City of Illusions. And it's worth remembering 00:12:13.679 --> 00:12:16.379 how humble the origins were. The first two were 00:12:16.379 --> 00:12:18.500 published as halves of an ace double. Right, 00:12:18.580 --> 00:12:21.299 which, for anyone listening, was this low -cost 00:12:21.299 --> 00:12:23.679 paperback format where two novels were bound 00:12:23.679 --> 00:12:25.559 together back -to -back, two different covers. 00:12:25.720 --> 00:12:27.840 It really speaks to her, you know, tentative 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:30.309 first steps into the genre. Those books were 00:12:30.309 --> 00:12:32.590 already doing so much more than standard genre 00:12:32.590 --> 00:12:34.570 fare. They were already incorporating those core 00:12:34.570 --> 00:12:37.370 Le Guin themes. Absolutely. They formed the heinous 00:12:37.370 --> 00:12:40.629 trilogy. They introduced her classic protagonist, 00:12:41.210 --> 00:12:43.789 the individual on an archetypal journey of self 00:12:43.789 --> 00:12:46.889 -discovery, usually across some vast alien landscape. 00:12:47.480 --> 00:12:50.320 The themes were all there. Communication, cultural 00:12:50.320 --> 00:12:53.419 contact, reconciling opposites. And she established 00:12:53.419 --> 00:12:56.580 the foundational tools of the Ikumen, that interstellar 00:12:56.580 --> 00:12:59.000 league of planets, including the Ansible. She 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:02.419 actually coined that term in 1966 for an instantaneous 00:13:02.419 --> 00:13:05.360 communication device. Then we get to that major 00:13:05.360 --> 00:13:08.000 turning point in the late 60s. She basically 00:13:08.000 --> 00:13:10.730 hit literary lightning. twice in two years. 1968 00:13:10.730 --> 00:13:14.289 and 1969 were just seismic. A Wizard of Earthsea 00:13:14.289 --> 00:13:16.870 in 68 was technically for a young adult audience, 00:13:17.149 --> 00:13:19.350 but it captivated everyone and it was praised 00:13:19.350 --> 00:13:22.029 instantly for subverting fantasy tropes. Most 00:13:22.029 --> 00:13:24.429 importantly, the protagonist, Ged, and most of 00:13:24.429 --> 00:13:26.350 the people in the archipelago, they were explicitly 00:13:26.350 --> 00:13:28.710 described as having dark skin. Which was a radical 00:13:28.710 --> 00:13:31.309 rejection of the dominant white European default 00:13:31.309 --> 00:13:33.730 you found in almost all fantasy literature at 00:13:33.730 --> 00:13:35.919 the time. And then... The Left Hand of Darkness 00:13:35.919 --> 00:13:38.539 in 69, which took that same idea of subverting 00:13:38.539 --> 00:13:41.029 norms and applied it to gender. That's the heinous 00:13:41.029 --> 00:13:43.970 novel on the ambisexual planet Giffen. It became 00:13:43.970 --> 00:13:46.429 a landmark in feminist science fiction and boom, 00:13:46.629 --> 00:13:49.049 it immediately won both the Hugo and the Nebula. 00:13:49.409 --> 00:13:53.210 That whole period from 66 to 74 is widely seen 00:13:53.210 --> 00:13:55.769 as her creative peak with this rapidly increasing 00:13:55.769 --> 00:13:58.970 political focus. What was it that catalyzed that 00:13:58.970 --> 00:14:00.970 sharpening of her political edge in the early 00:14:00.970 --> 00:14:04.190 70s? Well, Le Guin was profoundly affected by 00:14:04.190 --> 00:14:07.230 the Vietnam War and all the intense social upheaval 00:14:07.230 --> 00:14:10.500 of that era. Her anger over the war directly 00:14:10.500 --> 00:14:14.259 fueled the word for world is forest in 1973. 00:14:14.659 --> 00:14:17.940 Which explored colonialism and militarism. Right. 00:14:18.019 --> 00:14:21.220 By contrasting this destructive, hyper -masculine, 00:14:21.220 --> 00:14:23.860 and frankly uncaring colonizing human society 00:14:23.860 --> 00:14:26.440 who are just there to harvest the planet's wood. 00:14:26.639 --> 00:14:29.299 With the Athsean natives, a gentle species who 00:14:29.299 --> 00:14:31.500 had adapted their whole way of life to the planet's 00:14:31.500 --> 00:14:33.919 ecology. She used the story to make a very clear 00:14:33.919 --> 00:14:36.519 statement about imperialism. She even called 00:14:36.519 --> 00:14:39.250 it her most overt political statement in fiction. 00:14:39.269 --> 00:14:41.529 It's a sharp critique of American imperial intervention 00:14:41.529 --> 00:14:44.429 and a powerful early text on ecological ethics. 00:14:44.710 --> 00:14:48.809 And it won a Hugo Award, deservedly so. The pace 00:14:48.809 --> 00:14:50.889 of her output and the acclaim during this period 00:14:50.889 --> 00:14:53.710 is just breathtaking. You've got the first three 00:14:53.710 --> 00:14:56.529 Earthsea books, this hugely political sci -fi, 00:14:56.710 --> 00:14:59.629 and it's all leading up to her anarchist masterpiece. 00:15:00.090 --> 00:15:03.590 The Dispossessed in 1974. Which has the subtitle 00:15:03.590 --> 00:15:07.000 An Ambiguous Utopia. It won both the Hugo and 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:09.299 the Nebula again, making her the first person 00:15:09.299 --> 00:15:11.820 ever to win both awards for two different books. 00:15:11.960 --> 00:15:14.480 And it engaged directly with political ideas 00:15:14.480 --> 00:15:17.259 from pacifist anarchists like Peter Kropotkin 00:15:17.259 --> 00:15:19.519 and the counterculture movements of the 60s and 00:15:19.519 --> 00:15:21.759 70s. And we can't forget the short fiction from 00:15:21.759 --> 00:15:24.240 this time. They are maybe the most distilled 00:15:24.240 --> 00:15:26.919 versions of her ethical philosophy. The two powerhouses. 00:15:27.360 --> 00:15:29.799 The ones who walk away from omelas. Which won 00:15:29.799 --> 00:15:32.159 a Hugo. And the day before the revolution. Which 00:15:32.159 --> 00:15:34.870 won a Nebula. Both are basically thought experiments 00:15:34.870 --> 00:15:37.970 disguised as fiction. Amala's especially is this 00:15:37.970 --> 00:15:40.570 enduring parable about the moral cost of happiness. 00:15:40.970 --> 00:15:43.570 These works just cemented her place as a writer 00:15:43.570 --> 00:15:46.169 of essential ethical inquiry. So moving beyond 00:15:46.169 --> 00:15:49.190 that incredible era, the later decades of her 00:15:49.190 --> 00:15:52.960 career saw her really diversify. She showed she 00:15:52.960 --> 00:15:56.059 truly was an American novelist who refused to 00:15:56.059 --> 00:15:58.559 be boxed in by genre. She started experimenting 00:15:58.559 --> 00:16:00.700 with all kinds of formats. There were realistic 00:16:00.700 --> 00:16:03.320 novels, like very far away from anywhere else 00:16:03.320 --> 00:16:05.179 in Malafrina, where she actually went back to 00:16:05.179 --> 00:16:08.000 her fictional Orsinia setting. But maybe the 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:10.480 most radical structural experiment of her whole 00:16:10.480 --> 00:16:14.039 career came in 1985, Always Coming Home. Yeah, 00:16:14.039 --> 00:16:17.289 that book is... It's hard to even describe as 00:16:17.289 --> 00:16:19.470 a novel. It just pushes the boundaries of what 00:16:19.470 --> 00:16:21.549 a narrative can be. How did she approach it? 00:16:21.649 --> 00:16:23.750 It's groundbreaking because the structure itself 00:16:23.750 --> 00:16:26.590 is an anthropological artifact. The whole book 00:16:26.590 --> 00:16:29.789 is a fictionalized anthropological report. on 00:16:29.789 --> 00:16:32.309 a society called the Kish. They're a pacifist, 00:16:32.330 --> 00:16:35.049 matriarchal society living in a post -flood Napa 00:16:35.049 --> 00:16:38.470 Valley. Exactly. And Le Guin uses this non -linear 00:16:38.470 --> 00:16:40.649 kind of heterogeneous structure. She includes 00:16:40.649 --> 00:16:43.070 myths, rough drawings, musical scores, recipes, 00:16:43.350 --> 00:16:45.629 extensive field notes. It's a book that invites 00:16:45.629 --> 00:16:48.169 you, the reader, to be an active researcher and 00:16:48.169 --> 00:16:50.289 not just a passive audience. It sounds like her 00:16:50.289 --> 00:16:53.139 father's influence came full circle. But she 00:16:53.139 --> 00:16:55.679 was applying it to a civilization that she invented 00:16:55.679 --> 00:16:58.620 herself. That's a perfect way to put it. It uses 00:16:58.620 --> 00:17:01.440 her entire life's training. By presenting all 00:17:01.440 --> 00:17:03.639 this material as a collection of fragments, a 00:17:03.639 --> 00:17:06.240 carrier bag of information, you might say, she 00:17:06.240 --> 00:17:09.019 forces you to synthesize the culture for yourself. 00:17:09.720 --> 00:17:12.400 Critics praised its radical form. It was seen 00:17:12.400 --> 00:17:14.599 as one of the most important experimental works 00:17:14.599 --> 00:17:16.859 of the decade. And she also returned to her most 00:17:16.859 --> 00:17:19.119 famous worlds later in life, especially Earthsea. 00:17:19.869 --> 00:17:22.349 But there was an 18 -year gap before she wrote 00:17:22.349 --> 00:17:25.650 Tehanu in 1990. What prompted that? That gap 00:17:25.650 --> 00:17:27.890 let her own philosophy evolve, especially her 00:17:27.890 --> 00:17:30.809 thinking on gender. Tehanu was a conscious revision 00:17:30.809 --> 00:17:34.009 of the earlier trilogy. It has a notably grimmer 00:17:34.009 --> 00:17:36.890 tone, and it directly challenges the gender dynamics 00:17:36.890 --> 00:17:39.089 of the first books. Where men controlled magic 00:17:39.089 --> 00:17:42.220 and women were, well... limited. Right. Tehanu 00:17:42.220 --> 00:17:44.740 focuses on the female protagonist, Tenor, and 00:17:44.740 --> 00:17:46.980 all the constraints placed upon her. It celebrates 00:17:46.980 --> 00:17:49.559 the power of quiet domestic life, the kind of 00:17:49.559 --> 00:17:52.319 stuff often dismissed in high fantasy. It won 00:17:52.319 --> 00:17:54.940 her a third nebula for best novel, which just 00:17:54.940 --> 00:17:57.599 proves her capacity for growth and self -critique. 00:17:57.720 --> 00:18:00.599 And we see that same continuous evolution in 00:18:00.599 --> 00:18:02.559 her later heinous work too, right? Yeah, she 00:18:02.559 --> 00:18:04.839 went back to the heinous cycle in the 90s with 00:18:04.839 --> 00:18:06.960 stories that pushed even further on sexuality 00:18:06.960 --> 00:18:10.339 and social rules like coming of age and car hide. 00:18:10.640 --> 00:18:13.240 It's set on the same planet as the left hand 00:18:13.240 --> 00:18:15.480 of darkness. And she said herself that it was 00:18:15.480 --> 00:18:17.799 a story she couldn't have written in the 60s. 00:18:17.819 --> 00:18:20.059 Right. She said it was so trans aggressively 00:18:20.059 --> 00:18:23.400 sexual and so morally courageous that she just 00:18:23.400 --> 00:18:26.460 wasn't ready for it back then. Her comfort level 00:18:26.460 --> 00:18:29.160 and exploring these complex, non -heteronormative 00:18:29.160 --> 00:18:32.779 relationships grew as she. and as the culture 00:18:32.779 --> 00:18:35.039 around her shifted. Her final fictional works 00:18:35.039 --> 00:18:37.319 were for adolescents, but they still had all 00:18:37.319 --> 00:18:39.839 that intellectual rigor. Her final trilogy, The 00:18:39.839 --> 00:18:42.279 Annals of the Western Shore Gifts, Voices and 00:18:42.279 --> 00:18:45.279 Powers, was for young adults, but Powers, the 00:18:45.279 --> 00:18:47.880 last one, still won the Nebula for Best Novel 00:18:47.880 --> 00:18:50.940 in 2009. So even in her later years, her focus 00:18:50.940 --> 00:18:54.230 was consistent. Always stories about moral development, 00:18:54.470 --> 00:18:57.309 escaping societal constraints, and the responsibilities 00:18:57.309 --> 00:19:00.089 that come with personal power. Her final years 00:19:00.089 --> 00:19:03.089 were more focused on nonfiction, poetry, and 00:19:03.089 --> 00:19:05.569 translation, which gave us these really important 00:19:05.569 --> 00:19:07.970 collections of her essays and conversations that 00:19:07.970 --> 00:19:11.029 documented her thinking even further. Okay, so 00:19:11.029 --> 00:19:13.089 now we get to the engine room, the core themes 00:19:13.089 --> 00:19:15.390 that really define her impact. And we have to 00:19:15.390 --> 00:19:17.569 start with the centrality of gender and sexuality. 00:19:18.160 --> 00:19:20.640 which is inseparable from The Left Hand of Darkness. 00:19:20.940 --> 00:19:23.099 Yeah, The Left Hand of Darkness is still such 00:19:23.099 --> 00:19:26.400 a crucial document. The premise is just brilliant. 00:19:26.799 --> 00:19:29.480 On the planet Githin, the inhabitants are ambisexual. 00:19:29.740 --> 00:19:32.440 They exist in this state of sexual latency called 00:19:32.440 --> 00:19:34.759 Kemmer. And only during their monthly fertility 00:19:34.759 --> 00:19:38.279 cycle do they adopt either male or female sexual 00:19:38.279 --> 00:19:40.059 characteristics, and it depends on the context. 00:19:40.259 --> 00:19:42.359 Right. It's the most famous literary exploration 00:19:42.359 --> 00:19:45.500 of androgyny. It asks this radical question. 00:19:45.799 --> 00:19:48.680 What if gender wasn't a fixed continuous social 00:19:48.680 --> 00:19:51.640 factor. And the hypothesis was that this lack 00:19:51.640 --> 00:19:53.559 of fixed gender would eliminate certain types 00:19:53.559 --> 00:19:56.759 of societal conflict. Yes. The Terran observer, 00:19:57.099 --> 00:19:59.720 Genly Ai, he really struggles with Chthenian 00:19:59.720 --> 00:20:02.319 society at first because his own fixed masculinity 00:20:02.319 --> 00:20:05.880 is a barrier. He perceives them as perpetually 00:20:05.880 --> 00:20:08.119 masculine just because of the language he uses. 00:20:08.460 --> 00:20:11.019 The novel suggests that the absence of fixed 00:20:11.019 --> 00:20:13.690 gender is what allows their society to operate 00:20:13.690 --> 00:20:16.150 without war, without that constant competition 00:20:16.150 --> 00:20:19.130 driven by sexual selection. It's hailed as a 00:20:19.130 --> 00:20:21.849 landmark. But as we said, she was always evolving. 00:20:22.009 --> 00:20:24.890 And the novel got significant critique, even 00:20:24.890 --> 00:20:27.029 as it was winning awards. Oh, for sure. And from 00:20:27.029 --> 00:20:29.009 a feminist perspective, which is kind of ironic. 00:20:29.109 --> 00:20:31.740 Exactly. What were the main points of contention? 00:20:31.859 --> 00:20:34.039 Well, it was the pronouns. I mean, the Gothenians 00:20:34.039 --> 00:20:37.019 are ambisexual, but the text overwhelmingly uses 00:20:37.019 --> 00:20:40.640 masculine pronouns, he, him, to describe them. 00:20:40.779 --> 00:20:42.740 Which inadvertently reinforces the masculine 00:20:42.740 --> 00:20:45.380 as... the default human experience. Exactly. 00:20:45.680 --> 00:20:48.380 And on top of that, while they had the potential 00:20:48.380 --> 00:20:51.259 to adopt feminine traits during Kemmer, the novel 00:20:51.259 --> 00:20:53.579 mostly focuses on political and institutional 00:20:53.579 --> 00:20:56.299 roles, which are traditionally masculine pursuits. 00:20:56.460 --> 00:20:59.319 Plus, it only really showed heterosexual pairings 00:20:59.319 --> 00:21:01.180 during Kemmer. So even while challenging the 00:21:01.180 --> 00:21:03.720 structure of gender, she was still, in a way, 00:21:03.799 --> 00:21:06.140 using the structure of patriarchal language and 00:21:06.140 --> 00:21:08.880 narrative. How did she respond to that? Because 00:21:08.880 --> 00:21:10.660 her response is key. She didn't get defensive. 00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:14.140 She engaged. She revisited these critiques in 00:21:14.140 --> 00:21:17.380 her essays and her later work. She actually apologized 00:21:17.380 --> 00:21:19.619 for the heteronormative focus. And crucially, 00:21:19.720 --> 00:21:23.039 she responded fictionally. In later heinous stories 00:21:23.039 --> 00:21:26.019 like Coming of Age and Carhide, she consciously 00:21:26.019 --> 00:21:28.579 used feminine pronouns for the latent Gathenians, 00:21:28.740 --> 00:21:31.220 directly correcting that earlier linguistic bias. 00:21:31.640 --> 00:21:33.839 And we saw that revision in Earthsea, too, right? 00:21:33.940 --> 00:21:36.920 In Tehanu, she tackled the ingrained patriarchy 00:21:36.920 --> 00:21:39.869 of that world head on. Absolutely. The original 00:21:39.869 --> 00:21:41.930 Earth to Sea novels had been criticized for presenting 00:21:41.930 --> 00:21:44.349 a world where power high magic was almost exclusively 00:21:44.349 --> 00:21:47.549 for men. In Tehanu, she radically revised that. 00:21:47.670 --> 00:21:50.509 The book focuses on Tanar, showing that true 00:21:50.509 --> 00:21:53.029 fundamental power lies not in dramatic wizardry, 00:21:53.049 --> 00:21:55.549 but in the quiet, necessary work of nurturing 00:21:55.549 --> 00:21:58.049 and community power that's often dismissed as 00:21:58.049 --> 00:22:00.710 women's work. She just flipped the paradigm of 00:22:00.710 --> 00:22:03.430 what a heroic act is. And this challenge to the 00:22:03.430 --> 00:22:06.609 heroic act brings us directly to her most important 00:22:06.609 --> 00:22:09.440 piece of nonfiction. on this. The carrier bag 00:22:09.440 --> 00:22:11.700 theory of fiction. This is a concept we have 00:22:11.700 --> 00:22:14.000 to spend some time on. What is she critiquing? 00:22:14.019 --> 00:22:17.099 She's critiquing the traditional narrative form 00:22:17.099 --> 00:22:19.960 of Western civilization, which she calls the 00:22:19.960 --> 00:22:22.789 killer story. This narrative, she argues, is 00:22:22.789 --> 00:22:25.609 all about the spear, the arrow, the sword. It's 00:22:25.609 --> 00:22:28.170 the story of the hero, usually male, who goes 00:22:28.170 --> 00:22:30.910 out, hunts, dominates, and conquers, and it all 00:22:30.910 --> 00:22:34.170 leads to this big climax of confrontation. It's 00:22:34.170 --> 00:22:37.190 a story based on hierarchy, aggression, and singular 00:22:37.190 --> 00:22:39.670 achievement. And she argues that the first tools 00:22:39.670 --> 00:22:41.769 humanity made weren't weapons at all. They were 00:22:41.769 --> 00:22:44.450 containers. The carrier bag, the basket, the 00:22:44.450 --> 00:22:47.190 sling, the pot. Tools made not for killing, but 00:22:47.190 --> 00:22:49.819 for gathering, holding, and sharing. The killer 00:22:49.819 --> 00:22:52.180 story, she says, is a distraction from the true, 00:22:52.359 --> 00:22:54.859 more essential and probably older narrative of 00:22:54.859 --> 00:22:58.240 human survival, cooperation and community. So 00:22:58.240 --> 00:23:00.720 she proposed this carrier bag theory of fiction. 00:23:00.859 --> 00:23:02.759 What does that look like in practice in her books? 00:23:02.960 --> 00:23:05.460 Well, it fundamentally shifts the focus of the 00:23:05.460 --> 00:23:08.339 story. Instead of a straight line toward a single 00:23:08.339 --> 00:23:11.180 violent climax, the carrier bag narrative is 00:23:11.180 --> 00:23:14.440 about process, complexity, relationships. It's 00:23:14.440 --> 00:23:16.819 heterogeneous. It holds many different things 00:23:16.819 --> 00:23:19.160 at once, just like Always Coming Home does, with 00:23:19.160 --> 00:23:22.380 its poems and recipes and myths. It rejects the 00:23:22.380 --> 00:23:25.119 idea that a story has to be a weapon. Exactly. 00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:28.140 Her protagonists, like Jed trying to integrate 00:23:28.140 --> 00:23:30.859 his shadow or Shevek trying to build a better 00:23:30.859 --> 00:23:33.680 society, they aren't conquering villains. They're 00:23:33.680 --> 00:23:35.940 gathering knowledge, maintaining balance. and 00:23:35.940 --> 00:23:38.420 striving for reconciliation. It's a narrative 00:23:38.420 --> 00:23:41.420 of humility, not domination. That shifts us perfectly 00:23:41.420 --> 00:23:45.480 to her third core theme, anarchism, utopia, and 00:23:45.480 --> 00:23:48.559 that unrelenting critique of power. If she doesn't 00:23:48.559 --> 00:23:50.500 believe in the killer story, she definitely doesn't 00:23:50.500 --> 00:23:52.640 believe in centralized authority. Not at all. 00:23:52.759 --> 00:23:54.700 Alternative political systems are a constant 00:23:54.700 --> 00:23:57.079 experiment in her work. And The Dispossessed 00:23:57.079 --> 00:23:59.240 is the ultimate thought experiment. It's subtitled 00:23:59.240 --> 00:24:02.160 An Ambiguous Utopia for a Reason. And it draws 00:24:02.160 --> 00:24:04.700 from pacifist anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, 00:24:04.819 --> 00:24:07.319 who championed mutual aid over state control. 00:24:07.740 --> 00:24:10.500 Right. And Legreen is widely credited with helping 00:24:10.500 --> 00:24:13.500 to, quote, rescue anarchism from the cultural 00:24:13.500 --> 00:24:15.480 ghetto and bring it into serious intellectual 00:24:15.480 --> 00:24:17.799 consideration. So let's look at the contrast 00:24:17.799 --> 00:24:20.700 between the twin planets Uraz and Anars. Uraz 00:24:20.700 --> 00:24:22.720 is a planet of incredible wealth, but it's also 00:24:22.720 --> 00:24:26.380 deeply authoritarian, capitalist, hierarchical, 00:24:26.420 --> 00:24:29.859 misogynistic. Anars, the moon where the Odonian 00:24:29.859 --> 00:24:33.569 anarchists live, is materially poorer. It's dusty, 00:24:33.710 --> 00:24:36.569 resource scarce. But the society is based on 00:24:36.569 --> 00:24:38.910 cooperation, decentralization and individual 00:24:38.910 --> 00:24:41.930 liberty. No money, no mandatory government. It 00:24:41.930 --> 00:24:44.490 sounds like a perfect utopia on paper, but she 00:24:44.490 --> 00:24:46.730 called it an ambiguous utopia. So where's the 00:24:46.730 --> 00:24:49.369 ambiguity? What's the flaw? The ambiguity is 00:24:49.369 --> 00:24:51.670 in the tension between total individual freedom 00:24:51.670 --> 00:24:54.630 and the necessary structure of a society. The 00:24:54.630 --> 00:24:56.670 Odonians on Inaras, they're free from state oppression, 00:24:56.930 --> 00:25:00.069 but they often face this cultural rigidity, a 00:25:00.069 --> 00:25:02.470 psychological pressure to conform. A kind of 00:25:02.470 --> 00:25:04.490 bureaucratic inertia, even without a bureaucracy. 00:25:05.240 --> 00:25:08.240 Exactly. Chevec, the protagonist, he feels this 00:25:08.240 --> 00:25:11.380 loneliness and these stifling cultural expectations 00:25:11.380 --> 00:25:14.079 that contradict the ideal of free association. 00:25:14.440 --> 00:25:17.059 He realizes freedom isn't static. It requires 00:25:17.059 --> 00:25:19.960 constant active effort. And it's his journey, 00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:22.200 the physicist modeled on Oppenheimer, between 00:25:22.200 --> 00:25:24.640 these two imperfect systems that drives the whole 00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:27.480 story. It is. He travels to Eros, the hierarchical 00:25:27.480 --> 00:25:30.339 society, to break the isolation of his own people, 00:25:30.400 --> 00:25:33.339 realizing that his own society has become subtly 00:25:33.339 --> 00:25:35.710 restrictive in its own way. own way. Le Guin 00:25:35.710 --> 00:25:37.549 shows that power doesn't just live in governments. 00:25:37.769 --> 00:25:40.650 It lives in social consensus, in cultural expectations, 00:25:40.809 --> 00:25:43.730 in shame. True freedom, Chavek learns, has to 00:25:43.730 --> 00:25:46.269 be chosen every day. And if the dispossessed 00:25:46.269 --> 00:25:49.049 shows the complex internal failures of an anarchist 00:25:49.049 --> 00:25:51.549 state, the short story, the ones who walk away 00:25:51.549 --> 00:25:54.349 from Omelis, shows the damning external cost 00:25:54.349 --> 00:25:57.670 of a conventional utopia. Omelis is a true philosophical 00:25:57.670 --> 00:26:00.329 knife twist. It describes the society of universal 00:26:00.329 --> 00:26:03.250 joy and security, a perfect utopia. But then 00:26:03.250 --> 00:26:05.099 the text. reveals that all this happiness is 00:26:05.099 --> 00:26:07.079 absolutely contingent on the perpetual misery 00:26:07.079 --> 00:26:09.420 of a single neglected child locked away in a 00:26:09.420 --> 00:26:12.380 basement. And all the citizens know the child 00:26:12.380 --> 00:26:14.940 is there. They know if that child were helped, 00:26:15.059 --> 00:26:17.079 the whole paradise of Omelas would collapse. 00:26:17.079 --> 00:26:19.420 And the parable ends with some citizens just 00:26:19.420 --> 00:26:23.119 walking away. into the wilderness, never to return. 00:26:23.339 --> 00:26:25.460 What makes that story so enduringly powerful? 00:26:25.819 --> 00:26:28.319 It works as a critique of contemporary society. 00:26:28.619 --> 00:26:30.279 It's basically asking you, is your comfortable 00:26:30.279 --> 00:26:33.200 life dependent on some unseen systemic injustice, 00:26:33.640 --> 00:26:36.119 global poverty, environmental destruction, whatever 00:26:36.119 --> 00:26:38.339 it is, and the story doesn't tell you where the 00:26:38.339 --> 00:26:40.819 people who walk away go. The ethical weight is 00:26:40.819 --> 00:26:42.940 on you, the reader, to decide what the moral 00:26:42.940 --> 00:26:45.579 course of action is. It forces you to confront 00:26:45.579 --> 00:26:48.579 the hidden costs of your own prosperity. So we've 00:26:48.579 --> 00:26:51.180 established the content and the concepts. Now 00:26:51.180 --> 00:26:54.440 let's look at the legacy. Le Guin spent a lifetime 00:26:54.440 --> 00:26:56.579 fighting for her work to be taken seriously, 00:26:56.819 --> 00:26:58.920 which often meant challenging the very genre 00:26:58.920 --> 00:27:01.440 labels she was stuck with. This is such a crucial 00:27:01.440 --> 00:27:03.559 part of her career because her fiction focused 00:27:03.559 --> 00:27:05.819 on sociology, psychology, philosophy, rather 00:27:05.819 --> 00:27:08.559 than, say, rocket science. She got labeled the 00:27:08.559 --> 00:27:11.720 patron saint of soft science fiction. A term 00:27:11.720 --> 00:27:14.440 that was often used pejoratively to dismiss works 00:27:14.440 --> 00:27:17.369 that focused on the humanities. And intentionally 00:27:17.369 --> 00:27:20.869 or not, to marginalize the writing of women and 00:27:20.869 --> 00:27:23.450 other underrepresented groups in the genre. So 00:27:23.450 --> 00:27:26.109 it wasn't just descriptive. It implied a lack 00:27:26.109 --> 00:27:29.029 of seriousness. Exactly. And she found the label 00:27:29.029 --> 00:27:31.869 divisive. Instead of soft science fiction, she 00:27:31.869 --> 00:27:34.329 proposed a different category, social science 00:27:34.329 --> 00:27:37.230 fiction. This acknowledged the speculative part 00:27:37.230 --> 00:27:39.450 but anchored the work in scientific inquiry, 00:27:39.690 --> 00:27:42.130 specifically the study of human behavior and 00:27:42.130 --> 00:27:44.710 culture, which was her unique strength. She was 00:27:44.710 --> 00:27:47.349 always rejecting the idea that stories rooted 00:27:47.349 --> 00:27:50.069 in social structure were somehow less rigorous 00:27:50.069 --> 00:27:52.769 than stories rooted in astrophysics. And that 00:27:52.769 --> 00:27:55.670 resistance created friction among critics. She 00:27:55.670 --> 00:27:57.589 and other scholars called it the balkanization 00:27:57.589 --> 00:28:00.569 of criticism. Her works were reviewed separately 00:28:00.569 --> 00:28:03.650 by children's lit critics for Earthsea, by SF 00:28:03.650 --> 00:28:06.029 critics for the Hainish novels, and the mainstream 00:28:06.029 --> 00:28:08.549 literary world often missed the connection. She 00:28:08.549 --> 00:28:11.009 famously called the dismissal of children's literature, 00:28:11.210 --> 00:28:14.529 especially the deep moral work in Earthsea, adult 00:28:14.529 --> 00:28:17.529 chauvinist piggery. She did. And yet, despite 00:28:17.529 --> 00:28:19.990 all the genre debates, her prose was consistently 00:28:19.990 --> 00:28:23.019 hailed by major literary critics. Mainstream 00:28:23.019 --> 00:28:25.299 critics just couldn't ignore the quality of the 00:28:25.299 --> 00:28:27.500 writing. Absolutely not. Harold Bloom called 00:28:27.500 --> 00:28:30.359 her an exquisite stylist, noting her lyrical 00:28:30.359 --> 00:28:33.420 style and her moral relevance. The New York Times 00:28:33.420 --> 00:28:36.940 praised her lean but lyrical style, a perfect 00:28:36.940 --> 00:28:39.740 blend of precision and poetry that let her explore 00:28:39.740 --> 00:28:42.900 these complex ethical issues without ever sounding 00:28:42.900 --> 00:28:45.119 preachy. And her influence on the generations 00:28:45.119 --> 00:28:47.970 of writers that came after her is just... Undeniable. 00:28:48.210 --> 00:28:50.769 Enormous. After she died, Michael Chabon called 00:28:50.769 --> 00:28:53.150 her the greatest American writer of her generation. 00:28:54.210 --> 00:28:57.549 Zadie Smith praised her prose. David Mitchell, 00:28:57.789 --> 00:29:00.049 Salman Rushdie, they all cited her influence. 00:29:00.630 --> 00:29:03.789 Neil Gaiman gave maybe the most profound compliment. 00:29:04.150 --> 00:29:06.319 What did he say? He said he learns more from 00:29:06.319 --> 00:29:08.480 her books at every stage of life than from any 00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:10.880 other writer, which just underscores the enduring 00:29:10.880 --> 00:29:13.380 complexity of her moral lessons. And her legacy 00:29:13.380 --> 00:29:16.160 isn't just in the prose. It's in her high -profile 00:29:16.160 --> 00:29:19.220 activism, her willingness to use her voice and 00:29:19.220 --> 00:29:22.359 her awards to take these principled stands. Her 00:29:22.359 --> 00:29:25.400 activism was incredibly principled. In 1977, 00:29:25.740 --> 00:29:28.039 she took the radical step of refusing a Nebula 00:29:28.039 --> 00:29:31.019 Award for her story, The Diary of the Rose. To 00:29:31.019 --> 00:29:33.299 protest the science fiction writers of America's 00:29:33.299 --> 00:29:35.269 decision to revoke the the membership of the 00:29:35.269 --> 00:29:39.109 Polish author Stanisław Lem. She cited the group's 00:29:39.109 --> 00:29:41.269 political intolerance and said she wouldn't be 00:29:41.269 --> 00:29:43.670 associated with an organization that acted that 00:29:43.670 --> 00:29:46.130 way. And she kept that confrontational stance 00:29:46.130 --> 00:29:48.410 against the new power structures of the digital 00:29:48.410 --> 00:29:51.410 age. Yes, this is a major part of her later legacy. 00:29:51.690 --> 00:29:54.769 In 2009, she famously resigned from the Authors 00:29:54.769 --> 00:29:57.970 Guild over its endorsement of Google's book digitization 00:29:57.970 --> 00:30:00.910 project. She believed the guild had betrayed 00:30:00.910 --> 00:30:03.740 the core principles of copyright. She wrote in 00:30:03.740 --> 00:30:05.339 her resignation letter that they had decided 00:30:05.339 --> 00:30:07.859 to deal with the devil. She did. And then she 00:30:07.859 --> 00:30:10.240 took aim at the dominant force in books today, 00:30:10.460 --> 00:30:13.559 Amazon. Her National Book Award acceptance speech 00:30:13.559 --> 00:30:16.180 in 2014. That was a powerful moment that got 00:30:16.180 --> 00:30:18.400 massive media attention. She didn't just accept 00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:21.119 the medal. She used the platform to sharply criticize 00:30:21.119 --> 00:30:23.980 Amazon's control over publishing, arguing that 00:30:23.980 --> 00:30:25.940 the market had become defined by commodities, 00:30:26.220 --> 00:30:29.289 not works of art. Her activism just highlighted 00:30:29.289 --> 00:30:31.349 her consistent belief that art and literature 00:30:31.349 --> 00:30:33.470 are essential human functions that have to be 00:30:33.470 --> 00:30:36.170 protected from corporate domination. It's incredible 00:30:36.170 --> 00:30:38.970 that a writer who so actively resisted the establishment 00:30:38.970 --> 00:30:42.349 still won so many awards from that same establishment. 00:30:42.390 --> 00:30:44.650 It just speaks to the undeniable quality of her 00:30:44.650 --> 00:30:47.869 work. I mean, eight Hugo Awards, six Nebulas, 00:30:47.869 --> 00:30:50.109 four for Best Novel, more than any other writer, 00:30:50.230 --> 00:30:54.190 and 25 Locus Awards. The US Library of Congress 00:30:54.190 --> 00:30:57.069 named her a living legend. She won that National 00:30:57.069 --> 00:30:59.599 Book Foundation Medal. Her lifetime recognition 00:30:59.599 --> 00:31:02.720 really solidified her position as a writer who 00:31:02.720 --> 00:31:05.299 transcended the very genre divides she fought 00:31:05.299 --> 00:31:07.279 against. And we have to circle back to The Ansible. 00:31:07.440 --> 00:31:10.119 Her coinage of that term is such a great example 00:31:10.119 --> 00:31:13.299 of a fictional concept becoming part of the genre's 00:31:13.299 --> 00:31:16.180 shared vocabulary. It is. She coined it in 1966 00:31:16.180 --> 00:31:19.660 in Roe Cannon's world for an instantaneous interstellar 00:31:19.660 --> 00:31:22.420 communication device. The concept was so elegant 00:31:22.420 --> 00:31:24.740 and so necessary for far future storytelling 00:31:24.740 --> 00:31:27.299 that other major authors like Orson Scott Card 00:31:27.299 --> 00:31:30.200 and Neil Gaiman just adopted it. It's a quiet 00:31:30.200 --> 00:31:32.759 tribute to her world -building rigor. Finally, 00:31:32.859 --> 00:31:34.619 we should touch on the difficult issue of adaptations, 00:31:35.039 --> 00:31:37.700 especially given her emphasis on race and identity 00:31:37.700 --> 00:31:40.730 in her work. Le Guin was notoriously cautious 00:31:40.730 --> 00:31:43.970 and often critical of adaptations. She considered 00:31:43.970 --> 00:31:47.190 the 1979 film of The Lathe of Heaven the only 00:31:47.190 --> 00:31:49.990 good adaptation she'd ever seen. She was disappointed 00:31:49.990 --> 00:31:52.509 by the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Earthsea. 00:31:52.670 --> 00:31:55.569 She was. She felt the film prioritized spectacle 00:31:55.569 --> 00:31:58.309 and violence, missing the moral and Taoist focus 00:31:58.309 --> 00:32:00.750 on balance and reconciliation. But the television 00:32:00.750 --> 00:32:03.329 adaptation was the most offensive to her core 00:32:03.329 --> 00:32:06.579 principles. Oh, absolutely. She saved her strongest 00:32:06.579 --> 00:32:10.299 condemnation for the 2004 sci -fi channel miniseries 00:32:10.299 --> 00:32:13.940 Legend of Earthsea. She publicly and unequivocally 00:32:13.940 --> 00:32:16.480 objected to the fundamental betrayal of her vision, 00:32:16.599 --> 00:32:19.099 specifically the whitewashing of her non -white 00:32:19.099 --> 00:32:21.119 characters. She had painstakingly established 00:32:21.119 --> 00:32:23.339 that Earthsea's inhabitants were people of color. 00:32:23.480 --> 00:32:25.680 And the decision to cast white actors in the 00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:28.460 lead roles was, for her, a deep and unacceptable 00:32:28.460 --> 00:32:31.380 insult to the original text's meaning and its 00:32:31.380 --> 00:32:35.009 radical nature. And yet. Her influence endures. 00:32:35.130 --> 00:32:37.430 A forever stamp from the U .S. Postal Service 00:32:37.430 --> 00:32:41.750 in 2021, and just this year, 2024, a crater on 00:32:41.750 --> 00:32:44.589 Mercury was named in her honor. A legacy both 00:32:44.589 --> 00:32:48.210 grounded in social reality and literally extended 00:32:48.210 --> 00:32:52.269 into the cosmos. So, after all this, what does 00:32:52.269 --> 00:32:54.789 it all mean for us today? If we synthesize this 00:32:54.789 --> 00:32:57.230 deep dive, we see an author who used the framework 00:32:57.230 --> 00:32:59.589 of fantastical worlds, not just for entertainment, 00:32:59.710 --> 00:33:01.509 but to become one of the most rigorous and insightful 00:33:01.509 --> 00:33:04.329 social critics of her generation. She truly did. 00:33:04.390 --> 00:33:06.650 Her pivotal role was integrating this profound 00:33:06.650 --> 00:33:09.069 literary complexity, this deep philosophical 00:33:09.069 --> 00:33:12.150 inquiry from Taoism and Jung, and these radical 00:33:12.150 --> 00:33:15.029 social critiques on gender, race, politics, all 00:33:15.029 --> 00:33:17.089 into speculative fiction. She created worlds 00:33:17.089 --> 00:33:18.829 that were functional blueprints for how to think 00:33:18.829 --> 00:33:20.670 differently. Her consistent overarching theme 00:33:20.670 --> 00:33:22.730 from the first Hainish novels to the last Earthsea 00:33:22.730 --> 00:33:25.380 book. was always that search for self and the 00:33:25.380 --> 00:33:27.680 necessary reconciliation of opposites, light 00:33:27.680 --> 00:33:30.220 and dark, individual and society, anarchy and 00:33:30.220 --> 00:33:32.619 hierarchy. Her fiction functions as these essential 00:33:32.619 --> 00:33:34.319 ethical thought experiments, always trying to 00:33:34.319 --> 00:33:36.720 achieve that Taoist ideal of equilibrium. Right. 00:33:36.859 --> 00:33:39.579 She wasn't just inventing worlds. She was, as 00:33:39.579 --> 00:33:42.599 she put it, being a realist of a larger reality. 00:33:43.259 --> 00:33:45.279 Le Guin once said that hard times are coming, 00:33:45.359 --> 00:33:48.140 times when we will be wanting the voices of writers 00:33:48.140 --> 00:33:50.220 who can see alternatives to how we live now. 00:33:50.759 --> 00:33:53.359 This entire body of material suggests her work 00:33:53.359 --> 00:33:56.039 offers not just fictional escapes, but fully 00:33:56.039 --> 00:33:58.900 realized complex models for rethinking freedom, 00:33:59.119 --> 00:34:01.740 community, and power. Which leaves us with a 00:34:01.740 --> 00:34:03.779 final provocative thought for you to mull over. 00:34:04.140 --> 00:34:06.440 Considering the costs and benefits of her invented 00:34:06.440 --> 00:34:09.400 societies, the materially poor but ethically 00:34:09.400 --> 00:34:13.099 advanced anarchists and ors, the pacifist matriarchal 00:34:13.099 --> 00:34:15.579 cash of always coming home, or the painful communal 00:34:15.579 --> 00:34:18.380 tradeoff of omelettes, which of these radically 00:34:18.380 --> 00:34:20.360 different social contracts provides the most 00:34:20.360 --> 00:34:22.579 realistic vision for change we can and should 00:34:22.579 --> 00:34:25.039 explore in our world today? A challenge well 00:34:25.039 --> 00:34:25.539 worth taking.