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The Legacies of Ursula K.
Le Guin:
Science, Fiction, Ethics 1st Edition
Christopher L. Robinson (Editor)
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The Legacies of
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science, Fiction, Ethics
Edited by
Christopher L. Robinson
Sarah Bouttier
Pierre-Louis Patoine
Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture
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Department of English
University of California
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Sarah Bouttier • Pierre-Louis Patoine
Editors
The Legacies of
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science, Fiction, Ethics
Editors
Christopher L. Robinson Sarah Bouttier
École Polytechnique École Polytechnique
Palaiseau, France Palaiseau, France
Pierre-Louis Patoine
New Sorbonne University
Paris, France
ISSN 2731-4359 ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-82826-4 ISBN 978-3-030-82827-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1
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Acknowledgments
For all their help and support for this project during its various stages, we
wish to extend a warm thanks to the following: Danièle André, Daniel
Argèles, Pierre Dauchy, Brian Attebery, Jennifer Eastman Attebery,
Stephanie Burt, Marie-Pier Boucher, Victor Bournerias, Meghann Cassidy,
Jean-Marc Chomaz, Bruce Clarke, David Creuze, Arwen Curry, Maya
Curry, Mathieu Duplay, Vivien Feasson, Gaïd Girard, Carole Khalil,
Veronica Hollinger, Sandrine Laguerre, Eva Lafuente, Irène Langlet,
Christine Lorre, Hélène Machinal, Julie Phillips, Béatrice Pire, Marc
Porée, Isabelle Réguillon, Fabienne Robinson, Julie Sauret, Chantal
Schütz, Olivier Semonnay, Anne Simon, Héloïse Thomas, Natacha Vas-
Deyres, Sherryl Vint, and Frédéric Zantonio.
We would also like to thank Allie Troyanos at Palgrave Macmillan and
Tikoji Rao at Springer Nature for their enthusiasm and kind assistance in
preparing the publication of this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier, and Pierre-
Louis Patoine
2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

Guin’s Career 9
Brian Attebery
3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de Lauretis 27
4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

and The Dispossessed 47
Dennis Wilson Wise
5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

Le Guin’s Ekumen 65
Arwen Spicer
6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin 83
Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis Gene-Rowe
vii
viii Contents
7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

K. Le Guin and the X-Men107
Stephanie Burt
8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121

Isabelle Stengers
Author Index137
Works by Le Guin141
Notes on Contributors
Brian Attebery is Professor of English at Idaho State University, USA,

and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He has authored
several books about fantasy and science fiction, including The Fantasy
Tradition in American Literature from Irving to Le Guin (1980), Decoding
Gender in Science Fiction (2002), Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the
Remaking of Myth (2014), and Fantasy in the World: How It Means and
What It Does, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Together with
Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, he co-edited The Norton Book of
Science Fiction (1997). He has also edited several volumes in the Library
of America’s reissue of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete
Orsinia (2016), The Hainish Novels & Stories (2017), Always Coming
Home (2019), and Annals of the Western Shore (2020).
Sarah Bouttier is Assistant Professor of English at École Polytechnique,
Paris, France. After completing a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne Nouvelle on
D. H. Lawrence’s poetry and his representation of the nonhuman world,
she taught and researched as a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University.
She has been working on a monograph defining a poetics of the nonhu-
man encompassing a broad range of Anglophone poets of the twentieth
and twenty-first century and has written widely on the nonhuman in lit-
erature and modern and contemporary poetry.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, UK. Her
most recent books include After Callimachus (2020) and Don’t Read
Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019). A new book of poems
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
will appear in 2022. With Jay Edidin, Rachel Gold, and others, she is at
work on a book about the X-Men.
Francis Gene-Rowe is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor at Royal
Holloway, University of London, UK, as well as a sessional lecturer at the
University of Surrey, UK. His thesis explores utopian politics of time, sub-
ject, and world in the work of Philip K. Dick and William Blake. He also
works on and with tabletop gaming, SF poetry, ecocriticism, and decolo-
niality. Gene-Rowe co-directs the London Science Fiction Research
Community and is a Councilor of the British Science Fiction Association.
In 2017, he won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Student Paper
Award, and now serves as one of the Association’s official UK representa-
tives. Gene-Rowe has written for Foundation, SFRA Review, Fantastika
Journal, and Oxford Bibliographies, and serves on the editorial board of
the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy A New Canon series.
Eli Lee is a novelist working at the intersection between literary fiction
and science fiction. Her debut novel, A Strange and Brilliant Light, came
out in July 2021 with Quercus. It explores artificial intelligence and the
politics of job loss through automation, as well as the themes of love,
friendship, and family. She is the Fiction Editor at the literary journal
Minor Literatures, was previously an Articles Editor at Strange Horizons,
and has written fiction, non-fiction, and criticism for The Financial Times,
the i newspaper, The Quietus, The Pigeonhole, and Delayed Gratification.
She is at work on her next novel.
Pierre-Louis Patoine is Assistant Professor of American Literature at
Sorbonne Nouvelle University, co-director of the Science/Literature
research group (litorg.hypotheses.org), and co-editor of the journal
Epistemocritique.org. He has written a monograph on the role of the
empathic, physiological body in the experience of reading (Corps/texte,
ENS Éditions, 2015), and articles exploring biosemiotic, ecocritical, and
neuroaesthetic approaches to immersion and altered states of conscious-
ness, virality, planetary life, and anthropocenic acceleration in literature
(Ursula K. Le Guin, William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard) and video games
(Final Fantasy VII).
Christopher L. Robinson is Assistant Professor of English at the École
Polytechnique, France. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory
of X (LinX), the research group Identities, Cultures, and Histories
(GRICH), and the pilot committee of the Chair of Arts and Sciences
jointly held by École Polytechnique and École nationale supérieure des
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Arts Décoratifs. In addition to completing the first doctoral dissertation

on Le Guin in French at Paris University-Nanterre, he authored the entry
for Le Guin in Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (Les Éditions des
Femmes, 2013), a publication sponsored by UNESCO. Interested in both
gender and genre studies, he has written articles on Le Guin, Kathy Acker,
Willa Cather, H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, H. R. Giger,
and Frank Herbert in journals such as Children’s Literature, Extrapolation,
Names, Textes et Genres, and Yearbook of Comparative and General
Literature. He is the editor, with Sam Azulys at NYU-Paris, of 2001:
l’Odyssée de l’espace: au carrefour des arts et des sciences (Les Éditions de
l’École Polytechnique, 2021).
Arwen Spicer holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of
Oregon, USA, where she focused on progressionist and non-progressionist
discourses in utopian science fiction, including Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
More recently, her work on Anthropocene discourse in the science fiction
of Jeff VanderMeer has been published. She teaches English at Clark
College in Vancouver, Washington, USA, and runs community-based
workshops on workable utopias, a framework for seeking hopeful but real-
istic ways forward for our current world. Her short science fiction story
“Let It Die” is forthcoming in the Le Guin-inspired anthology, Dispatches
from Anarres (2021). Her speculative fiction has also appeared in
Challenging Destiny, Women of the Woods, and Spoon Knife 4.
Isabelle Stengers is Professor Emerita at the Université Libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium. After graduating in chemistry, she turned to philoso-
phy and, as a doctoral student, her collaboration with Nobel Prize winner
Ilya Prigogine led her to develop the contrast between the conceptual
inventiveness of physics and its role as a model of objectivity. Claiming the
irreducible plurality of scientific practices, she has proposed, as a challenge
inseparably political and cultural, the concept of an active ecology of prac-
tices, embedded within a demanding, empowered environment. Her work
is related to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred N. Whitehead, and
William James, as well as to the anthropology of Bruno Latour and the SF
thinking adventure of Donna Haraway. Among her books published in
English translation are: Order out of Chaos with Ilya Prigogine (1984); The
Invention of Modern Science (2000); Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell
with Philippe Pignarre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Cosmopolitics I and II
(2011); Thinking with Whitehead (2011) and Women Who Make a Fuss
(2014) with Vinciane Despret; In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming
Barbarism (2015); and Another Science is Possible (2018).
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Katie Stone is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor working at Birkbeck,

University of London, UK. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism
as imagined in science fiction and she is particularly interested in Marxist,
feminist, and queer readings of the genre. Stone is the co-founder of the
research network Utopian Acts and the research collective Beyond Gender.
She was recently awarded the Peter Nicholls’s essay prize for her work on
James Tiptree Jr., and she is one of this year’s R. D. Mullen Fellows. Stone
has written for Foundation, MLR Review, Vector, and the SFRA Review.
She has a forthcoming article in Utopian Studies on vampirism and uto-
pian hunger.
Dennis Wilson Wise is a lecturer at the University of Arizona, USA, who
studies the link between political theory and speculative fiction. Previous
academic work has appeared in Gothic Studies, Law & Literature,
Extrapolation, and others, and in 2019 he received a R. D. Mullen
Postdoctoral Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies to study modern
alliterative poetry in speculative fiction. An anthology on this modern allit-
erative verse is forthcoming with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Wise is also the reviews editor for Fafnir, which won a World Fantasy
Award in 2020.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier,

and Pierre-Louis Patoine
Abstract Ursula K. Le Guin anticipated many of the problems we are now

facing and imagined new ways of thinking about them. This collection of
studies explores the literary and imaginative, speculative and provisional
modes in which she has engaged with ethical questions related to utopia, the
power of social change, non-coercive intercultural exchange, and the inter-
connectedness between readers and writers. By tracing the literary, ecological,
philosophical, sexual, postcolonial, and anthropological ramifications of her
work, Legacies also takes new approaches to making sense of the “science” of
science fiction. In addition to presenting the main themes of the collection,
this introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Le Guin’s family back-
ground, her cultural and intellectual influences, and the diversity of her oeuvre.
C. L. Robinson (*) • S. Bouttier

École Polytechnique, IP-Paris, Palaiseau, France
e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]
P.-L. Patoine
New Sorbonne University, Paris, France
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. L. Robinson et al. (eds.), The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin,
Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_1
2 C. L. ROBINSON ET AL.
Keywords Alfred Kroeber • Donna Haraway • Epistemology • Fantasy

• Feminism • Frederic Jameson • Indigenous cultures • Intercultural
commonalities • Isabelle Stengers • Science fiction • Social change •
Theodora Kroeber • Ursula K. Le Guin • Utopia
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art,
the art of words.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
A visionary thinker, engaging storyteller, and superb stylist, Ursula K. Le

Guin parted from this world on 22 January 2018, leaving behind a sub-
stantial body of fiction and non-fiction that appears more vital with each
passing day. The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics is
the result of a collective effort to trace the ins and outs of this vitality, map-
ping out itineraries through the vast territories she has bequeathed us.
Why is Le Guin so important for us today? As humanity faces climate
change and species extinction, the overexploitation and appropriation of
natural resources, the continuation and the new incarnations of imperial-
ism and colonialism, military conflicts, and racial and gender oppression,
we turn to the arts and to literature in the hope of finding ways to re-
imagine and re-engineer the world we live in. The twenty-first century has
seen a renewed interest in the reparative, didactic, moral, and political
power of art, an interest central to subfields in the humanities such as eco-
criticism, theories of care and narrative medicine,1 post/decolonialism,
feminist and queer theory, disability, trauma, and animal studies. Le Guin’s
legacy here appears invaluable, inviting us to embark on adventures in
which we brush against planetary ethics and aesthetics, interspecies com-
munities, post-gender and anarchist societies, indigenous knowledge, or
vegetal sentience.
But if Le Guin’s fiction and essays engage with the tensions and contra-
dictions that have animated the consciousness of her time—debates that
have gained in urgency as the years have unfolded—she has never forgot-
ten to make us dream, to open the doors of our imagination, transporting
1
A practice anticipated by Le Guin in the practice of telling life stories in Always
Coming Home.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
us to worlds inhabited by complex characters. It is thus no coincidence

that the chapters of this collection explore the specifically literary and
imaginative, speculative and provisional responses Le Guin has created
when engaging with the ethical questions of how we—women and men,
plants and animals, cultures and individuals, ancestors and descendants—
can live together. Across the multiplicity of their perspectives, the contri-
butions to The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin have been drawn to these
questions, weaving common threads in exploring the possibility and desir-
ability of utopia, of wielding the power of social change, or that of consti-
tuting intercultural commonalities.
By tracing the literary, ecological, philosophical, sexual, postcolonial,
and anthropological ramifications of her work, the chapters of this collec-
tion also delineate new ways of making sense of the “science” of science
fiction. Indeed, in her crafting of alternative worlds and myths, Le Guin
combines science and literature, delineating new methodologies for the
weaving and sharing of knowledge.
Le Guin was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, whom Dell Hymes
described as “the greatest general anthropologist that American anthro-
pology has ever known” (1964, p. 689). Le Guin herself developed an
interest in anthropology, and became immersed in Native American cul-
ture from her earliest childhood. Kroeber kept up with developments in
the other sciences, was a correspondent of Carl Jung, and a personal friend
of Robert Oppenheimer, who would serve Le Guin as a model for the
character of Shevek in The Dispossessed (1974). She also owes much to her
mother, Theodora Kroeber, the author of several books related to
Amerindian cultures.
Despite the demands of family life, Le Guin became a highly prolific
writer, producing some 70 titles, including novels, collections of poetry
and short stories, children’s literature, essays, and translations. She also
wrote hundreds of reviews and short articles, screenplays, the libretti for
two operas and for an orchestral work, The Uses of Music in Uttermost
Parts (1996), which was recorded with the author herself reading the text.
Finally, she co-edited, with Brian Attebery, The Norton Book of Science
Fiction (1993). Focusing on just the fiction, Le Guin has contributed to
multiple genres: mainstream, experimental, magical realism, fantasy and,
of course, science fiction.
With its elegant and fluid style, her writing engages ideas from both the
social and the physical sciences, weaving them into finely tuned narratives
that immerse the reader in sensuous and emotional story-worlds. Drawing
with erudition from fields as diverse as linguistics and ecology, compara-

tive religion and political science, physics and historiography, Le Guin’s
fiction and non-fiction moreover requires us to redefine what it means to
be human, by decentring a traditional, potentially racialized and gendered
vision of humans and placing them in a continuum involving animals,
technology, and more generally the environment. Epistemic exigency is
here matched by moral exigency—a commitment, we note in passing, that
is also the origin of one of the most frequent criticisms of Le Guin and of
the author’s own self-admitted flaws in her fiction: she can be overly didac-
tic, polemical, even preachy at times. In writing The Word for World is
Forest, for example, she admits, “I succumbed … to the lure of the pulpit.
It is a very strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly
than most novelists with ideas … and who therefore is always in danger of
inextricably confusing ideas with opinions” (1979, p. 151).
Despite her proclivity for didacticism, the canonization of Le Guin’s
works is not unrelated to the rich ideational content of her writing. It thus
comes as no surprise that she has inspired philosophers such as Donna
Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Fredric Jameson. The latter’s collection of
essays Archaeologies of the Future (2005) takes its title from a phrase in
Always Coming Home (1985). This novel, which describes the post-
apocalyptic culture of a people who “might be going to have lived a long,
long time from now in Northern California” (Le Guin 2019, p. 7), is the
focus of Brian Attebery’s contribution to this collection. Because they
engage so directly with ideas, her works have drawn admiration, emula-
tion, but also, as we have just mentioned, criticism. This is especially true
of her early science fiction, often deemed timid in its feminism. The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969) continues to generate heated debate and the
expression of divergent opinions. Yet this landmark novel, which describes
a biologically androgynous species, paved the way to an almost exclusively
male literary genre for writers such as Joanna Russ, Doris Lessing, or
Margaret Atwood. In his chapter, Christopher L. Robinson explores Le
Guin’s relationship, indebtedness, and contributions to feminist thought.
The Dispossessed (1974) is recognized not only as one of the masterpieces
of science fiction and anarchist thought, but also an important twentieth-
century contribution to the utopian tradition, which many believe Le
Guin to have revived (see, e.g., Davis and Stillman 2012). Utopianism, a
common thread through this collection, is specifically addressed by Dennis
Wilson Wise and Arwen Spicer.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Le Guin’s reputation has only continued to grow since the turn of the
millennium, due in no small part to how she anticipated many of the prob-
lems we now face and, above all, to how she imagined new ways of think-
ing about such problems. The essays in this collection explore how these
new ways deploy an ethics of science fiction, or more broadly of specula-
tive fiction.
A reader and collaborator of Le Guin over several decades, and the chief
editor of the complete edition of her work published by the Library of
America, Brian Attebery comes back on the so-called two periods of Le
Guin’s writing: a first phase with the early Hainish novels and the Earthsea
trilogy, and then the second more feminist, less epic phase starting with
Tehanu (1990). In Chap. 2 “Always Coming Home and the Hinge in
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career,” Attebery questions this dichotomy by focus-
ing on a work that would constitute the “hinge” between the two phases:
Always Coming Home.
In Chap. 3 “Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,
Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de Lauretis,” Christopher L. Robinson turns to
a short story written during this hinge period of Le Guin’s career, “Ether,
OR” (1996), to connect the author’s personal views on narrative with the
feminist theories of the subject and narrativity that were evolving around
the same time, notably in the work of the Italian philosophers Rosi
Braidotti and Teresa de Lauretis.
Following these attempts at situating Le Guin’s writing within the
recent history of ideas, the next two chapters focus on the utopian aspects
of Le Guin’s writing. In Chap. 4 “Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous:
Plato, Leo Strauss, and The Dispossessed,” Dennis Wilson Wise draws a
provocative parallel between The Dispossessed, and Socrates’s three-fold
utopian polis presented in Plato’s Republic. For Wise, Le Guin and Socrates
are akin in their fundamentally literary approach to utopia, allowing for
ambiguity, irony, and contradiction to settle in at its very heart.
In Chap. 5, “Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in
Le Guin’s Ekumen,” Arwen Spicer carefully unpacks the complex, multi-
layered position of Le Guin’s utopian impulses as they relate both to her
care for and knowledge of indigenous cultures, and to her experience as
belonging to a group of privileged Westerners. By putting in parallel Le
Guin’s oeuvre and recent indigenous SF, she illuminates the power, speci-
ficity, and contradictions of Le Guin’s utopian world-making. In doing so,
Spicer follows Le Guin’s own vision of non-coercive intercultural exchange.
Complementing this contribution, Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis

Gene-Rowe, in Chap. 6 “The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism,
Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin,” propose a
nuanced analysis of the complex relationship established between, on the
one hand, Le Guin’s writings over the decades, and, on the other, indig-
enous knowledge (especially Western Native American), in terms of her
vision and narrative use of time and of other-than-human life-forms.
Without discrediting her, the authors situate Le Guin racially, through an
exploration of her temporalities, nonhuman or not, decolonial or not.
With Chap. 7 “The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula
K. Le Guin and the X-Men,” we turn from indigenous to popular culture.
Stephanie Burt compares the treatment of super powers in the X-Men
comics, especially Asgardian Wars (1985), and in Le Guin’s fiction, nota-
bly The Lathe of Heaven (1971), but also her last fantasy trilogy, Annals of
the Western Shore: Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Burt
strives for a nuanced vision of power and responsibility in the work of Le
Guin, arguing that we must move beyond a simplistic reduction of her
ethos to a celebration of non-action, to one in which power is not power
over things and people, but rather power with, acting and crafting futures
together, instead of dominating.
The final chapter (Chap. 8) of this collection, written by the eminent
philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, addresses fiction and essays span-
ning Le Guin’s entire career to develop an epistemology of “thinking in
SF mode,” one which explores how speculative fiction—more than any
thought experiment in the social sciences—can allow us to see, through
the density of world-building, the potentialities for future change evolving
in the interstices of contemporary experience.
Following a trope dear to Le Guin, this collection of essays offers read-
ings and comments on readings, committing to a hermeneutic practice
reminiscent of the storytelling traditions and the writings scattered on the
walls in the old town of The Telling (2000). Though their methods differ
widely, these readings all avoid translating the intricate thoughts of her
narratives into abstract issues taken outside of their original story-world.
One reading that serves as a primary example here is that of The Asgardian
Wars in the X-Men comics, which, as Burt suggests, explicitly reinterprets
The Lathe of Heaven by introducing nuances in its “ethics of power and
responsibility,” nuances announcing positions that are typical of Le Guin’s
later writing. The centrality of methodology and epistemology in these
readings follows one of Le Guin’s most important teachings: that, as
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Isabelle Stengers shows, SF is a mode of thinking, something to think with

rather than simply about. Within that search for new methods rather than
new content, and for thinking with, rather than thinking about, these
readings bring forth the literary as a site of potentiality and hesitation, as
in the reworking of the interconnectedness of readers and writers dis-
cussed by Attebery and Robinson, or the hesitation as a mode for the
realization of utopias, as Wise deftly introduces. Taken together, these
close readings situate the art of Le Guin in terms of history, race, gender,
and politics, revealing its legacy as an open-ended roadmap to the future,
a methodology for dreaming, and a lesson in style and sensibility. By navi-
gating the constellation of her writings, by making them live through
interpretation, this collection invites us to find, between science, fiction
and ethics, ways of living together in responsibility, joy, and difference.
References
Davis, Laurence, and Peter G. Stillman. 2012. Utopian Journeying: Ursula K. Le
Guin’s The Dispossessed. In Utopian Moments. Reading Utopian Texts, ed.
Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J.C. Davis, 133–129. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Hymes, Dell. 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and
Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1979. Introduction to The Word for World is Forest. In The
Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood,
149–154. New York: Putnam.
———. 2019. Always Coming Home (Author’s Expanded Edition). Ed. Brian
Attebery. New York: The Library of America.
CHAPTER 2
Always Coming Home and the Hinge

in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career
Brian Attebery
Abstract Always Coming Home (ACH) marks a transition in Ursula

K. Le Guin’s career, from her meteoric rise in the mid-1960s to the
remarkable second half of her career. An appropriate metaphor for the
place of ACH in her life and work is the “hinge” that appears as a visual
motif throughout the book: the empty space joining the two spirals that
her imaginary future community terms the heyiya-if. The novel itself
and the essays it inspired her to write show Le Guin rethinking her role
and her art. Moving outward from the hinge, we find Le Guin develop-
ing its implications in her later work: metafictional play, alternative ways
of living in the world, a poetic voice grounded in speech, and alterna-
tives to the heroic conventions of myth.
B. Attebery (*)
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID, USA

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_2
10 B. ATTEBERY
Keywords Always Coming Home • Collaboration • Imaginary

ethnography • Science fictional megatext • Ursula K. Le Guin •
Yin utopia
The Ursula K. Le Guin of the 1960s through 1980s, the Ursula K. Le

Guin of the 1990s–2010s: are they the same? The only possible answer is
yes/no. Or perhaps no/yes. When fans and scholars talk of Le Guin’s
work and career, especially those who (like me) were around during the
first phase, they tend to dwell on one era or the other. I have even seen the
question posed by older scholars: does anyone read Le Guin’s work after
The Dispossessed (1974)? As the later Le Guin began to emerge with works
like Tehanu (1990), some readers spoke of how she had gone over to the
wrong side. She was angry, she was feminist, she had forgotten how to tell
a story. But, of course, a whole new set of readers on this side of the divide
are more interested in the post-1990 Le Guin. They like the reframed
Hainish universe and what Le Guin termed, in a celebrated essay, the
“revisioned” Earthsea (“Earthsea Revisioned,” 1993). They enjoy the
narrative experiments of Changing Planes (2003) and other short fiction.
Their Earthsea has always challenged masculine models of power and her-
oism. They see a new political landscape reflected in a series of science
fiction novellas, “[T]he Annals of the Western Shore,” and later Orsinian
tales such as “Unlocking the Air” (1996). Instead of debating whether
The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness was the best SF novel ever,
they want to talk about The Telling (2000) and Lavinia (2008).
What is not discussed as much by either group is the major work that
falls right between these two careers (either of which, I probably don’t
have to point out here, would be more than enough to establish its author
as a major force in American literature). That island between two conti-
nents is Always Coming Home. Since I have been working closely with the
book for the past couple of years in preparing the Library of America’s
expanded edition (2019), I’m very much aware of how it fits or doesn’t fit
with everything that came before and everything that came after. I don’t
want to isolate it from the rest of her work or to promote the mostly false
notion that she had fallen silent before roaring back with the fiction of the
1990s. Le Guin’s writing from the late 1970s and 1980s includes chil-
dren’s and young adult books, a screenplay, a new outpouring of poetry,
category-defying fiction, and powerful essays on, as Le Guin indicates in
the subtitle of one collection, Words, Women, and Places.
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 11
But I do see a difference between the early and late Le Guin, and it is a
difference in how she viewed herself, her work, and the world. Or maybe
it is a difference in how we, her readers, are invited to view those things. I
know my own view changed radically in the late 1980s. Before then, Le
Guin was a distant, imposing figure, one of my personal idols, someone I
had met once and corresponded with a little but mostly worshiped from
afar. Afterward (the turning point was a conference where she and I were
both on the program and had a chance to talk between events), there was
also a funny, no-nonsense person named Ursula, who came equipped with
a charming, supportive partner named Charles. I don’t know if everyone
who knew Ursula had the same reaction I did, but I distinctly remember
moments in mid-conversation when I would suddenly be flooded with the
realization, “My God, I’m talking with Ursula K. Le Guin!” And then she
would crack a joke or offer a cup of tea, and she would be my friend Ursula
again. For me, that double awareness never got in the way of reading her
work, but it did add an extra resonance, the echo of a living voice, to the
words on the page. So some of what I will say about her later work reflects
my own uniquely privileged and enhanced sense of how literature comes
about and how it communicates, but that altered sense is also related to
the change in Le Guin’s work itself after Always Coming Home.
I will go ahead and refer to Always Coming Home as a novel because
there isn’t really a better word for it, even though it profoundly challenges
our sense of what a novel might be. A novel can be the story of a character
or an anatomy of a world: many novels are both. ACH (for short) is mostly
a world: an imaginary ethnography complete with footnotes and back
matter and a self-doubting ethnographer who calls herself Pandora. It is
an encyclopedia as much as a novel; and also a piece of metafiction and an
anthology of poems, songs, plays, and even recipes. It takes the idea of a
science fictional megatext—the body of knowledge a reader must bring to
the text in order to unfold it—and moves its megatext to the foreground.
There is a more conventional character-centered novel doled out among
its pages but that novel, about a woman called Stone Telling, is (I believe
deliberately) less compelling than the matrix in which it is embedded.
So Always Coming Home is big; it is ambitious; it is strange. Early reac-
tions to it reflected its un-novelish novelty. Everyone agreed that it was
beautifully written—that was pretty much a given with Le Guin—and
meticulously imagined, but it almost seemed designed to frustrate expec-
tations. It was the opposite of space opera: determinedly earthbound, un-
spacey, and un-operatic. In a moment when the great new thing in science
12 B. ATTEBERY
fiction was cyberpunk, it said no both to cyberspace disembodiment and

to street-smart violence.
Not only is Stone Telling’s story less beguiling than many of the other
narrative fragments and cultural glimpses in the book, it is also deliberately
anticlimactic. The novel sets up a potential conflict between the militaristic
Condor and the peaceful Kesh, only to show the Condor invasion fizzling
out because of poor planning, food shortages, and the absence of an
industrial base to support armies and weapons. I suspect that most readers
fail to grasp, at least the first time around, that the Condor story serves
mostly as contrast with less dramatic but ultimately more engaging stories
of ordinary life in the Valley of the Na. The book is really about what it
might mean to be not aggressive, not acquisitive, not wasteful—in other
words, not us. It is not the kind of storytelling we have been told to value:
the kind with violence and catharsis and slices of “real life.” But it’s the
kind of storytelling we need if we are to survive this era of self-interest,
short-sightedness, and cascading catastrophes called the Anthropocene.
This 30-plus-year-old novel is very much a book for the present moment.
We need to take to heart its message (in the poem “Not Being Single-
Minded”) that there is no such thing as throwing away: wherever we
throw things is part of here (2019, p. 567).
The Valley of the Na is a future Napa Valley, California, that looks a lot
like a past, and many hasty readers took the book to be an exercise in nos-
talgia or technophobia. It is, instead, a bold thought-experiment in stabil-
ity and sustainability, which in turn necessitated a literary experiment. To
write Always Coming Home required Le Guin to invent a new kind of
story, one without heroes, one in which community is more interesting
than conflict, and one in which silence is treated as white space is treated
in Zen paintings—not as absence but as an opportunity for imagination.
Le Guin structured the book in such a way that readers could jump
from one Stone Telling segment to the next, treating the rest as backdrop,
like the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings or the cetology sections of
Moby-Dick. But at the same time, she opened a dialogue with the reader
about other ways of reading, writing, and living. The reader who was will-
ing to get lost, to stray from the narrative path, was richly rewarded. I was
recently asked by an interviewer about different ways to read the book,
and it struck me that one could start with the present-day, which shows up
in a story called “A Hole in the Air,” and follow Pandora forward across
the bridge from Here-and-Now to There-and-Then. It really is a
hypertext without a computer interface. That is one reason it gets better

with rereading, when memory provides the linkages.
I’m not sure Le Guin would have been able to write Always Coming
Home if she had not been experiencing a series of personal and profes-
sional transitions. During the time leading up to writing it, Le Guin made
serious efforts to re-identify herself not primarily as a science fiction writer
(though she never did the Margaret Atwood thing of denying her genre
ties—see Davis 2009, for instance) but simply as a writer. In the process of
rethinking her writerly identity, she went back to one of her unpublished
early works, a historical novel set in an imaginary country, and reworked it
as Malafrena, published in 1979 (available in The Complete Orsinia,
2016). In that same year her mother Theodora Kroeber Quinn died.
Ursula was powerfully affected by the deaths of both parents. Referring to
the year her father died, she once commented that, “I came of age, rather
belatedly, at the age of 31,” and one of the first poems that led her to the
world of the Kesh was “written when my mother was mortally ill”; she
called the poem “a first beginning of learning what questions to ask”
(2019, p. 751). Le Guin’s introduction to the 1985 edition of her moth-
er’s volume of California Indian tales, The Inland Whale, suggests autobi-
ography, a glimpse into her own workshop:
I don’t know the genesis of the book, but would guess that separate stories,
which she had tried retelling for their own sake and the work’s sake, began
to make a whole, a shape in her mind. Perhaps she set out to write a book of
stories about women, but I think it more likely that the pattern became
apparent, and the connections imperative, as she worked and reworked and
re-reworked the material—for she was a hard writer, a merciless reviser.
(1989, p. 139)
In 1983, Charles Le Guin had a sabbatical from Portland State University,

and with their children away at college, both Le Guins were free to take
time off from busy lives. They spent five months at the Kroeber ranch in
the Napa Valley—a longtime summer retreat for the extended family—
where Ursula worked out ideas for a future based on E. F. Schumacher’s
concept of appropriate technology, on ideas about simplicity from Henry
Thoreau and others, and on anthropological theories of community.
She was also taking time to rethink her art. It is no coincidence that
about the same time she was working on Always Coming Home she pro-
duced a cluster of powerful essays about gender, language, literature, and
14 B. ATTEBERY
place.1 These had always been present as themes in her work: now they
became its foundation. Having taken part in 1979 in a powerhouse sym-
posium on narrative at the University of Chicago—where speakers
included Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Victor Turner, and Hayden
White—Le Guin was beginning to question assumptions about her chosen
art form. What does the capacity for narrative have to do with being
human? Why does a novel have to follow an arrow-like trajectory? Why is
prose fiction separated off from poetry? Who says utopias are inherently
less interesting, or more impossible, than dystopias? What if Henry James’s
description of novels as “loose, baggy monsters” was not a criticism of the
novel’s form but a celebration of its possibilities?
All of these questions and more are addressed in essays such as “The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989), which is why Library of America
editors and I included a handful of them in the expanded edition of Always
Coming Home. I think of these essays as parts of the novel though pub-
lished apart from it. They are exclaves: non-contiguous territories like the
state of Alaska or Russian Kaliningrad. A book that welcomes into itself
diverse and even contradictory forms of expression already challenges the
idea of textual boundaries. If a novel can be so permeable, then it can also
send parts of itself outside of its covers—an idea that strikes me as being a
lot like contemporary ideas about bodies, consciousness, and the self—for
example, in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999).
So Always Coming Home is a portrait of an artist undergoing personal
change and undertaking professional reassessment. And yet it is very much
of a piece with her earlier work, from the Taoist emphasis on purposeful
inaction to the playful exploration of rhetorical modes and alternative
social structures (think of “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other
Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,”
collected in The Compass Rose, 1982, or “The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas,” collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 1975). How can I
describe that stability through change, or change within continuity?
Running through ACH is a simple geometric figure, a double spiral,
something like a galaxy with two arms curving out from or into the center,
1
The following essays, originally published in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts
on Words, Women, Places (1989), have been reprinted in the expanded version of Always
Come Home (2019): “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”; “The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”; and “Text, Silence, Performance.”
depending on one’s trajectory. In the middle, where a galaxy would have

a core cluster of suns, is an empty space. The text calls this figure a heyiya-
if, from a Kesh word of greeting, heya, whose connotations, Le Guin’s
narrator Pandora informs us, “include sacredness, hinge, connection, spi-
ral, center, praise, and change.” Villages use the heyiya-if as a map. Dances
follow its pattern. The book’s design employs it to divide sections of text.
Margaret Chodos’s illustrations echo the heyiya-if in the eye of a puma,
the topknot of a quail. Rituals proceed according to its logic. Pandora tells
us it is “the visual form of an idea which pervaded the thought and culture
of the Valley,” rather as the yin-yang symbol runs through Taoist philoso-
phy and practice (2019, p. 65). And it all depends on the space in the
middle. The Kesh refer to this empty center as the Hinge. A hinge, says
Pandora, “connects and it holds apart.” (2019, p. 288). If the hinge were
not vacant, there would be no room to dance, no place to say “the word
at the center, heya!” (2019, p. 67).
Always Coming Home marks the hinge in Le Guin’s career. Everything
prior winds not down but in toward it. Everything she wrote afterward
expands out from it. Without it (especially considering the critical bias
toward realist novels and against things like children’s literature), she
might have risked becoming one of those American writers whose lives, as
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, have no second acts. And yet what a splendid
second act was to follow the interval that produced ACH! The first great
work that came soon after, and that very much reflects the same sort of
thinking about alternative ways of seeing and of living, is the novella
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1988). Like the novel,
the story borrows the Native American trickster Coyote (in this case a
female coyote) and explores what it means to see the world through lenses
other than the Western rationalist, capitalist, anthropocentric one that
reduces all kinds of people except “human people” into enemies or com-
modities. And it’s funny.
Next, after rethinking heroes and quests, she returned to the fantasy
world of Earthsea with Tehanu (1990): a novel that denies nothing in the
first trilogy and yet reinterprets all through a feminist lens. Lines dropped
casually in the first three volumes, like “Weak as women’s magic,” and
“Wicked as woman’s magic” (1968, p. 5) become the basis for question-
ing what women are, what magic is, and why weakness should be equated
with wickedness. All of those questions were implied in the first novels and
in the traditional sources from which she built them. Yet somehow no one
noticed, including Le Guin herself, until she stopped to listen to her own
16 B. ATTEBERY
story. She thought she was done with Earthsea, but Tehanu opened the
gates again. It became the first of three new volumes that complement and
critique the first three. I’ll come back to Tehanu in a bit, because its rela-
tionship to ACH is complicated.
The story collection Searoad (1991) picks up some of the themes and
narrative innovations of ACH and applies them to a contemporary coastal
town in Oregon. Searoad was mostly ignored by science fiction and fan-
tasy fans while being hailed by the literary mainstream (one of the stories
won a Pushcart Prize and the whole book was a finalist for a Pulitzer). Yet
I think readers schooled by working through ACH will see the essential
strangeness, the refusal of norms and narrative centering, in the book. I
would love to see an extended reading of Searoad as utopian fiction.
Also in the 1990s, having reached a point where she felt she could no
longer “do space,” that she had exhausted the metaphoric possibilities of
conventional science fiction, Le Guin found a way to launch once again.
First in short stories and then in the novellas that make up Five Ways to
Forgiveness (2017) and finally in the novel The Telling, Le Guin proved
that she was still at the top of her game as an SF writer. Evidence of this
resurgence includes science fiction awards such as the Endeavor and Locus
Awards won by The Telling and Locus and Imaginaire Awards (the latter
for the French translation) for Four Ways to Forgiveness.2
Again bringing in a personal perspective on this renewal of her SF
career, I will point out that Le Guin was reading more science fiction soon
after ACH because she, along with a couple of co-conspirators, was
involved in selecting stories for The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993).
This project is not to be confused with a Norton Anthology of Science
Fiction—which does not exist because the Norton textbook division has
not yet been persuaded that science fiction belongs in the canon. Books in
the “Norton Book of” line were intended to be popular offerings on inter-
esting themes, curated by various literary celebrities. For example, Eudora
Welty edited The Norton Book of Friendship with scholar Ronald A. Sharp.
I was the scholar in this case; Karen Joy Fowler, who was just beginning to
publish, was brought in by Ursula as someone more immersed in the cur-
rent state of the genre than either Ursula or I.
2
In 1995 Le Guin published a collection of four novellas as a “suite” entitled Four Ways to
Forgiveness. She published a new edition with The Library of America in 2017 that included
a fifth novella, and she consequently changed the title to Five Ways to Forgiveness.
At any rate, Ursula took the editing duties very seriously, and that
meant reading scores of stories from the past three decades. We divided up
story collections, anthologies, and magazines to read separately, exchange
favorites, and discuss. And I got the impression that Ursula was growing
more and more excited about a field that had changed since her early
engagement in it. The literary ambitions that were just beginning to be
tolerated in 1960s SF now permeated the genre. As we read new work by
a younger generation of writers—and half-forgotten treasures such as
Carol Emshwiller and R. A. Lafferty—I could see Ursula beginning to
consider how she might fit into this new and exciting version of SF. So it
was no surprise when she began to produce a raft of new science fiction
stories rivaling or bettering anything she had done before.
This set of stories differed from those of the 1960s and 1970s, though.
They were more elusive, more metafictional. Without falling into self-
conscious literariness, they acknowledged the constructedness of the form.
In “The Shobies’ Story” (collected in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,
1994), a method of transport called transilience is revealed to be a func-
tion of narrative and shared belief. From there it is only a side step to the
parables and playfulness of her most Borgesian work, Changing Planes.
But all of this second flowering is forecast in Always Coming Home, includ-
ing the power of shared belief to shape reality. One expression of this
power comes in previously unpublished chapters from the Kesh novel
“Dangerous People,” in which each point-of-view character brings a dif-
ferent meaning to the disappearance of the woman Whette. Another is the
embedded story mentioned before, “A Hole in the Air,” which looks at
our world through the eyes of one of the Kesh who has somehow slipped
back in time. The final dialogue between Pandora and her Kesh informant,
the archivist at Wakwaha-na, celebrates meetings across time and world-
view, where there is not necessarily full understanding but there can be
communion.
Le Guin’s career on the outward spiral of its hinge was not just a mirror
of the first, inward half, with matching volumes of fantasy and SF. A new
self-awareness shows in her writing in an array of forms. She was an acute
critic before the hinge; afterward she became a foundational thinker about
narrative and gender and language. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
for instance, helped redirect Donna Haraway’s thinking about human
development and art, as noted in Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble
(2016, p. 118). “Text, Silence, Performance” shows us how to critique
assumptions about literary value and meaning from outside, from the
18 B. ATTEBERY
perspectives of anthropology and folklore and music. “A Non-Euclidean

View of California as a Cold Place to Be” articulates the alternative model
of utopia that allowed Le Guin to revive that seemingly dead genre—
scholar Tom Moylan, in Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the
Utopian Imagination, terms her approach the “critical utopia” (1986,
p. 10): utopia as process and dialogue rather than as blueprint. She had
created utopias before: now she articulated a theory of the “yin utopia”:
something like Moylan’s concept but more limited and explicitly “partici-
patory, circular, [and] cyclical” (Le Guin 2019, pp. 713–714). Most of her
later work includes glimpses or moments of such yin utopias.
Looking at another mode, though Le Guin had always written poetry,
arguably after listening to the silences and songs of the Kesh she became a
poet. Her earlier verse was less engaging than her powerful prose. It often
comes across as distant: elegant but too tightly controlled. Here is a sam-
ple, part of the title poem from her first collection Wild Angels. The poet
apostrophizes the landscape of California: “O wild angels of the open
hills […]”
Angels of the shadowed ancient land

That lies yet unenvisioned, without myth,
Return, and silent-winged descend
On the winds that you have voyaged with,
And in the barren evening stand
On the hills of my childhood, in whose silences,
Savage, before all sorrow, your presence is. (1975, p. 7)
This is a lovely poem but it is very self-consciously a Poem, from the

conventional “O” of address that opens the poem to the final poetic inver-
sion. Throw in the loose iambic pentameter, the end-rhymes, and the
romantic rhetoric and it becomes clear that this is a young writer emulat-
ing the masters. The poet tells you not only how she feels but how you
are supposed to feel, using loaded words like “shadowed” and “barren”;
the lines are crowded with significance; there is no space, no silence despite
the two-fold references to silence.
Le Guin says she showed the poem to her father, not thinking about
the irony of telling someone who “had spent a good part of the previous
five decades listening to and writing down the vision-inspired myths of
California” that the place was empty of myth. His reaction was, “It’s fine.
But what do you need angels for?” “To mediate,” was her response.
“Why?” said my father. “Mediate what? You’re here—it’s here.”

The man had spent too much time, you see, with Indians. (2019,
pp. 741–742)
All of which tells us that Le Guin was now looking for another kind of
poetry: unmediated, immediate. She told that story on herself in a talk to
the Mythopoeic Society about the writing of Always Coming Home, which
required her to come home, in several senses. She had to write about the
place that was deepest in her heart, and to find a language that was, liter-
ally, grounded:
If I was ever to speak as a native of my own country, it was the dirt words I
needed; I had to listen to the animals, birds, plants, rocks; to learn the coy-
ote words, quail words, obsidian words, the brown adobe clay words.
(2019, p. 744)
Furthermore, she had to learn silence, and to forget about being the cap-
ital-P Poet. She had to learn to value the evanescence of spoken language:
the way it comes to life in performance and then disappears into the ether.
“Text, Silence, Performance” was originally a speech, and it reproduces
a poem called “She Who,” by Judy Grahn. The entire poem consists of the
two words “she” and “who.” It is, as Le Guin says, “a poem that must be
read aloud, cannot be read silently: its appearance in print is like music
notation—an indication of performance” (2019, p. 738). I heard Ursula
speak it once—I don’t know if her performance was ever recorded—and it
is clear that the seemingly trivial, meaningless repetitions on the page
become something entirely different when voice is added, and breath, and
pacing, and intonation and, above all, direct connection between speaker
and audience. The printed version can only be a marker for what is lost in
time, which is all the more significant for its absence.
Writing the songs of the Kesh, Le Guin learned to emulate the direct-
ness of oral poetry. Here is one of what she called the Blood Lodge songs:
short, often improvisational chants performed by women for women. The
words tell us very little:
Hey say who, sweet chance, sweet chance,

Hey say who, sweet chance to be,
To come to be, sweet chance,
20 B. ATTEBERY
Sweet chance to come to me, sweet chance. (2019, p. 676)3
In order to “get” the poem, the reader has to know that this is a mother
speaking to her unborn baby. It’s a private ceremony, a bit of casual inter-
nal monologue made into music. It reminds me of something a Papago
Indian singer said to anthropologist Ruth Underhill: “The song is very
short because we understand so much” (1985, p. 51). Complexity is in
the context; significance lives in the pre-internet cultural cloud.
In his book How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), folklorist John Miles
Foley offers insights into the differences between listening and reading,
and between formal composition and improvisation within traditional
modes. Foley’s deliberately provocative, paradoxical title reminds us that
poetry is not the sole province of literate Westerners, nor do our ways of
reading Milton and Wordsworth serve us well when we reach beyond the
written canon. The field of ethnopoetics seeks to transcribe orally per-
formed texts in ways that bring out the artistry and the cultural complexity
that are otherwise lost when the words are captured on the page. Le Guin
was reading some of those ethnopoeticists, probably led there by her
brother Karl Kroeber and by folklorist Barre Toelken, when she was think-
ing her way toward the world of the Kesh. Under their influence, she
began to understand that the discovery by Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme
that he has been speaking prose all his life is not true of everyone every-
where. And once you understand that some speech is poetry, you begin to
process all speech differently, listening for the artful repetitions and echoes,
the melodies of intonation, and the influence of the unspeaking listener—
even when that listener is a fetus in the womb.
In the essay “Text, Silence, Performance,” she says many of the same
things Foley would later say about orality and literature generally and then
turns to her own attempts to bring a different poetic sensibility to the novel:
Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—

and much of it was made by what we call amateurs, people doing poetry as
a common skill, the way people do sewing or cooking, as an ordinary and
3
Le Guin continued to think about the world of the Kesh after the publication of Always
Coming Home. She sent the author a page of Blood Lodge songs in about 1991, when his
wife was expecting a child, and “Sweet Chance” was composed for her after a conversation
about the lack of literature dealing with pregnancy. Le Guin later lost track of the Blood
Lodge poems but I tracked down the copy in my correspondence and so she was able to
include them in the expanded edition of the novel.
essential part of being alive. The quality of such poetry, sewing, and cooking
of course varies enormously. We have been taught that only poetry of
extremely high quality is poetry at all; that poetry is a big deal, and you have
to be a pro to write it, or, in fact, to read it. This is what keeps a few poets
and many, many English departments alive. That’s fine, but I was after
something else: the poem not as fancy pastry but as bread; the poem not as
masterpiece but as life-work. (2019, p. 739)
That is what “Sweet Chance” is: life-work. It doesn’t stand on its own. It
isn’t meant to, either by the mother who sang it or by the author who
invented both it and its maker. But it makes a connection and it reorga-
nizes the world. Writing it changed the writer in subtle and profound ways.
Years after ACH, she came back to the world of the Kesh, and, writing
as Intrumo of Sinshan (a translation of her name, since both Intrumo and
Ursula mean “little bear woman”), she composed a poem called “Navna:
The River-running.” It starts,
Listen to the voices of the water in its going.

Quiet as an outbreath as it wells up in its spring
deep in dirt among the stones, it gathers up its flowing
and creeps out into daylight like a little living thing. (2012, p. 145)
Le Guin’s later poems are informed by her discovery of oral art. Her
English rendering of the Tao Te Ching draws on new awareness to convey
the deceptively simple melody in that text (as well as its humor and wis-
dom). And her stories, too, have the sound of someone pausing to listen
to the breath of the world. Their narrators are quieter, less insistent on
telling us the answers, which, they are likely to confess, they themselves
don’t know. But they invite you to work with them on finding some.
Biographer Julie Phillips asked Le Guin whether ACH influenced the
writing of Tehanu. She didn’t think so:
I wouldn’t connect them very much. Writing Always Coming Home was
kind of a big … step, a different plateau, I guess. But then, so was The
Dispossessed, earlier. Each time I did a big book, it probably left echoes
thereafter.
But I couldn’t trace anything from Tehanu to ACH. (Phillips, Personal
Correspondence, 15 February 2019)
22 B. ATTEBERY
Then when Julie observed that the world of Earthsea seems related to that
of ACH, Le Guin qualified her denial:
I think that’s true. And I think what’s going on is that instead of just accept-
ing the hierarchical, medieval fantasy world ready-made, the tradition I
started the trilogy in, I could take that non-industrialized world and not just
make it a sort of a picture-pretty medieval scene, but think about its eco-
nomics and its—I sort of always knew how people lived—daily life—but
actually thinking, really thinking about the politics and the economics, and
the relationship of the Kargad lands with the Archipelago and so on. Having
developed a world the way I did in ACH, from then on I kind of knew how
to do that. And how to slip in the information if I needed to. (Phillips,
Personal Correspondence, 15 February 2019)
So perhaps the work of coming home in Always Coming Home enabled Le

Guin to remake another of her fictional worlds. But I think the biggest
transformation is at a more granular level: in the words and sentences that
speak more directly, more simply, more collectively.
A big part of the change from one side of the heyiya-if to the other was
that Le Guin became an active seeker of collaborations. ACH not only
celebrates communal creation; it is a collaboration from start to finish, in
which Le Guin’s text is supplemented by George Hersh’s geological spec-
ulation, Margaret Chodos’s drawings, and Todd Barton’s compositions.
Each of those contributions stimulated her imagination, feeding the imag-
inary future. The experience gave her a taste for collective projects. After
working with Barton to fuse musical and poetic visions, she joined with
composer Elinor Armer to produce a set of pieces for orchestra and wom-
en’s chorus called Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts (1996). In the early
1990s, as I mentioned before, she brought Karen Joy Fowler and me in as
co-conspirators in remaking the science fiction canon with The Norton
Book of Science Fiction (1993).
She increasingly used intertextuality to conduct a kind of collaborative
debate with the past and with cultural norms. A couple of examples are her
anti-heroic SF story “Dancing to Ganam” (1993) and her meta-fairy tale
“The Poacher” (1992) in which she lets the poverty of “Hansel and
Gretel” interrogate the wish-fulfillment of “The Sleeping Beauty.” She
debated with her younger self—a kind of self-collaboration—in the
1976/1987 essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” and collaborated with
feminist critiques of The Left Hand of Darkness to re-envisage androgyny
in “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995). All the later Earthsea stories simi-
larly layer her later conceptions of gender and power and identity over
early ones: she doesn’t silence her younger self but listens and responds
and listens again. Her final novel, Lavinia, is a posthumous collaboration
with the poet Virgil, in which she found and filled the gaps in the Aeneid
much as she had with her earlier Earthsea novels.
Collaboration confounds standard critical models. Surveys of literature
usually relegate collaborative texts to footnotes—in science fiction, for
instance, the joint productions of C. L. Moore and her husband Henry
Kuttner get passed over for the less impressive individual output of their
contemporaries. Like 1940s film critics, we want heroic auteurs rather
than teams of writers, directors, and cinematographers, even if we have to
invent those auteurs. We want authors, auctors, and authorizers to tell us
how to feel and how to organize our lives along narrative lines. In this, as
in many of her later artistic choices, what might have seemed contrariness
on Le Guin’s part revealed itself to be prophetic. One of the lasting lessons
of postmodernism is that texts are always multiple, contradictory, and, yes,
collaborative. Language is social, and so are the arts that employ it, no
matter how much we want to turn writers into solitary colossi or demi-
divinities. Stories build on stories. The resonance we value in great litera-
ture is partly the artful echo of other literature.
In writing Always Coming Home, Le Guin renewed her art and her
vision by inviting others—including the reader—to collaborate with her.
The translations from Kesh in that book (the product of Todd Barton’s
suggestion that perhaps Kesh songs should not be in English, necessitat-
ing the invention of a new language) were followed by other such coop-
erative, trans-cultural projects. She translated Argentine SF writer Angélica
Gorodischer’s novel Kalpa Imperial (2003) and worked with poet Diana
Bellessi to produce mutual translations of one another’s verse (The Twins,
The Dream, 1996). She translated Goethe and Borges and Gabriela Mistral
and produced her own version—collaborating with previous translators
and commentators—of the Tao Te Ching (1998).
A different kind of collaboration is represented in Le Guin’s treasured
forms of science fiction and fantasy, which Always Coming Home encour-
ages us to read as translations from unknown originals, collaborations with
those who don’t yet exist. It will take such a joint effort for us to pass
through the crisis of the Anthropocene and out the other side. One of the
later sections of ACH is a dialogue between Pandora, Le Guin’s authorial
stand-in, and the archivist of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na.
24 B. ATTEBERY
Frustrated at their failure to reach consensus about technology or knowl-

edge or the future, Pandora says to the Archivist, “Go sing heya, like any
savage,” and the Archivist replies, “Only if you’ll sing with me.”
PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.

ARC: I’ll teach you, aunt.
PAN: I’ll learn, niece. (2019, p. 372)
And so they meet in the middle, in the Hinge, in the silence that we can
only fill with song, together.
There is a terrible gap between the present that is the Anthropocene
and the yin utopia that Le Guin dares to imagine. This is increasingly a
problem for science fiction writers and futurists: how to move beyond
ecological catastrophe and political chaos that loom in the near future to
get to a transcendent far future. Le Guin suggests that we can’t possibly
get there unless we’re already there. As Pandora tells the reader:
When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the
blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late
in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say,
“A little farther.” […] We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the
mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river
running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say,
“Isn’t that it, the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is, “Drink this water
of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go, and I can’t go
without you.” (2019, p. 398)
Now Le Guin is on the other side of the great hinge of death, and it is up
to us to find the way to go on, not without her, but with her, walking
together in companionable silence.
References
Davis, Lauren. 2009. Margaret Atwood Says She Doesn’t Write Science Fiction,
Ursula K. Le Guin Disagrees. Gizmodo, August 31. https://io9.gizmodo.
com/margaret-a twood-s ays-s he-d oesnt-w rite-s cience-f iction-5 349583.
Accessed 19 June 2019.
Foley, John Miles. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1968. A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Atheneum Books.
———. 1975. Wild Angels. In Wild Angels, 7. Santa Barbara: Capra Press.
———. 1989. Theodora. In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words,
Women, Places, 138–141. Grove Press.
———. 1993. Earthsea Revisioned. Cambridge: Green Bay Publications.
Reprinted in The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition. Illustrated
by Charles Vess, New York: Saga Press, 2018. 979–992.
———. 2012. Navna: The River-running, by Intrumo of Sinshan. In Finding My
Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 145. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
———. 2016. The Complete Orsinia. Ed. Brian Attebery. New York: The Library
of America.
———. 2019. Always Coming Home (Author’s Expanded Edition). Ed. Brian
Attebery. New York: The Library of America.
Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian
Imagination. New York: Methuen.
Underhill, Ruth. 1985. Papago Woman. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
CHAPTER 3
Making Narrative Connections with Ursula

K. Le Guin, Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de
Lauretis
Abstract The form of “Ether, OR” invites comparison with Ursula K. Le

Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative. In this short story, a woman
named Edna meditates on age, sex, work, childcare, and death. Her efforts
to connect the disparate experiences of her life illustrate Le Guin’s asser-
tion that all individuals need both to tell and to listen to stories because,
This is a revised and updated version of a text that was published in French as
“Subjectivités mobiles dans ‘Ether, OR’ d’Ursula K. Le Guin.” In Le sujet à
l’œuvre: Choix formels, choix politiques dans les arts, la littérature et les sciences
humaines, eds. Daniel Argelès, et al., 127–140. Éditions de l’École
Polytechnique, 2018. My sincere thanks go to Daniel Argèles, as well as to Lucile
Anglés and Dominique Rossin at the Éditions de l’École Polytechnique for
permission to reprint this material.
C. L. Robinson (*)
École Polytechnique, IP-Paris, Palaiseau, France

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_3
28 C. L. ROBINSON
when they fail to make what she calls the narrative connection, they then
perceive their lives as being disjointed, aimless, or meaningless. Edna’s
words also echo the debates that animated the feminist discourse of the
time when the story was written, and thus permits us to draw connections
between the text and the ideas of two major figures associated with third-
wave feminism, Rosi Braidotti and Teresa de Lauretis.
Keywords Carrier bag theory of fiction • Rosi Braidotti • Teresa de

Lauretis • “Ether, OR” • Feminist narratology • Feminist subjectivity •
Ursula K. Le Guin • Nomadic subjectivity
An inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to

make sense, to make the narrative connection, is a radical
incompetence at being human.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
The place of feminism in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin has long been a
subject of debate. Amy Clarke, in a book-length study of the topic, exam-
ines the relationship of the author and her writings to the evolving literary
feminist movement, covering a period of nearly five decades (2010, p. 1).
“As a major contemporary author,” Clarke writes, “Le Guin is an interest-
ing test case for asking how feminism has shaped modern fiction, in part
because she was so slow to embrace feminist ideals” (2010, p. 6). Her
earliest stories and novels from the 1960s focused on, and were narrated
almost exclusively from the point of view of male characters. Later, in the
1970s, criticisms of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed
(1974) were a wake-up call. While these novels were hailed as masterpieces
among specialists of science fiction or utopian studies, they were roundly
criticized by many feminist critics (2010, p. 28). As a consequence, Le
Guin shifted toward a more consciously feminist position with what Clarke
calls “woman’s writing”: “stories about women, told in non-linear fash-
ion, about non-heroic people, and using the ‘mother tongue,’ the lan-
guage of the household” (2010, p. 7). She moreover adopted the eponymic
persona of the essay “The Space Crone,” in which Le Guin proposes to
send an elderly woman as ambassador of the human race to an alien civili-
zation. As Clarke describes her, the Space Crone is “a post-menopausal
woman who because of her marginal social position can comment openly
3 MAKING NARRATIVE CONNECTIONS WITH URSULA K. LE GUIN, ROSI… 29
about her society” (2010, p. 8). Le Guin also became more vocal about
gender issues, more engaged with feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan,
Jean-Baker Miller, Hélène Cixous, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, and
eventually began to confront and revision her own earlier work (2010,
p. 103). Feeling liberated, thanks to this discourse, from “certain rigidi-
ties” of the masculinist conventions in literature—science fiction and fan-
tasy, in particular—she became more experimental in the writing of fiction,
and began working in a variety of genres (O’Connell 1987, p. 37; qtd. in
Clarke 2010, p. 99). Clarke considers the novel Always Coming Home
(1985) as the culmination of Le Guin’s feminist thought (2010, p. 1).1 At
the same time, some of her writings around this period begin to align with
what Clarke calls “an emerging post-feminist sensibility” (2010, p. 138).
By “post-feminist” she means, not that the author disavowed a feminist
agenda, but rather that Le Guin moved beyond the second wave of femi-
nism, which Clarke claims was characterized by separatism and essential-
ism (2010, p. 74). Le Guin’s “writing reflects the thinking current in the
nineties,” she writes, “especially post-feminism and to an extent both
post-structuralism and post-colonialism” (2010, p. 128).2
The short story “Ether, OR” provides an excellent example of Clark’s
observations concerning Le Guin’s fiction during her transitional period.
Clarke does not mention “Ether, OR” nor any of the other texts in the
collection Unlocking the Air (1996), apart from a very brief allusion to the
title story (2010, p. 9). In what follows, I will demonstrate how the exper-
imental form of “Ether, OR” nonetheless illustrates and puts into practice
1
The novel is therefore a transitional one, or, as Brian Attebery puts it in the first chapter
of this collection, it is the “hinge” in Le Guin’s writing career: “Everything prior winds not
down but in toward it. Everything she wrote afterward expands out from it” (2021, p. 15).
2
In a review of Clarke’s study, Sandra J. Lindow takes issue with the label of post-feminism,
because it suggests that the feminist movement and the struggle for gender equality are
things of the past. It should be noted, however, that Clarke makes a distinction between two
types of post-feminism: the reactionary kind advocated by Camille Paglia and propagated by
the conservative media; and another, more progressive and academic type that reacts to the
limitations of the second wave of literary feminism, but also continues the struggle (2010,
p. 26). That said, a less contentious strategy would be to adopt the more common term of
third-wave feminism. The word “wave,” moreover, is a metaphorical one that Le Guin her-
self has employed and expanded upon in discussing the impact of feminism on her writing:
“the feminism of the ’60s and ’70s and feminist reading, feminist criticism, came along in the
middle of my life and lifted me on a great wave, away from the ever dryer desert of male-
centered fiction and male-directed reading that I was getting lost in. I, and my writing, have
been borne up by that wave ever since” (Ramola D 2002).
30 C. L. ROBINSON
the feminist narratological theories that Le Guin elaborates in several

essays collected in Dancing on the Edge of the World (1989). The text
moreover reflects some of the main currents of feminist discourse of the
time in which it was written. In particular, the mobile topology of the city
of Ether, Oregon, the setting of the story, can be read as an allegory of
what Rosi Braidotti, one of the major figures associated with third-wave
feminism, calls nomadic subjectivity. The autobiographical narrative frag-
ments of the central character, Edna, invite comparison with Braidotti’s
recent questioning about the consequences of the loss of a unified subject
in contemporary critical theory and practice. Braidotti, furthermore,
establishes a close link between nomadic subjectivity and narrative. After
exploring the connections between the two, I will come back, by way of
conclusion, to some of the issues raised by Le Guin in her essays on narra-
tive and in her short story, and then draw a few final connections with the
ideas of Braidotti and another seminal figure in gender studies, Teresa de
Lauretis.
A Carrier Bag Narrative

Le Guin’s personal theory of narrative aims to develop an approach to
writing that is both feminist and egalitarian. “Ether, OR” is dedicated to
“the Narrative Americans,” an obvious pun on Native Americans. Yet,
behind this simple wordplay, there lies a democratic theory of narrative
which states that all Americans have a tale worthy of being told, all have
the inborn abilities to tell that tale, and all have a deep-rooted need and
desire to tell it. In an essay entitled, “Some Thoughts on Narrative,” Le
Guin argues that all individuals live their lives as if they were living out a
story. And since all individuals live their lives as a fiction (including fiction
in the negative sense of a falsehood or illusion), they all possess the mini-
mal skills required to recount the stories of their lives in a meaningful way
(1989c, p. 42). Indeed, she claims that, if we accept Aristotle’s definition
of narrative as “language used to connect events in time,” it then follows
that, not only are all humans able to create narratives, but they do create
them—in dreams, in anecdotes, even in accounts of how one’s day has
gone (1989c, p. 38).
Most Narrative Americans hesitate to acknowledge their ability to spin
a tale. They say they do not have the time, or that they lack the imagina-
tion and talent to connect events in a meaningful and artful manner, or
that they have nothing very interesting to tell. Yet, contrary to this
common assumption, narrative is not confined to a partitioned sphere of

cultural production and consumption—Art with a capital A, Literature
with a capital L.3 Rather, Le Guin argues, narrative is “a central function
of language” and “a fundamental operation of the normal mind function-
ing in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story” (1989c, p. 39).
She even goes so far as to say that “[s]o seen, stupidity could be defined as
a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated
error in making connections—in telling The Story of My Life” (1989c,
p. 43). Individuals need both to tell and to listen to stories because, when
they fail to make the narrative connection, they then perceive their lives as
being disjointed, aimless, and meaningless. As such, life becomes the very
image of despair.
Making the narrative connection is what “Ether, OR” is all about, the
guiding concept of its content and form. The text consists of 13 short
monologues, headed by the italicized names of the narrators. Each of the
individual texts is in itself a jumble of anecdotes, memories, reflections,
ruminations, fantasies, confessions, and so on. These individuals speak in
their own voices, with their idiolects, colloquialisms, repetitions, and
grammatical errors kept intact. As such, the individual narratives of “Ether,
OR” are similar to the Life Stories in Always Coming Home, which are
described as “naïve autobiographies without literary pretensions” (2019,
p. 311). With the exception of Tobinye (aka Toby) Walker, a former time
traveler (or time walker), the subjects of the narratives in “Ether, OR” are
all more or less ordinary Americans. Edna is a 60-year-old woman who
works in the local grocery store and strongly resembles the “Space Crone.”
Thomas Sunn, an anti-government reactionary and misogynist, describes
himself as a “crusty old bachelor” (1996, p. 97). Ervin Muth, a conserva-
tive real estate agent, rails against immigrants. Starra Walinow Amethyst is
a teenager who has erotic fantasies about Frenchmen. Gracie Fane is a
tomboy who wants to be a truck driver. Archie Hiddenstone, a grocery
clerk who works at the same shop as Edna, has a crush on Gracie. The
owner of the grocery store is J. Needless. Roger Hiddenstone, a former
pilot, has become a ranch owner. Emma Bodely is a paranoiac who has a
morbid obsession with serial killers.
This heterogeneous collection of texts brings to mind yet another essay
on narrative, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” “[T]he natural, proper,
3
Le Guin’s ideas here invite comparison with the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière and nota-
bly his concept of the distribution of the sensible (2006).
32 C. L. ROBINSON
fitting shape of the narrative might be that of a sack, a bag,” Le Guin

asserts. “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A
novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful rela-
tionship to one another and to us” (1989a, p. 169). Following this idea,
the overall narrative structure of “Ether, OR” can be read as resembling a
container of shorter heterogeneous narratives that have been gathered
from among the residents of a small west coast town. Moreover, the order-
ing of these shorter texts is non-linear, purposefully avoiding what the
author derides in her essay as “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-
arrow mode” of storytelling (1989a, p. 170). Most of the characters have
only one monologue, but two of them, Tobinye Walker and J. Needless,
each have two, while Edna, the most complex and fully developed of the
characters, has three. These sub-narratives have been cut up into two or
three episodes that are dispersed among the others.
Like the lives they recount, the different narratives overlap and connect
with one another in multiple ways, reflecting various relationships among
the characters. These points of connection, however, are never identified
nor brought together by an over-arching narrator. It is rather the role of
the reader, like the nomad woman with the objects in her carrier bag, to
identify the narrative connections, to sort them out, and to make sense of
them. In mapping these connections, the reader will discover that Edna’s
narratives serve as the node of relationships between all the other charac-
ters and their stories. Emma Bodely is Edna’s friend, Thomas Sunn her
former lover. Toby Walker and Roger Hiddenstone both had children
with Edna. Her boss, J. Needless, is in love with her but cannot reveal his
emotions; consequently, he feels perturbed by her presence in the shop.
Ervin Muth believes that Tobinye Walker, the former lover whom Edna
still seems to long for, is an illegal alien. The son of Edna and Roger,
Archie, has a crush on Gracie Fane. Starra has a crush on Archie. Yet, if
Tobinye’s final prophecies are to be believed, it is she and Roger, rather
than Archie, who will one day “lie in each other’s tender arms, she sixteen
he sixty” (1996, pp. 122–123).
A Town on the Move

Having made some of the narrative connections within the text itself, I
will now place “Ether, OR” within the context of the feminist discourse at
the time in which it was written, so as to draw connections between the
story and the critical writings of Rosi Braidotti. The Italian philosopher is
best known for her concept of nomadic subjectivity. Le Guin’s story fea-
tures two nomads, whose fates are intertwined, and evokes the nomadism
of American populations in both the past and present. When the time-
traveler Tobinye Walker took up permanent residence in Ether, it was pos-
sibly out of love for Edna, although he never explicitly admits this. Rather,
he describes his settling down as accidental: “When I first stopped by here,
before my accident, there was no town, of course, no settlement. Several
people came through and sometimes encamped for a season, but it was a
range without boundary, though it had names” (1996, p. 102). Walker’s
words, which describe the reports of Native Americans and early European
settlers to the land, evoke a nomadic way of life. In the past, it was people
who moved, but in the story, it is the town itself that ranges. As the char-
acters say, it is “a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time”
(1996, p. 103), but rather “moves all the time” (1996, p. 111) from the
coast to the mountains to the prairies. I propose to read the displacement
of the town as an allegorical backdrop, one that represents something akin
to Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivities. She developed this influ-
ential idea in Nomadic Subjects, a book which appeared in 1994, one year
before Le Guin’s short story was first published. To my knowledge, Le
Guin has never mentioned Braidotti, nor has Braidotti mentioned Le
Guin. Others, however, have established parallels between their work,
notably in connection with subjects such as posthumanism and feminist
utopias.4
In Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti states that contemporary discourse has
inherited a social and intellectual context that “celebrates and rewards
Sameness, cultural essentialism, and one-way thinking” (2011, p. 10).
This is true, she says, not only in masculinist discourse, but also in that of
the second-wave feminists. Aiming for a reversal of hierarchies, critics and
writers of this wave sought to position women as subjects rather than
objects of discourse. Yet, in their search for a properly feminine subject,
they tended to reproduce the reverse of the masculine, which is conceived
as unified, innate, and universal. As such, even if it is constructed in oppo-
sition, the feminine subject conceived in this way is still tied to the mascu-
line standard. The other problem with notions such as l’écriture féminine
is one mentioned by Amy Clark, namely essentialism: the idea that femi-
nine attributes are conferred by sexual biology rather than culturally
4
See, for example, Hansen 2012, p. 117; Lacey 2014, p. 142; Fortunati 2000, p. 225; and
Fortunati and Ramos 2006, p. 3.
34 C. L. ROBINSON
constructed. Finally, the exclusive concentration on femininity tends to

ignore how gender and sexuality are differentially constructed, within a
network of intersecting social categories such as race, class, age, health,
and so on. For these reasons Braidotti champions “a nonunitary vision of
a subject,” one that “actively yearns for and constructs itself in complex
and internally contradictory webs of social relations” (2011, p. 10). To
take this into account, we must focus on processes rather than essences,
transformations rather than fixed identities. In addition to the aforemen-
tioned sociological variables, we must develop a theory that sees the sub-
ject as a dynamic and changing entity, one that is “nomadic” (2011,
p. 10). This model, according to Braidotti, “renders an image of the sub-
ject in terms of a nonunitary and multilayered vision, as a dynamic and
changing entity,” situated within what she calls “a politically invested car-
tography” (2011, p. 4). Across the boundaries of community and power,
space and time, without the foundation of a fixed identity, these mobile
subjectivities move from one position or situation to another. Any sem-
blance of unity in these subjects, insists Braidotti, is not due to an essence
given by nature, but rather to a “fictional choreography” of multiple vari-
ables into “one socially operational self” (2011, p. 18). Even if the towns-
people of Ether are sedentary in their primary mode of habitation, they are
nonetheless nomadic in their subjectivities. The setting of the story thus
illustrates how the construction of the subject is a continuous process,
occurring in constantly changing contexts of space and time.
A Life Sentence
Braidotti first proposed the concept of nomadic subjectivity as a model for
a liberated, multifaceted, and dynamic sense of identity. In a revised edi-
tion of Nomadic Subjects, however, she acknowledges that unrelenting
change forces individuals to negotiate multiple social, economic, and
political constraints on a constant basis. Rather than inspire feelings of
liberation, the continual incitation to shift away from traditional forms of
identity can provoke fear, anxiety, and nostalgia. “[S]hifting our imaginary
identifications is not a willful operation, like a change of clothes,” she
writes. Rather, “imaginary relocations are complex and … the task of
working them through is as time-consuming as shedding an old skin”
(2011, p. 79). In Edna’s first monologue, a metaphor similar to that of
shedding skin joins that of nomadism:
I feel like I was walking across Nevada, like the pioneers, carrying a lot of
stuff I need, but as I go along I have to keep dropping off things. I had a
piano once but it got swamped at a crossing of the Platte. I had a good fry-
pan, but it got too heavy and I left it in the Rockies. I had a couple ovaries
but they wore out around the time we were in Carson Sink. I had a good
memory but pieces of it keep dropping off, have to leave them scattered
around in the sagebrush, on the sand hills. (1996, p. 96)
In the introduction to the second edition of her book, Braidotti asks,

“What exactly are the implications of the loss of unity of the subject?”
(2011, p. 3). Observing that the concept of the nomadic subject, with its
fragmentation, complexity, and multiplicity, has become widely accepted
in today’s critical theory, the philosopher finds that this last question, per-
haps the most important of all, has not yet been adequately addressed.
Braidotti suggests that, for the moment, the best way to answer this
question is not through the medium of theoretical discourse, but rather
through what she calls a political fiction. In other words, the semblance of
unity that can be found in the feminine subject is not due to an essence
given by nature, as the feminists of the second-wave claim, but rather to
“the fictional unity of a grammatical ‘I’” (2011, p. 18). With the word
“fictional,” Braidotti insists that this subject is both a socially accepted
convention, as in grammar, but also the kind of imaginary entity that can
be found in a literary narrative. Indeed, she notes that “[t]he nomadic
subject is a myth, or a political fiction,” one which allows her “to think
through and move across established categories and levels of experience.”
The idea of an imaginary, mythical, or fictional subject is inspired by what
Gilles Deleuze calls a “conceptual persona,” which Braidotti defines as “a
theoretical navigational tool that evokes and mobilizes creative possibili-
ties in order to change the dominant subject position” (2011, p. 12). The
intellectual stalemate of which she speaks is partly that of the conflict
between, on the one hand, the desire to escape the constraints imposed by
a unified and innate subject and, on the other, an individual’s perception
that her life has become directionless, piecemeal, and meaningless in the
absence of these constraints. Borrowing the formulation of Fredric
Jameson, we can say that the figuration of the subject as a nomad offers
the possibility of an “imaginary resolution to a real social contradiction”
(1982, p. 77). For Braidotti, as for Jameson, this resolution operates by
and through narrative.
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The Legacies of Ursula K Le Guin Science Fiction Ethics 1St Edition Christopher L Robinson Editor Full Chapter

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The Legacies of Ursula K.

More information about this series at

ISSN 2731-4359 ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121

Brian Attebery is Professor of English at Idaho State University, USA,

Arts Décoratifs. In addition to completing the first doctoral dissertation

Katie Stone is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor working at Birkbeck,

Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier,

Abstract Ursula K. Le Guin anticipated many of the problems we are now

C. L. Robinson (*) • S. Bouttier

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Keywords Alfred Kroeber • Donna Haraway • Epistemology • Fantasy

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

A visionary thinker, engaging storyteller, and superb stylist, Ursula K. Le

us to worlds inhabited by complex characters. It is thus no coincidence

with erudition from fields as diverse as linguistics and ecology, compara-

Complementing this contribution, Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis

Isabelle Stengers shows, SF is a mode of thinking, something to think with

Always Coming Home and the Hinge

Abstract Always Coming Home (ACH) marks a transition in Ursula

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

Keywords Always Coming Home • Collaboration • Imaginary

The Ursula K. Le Guin of the 1960s through 1980s, the Ursula K. Le

fiction was cyberpunk, it said no both to cyberspace disembodiment and

hypertext without a computer interface. That is one reason it gets better

In 1983, Charles Le Guin had a sabbatical from Portland State University,

depending on one’s trajectory. In the middle, where a galaxy would have

perspectives of anthropology and folklore and music. “A Non-Euclidean

Angels of the shadowed ancient land

This is a lovely poem but it is very self-consciously a Poem, from the

“Why?” said my father. “Mediate what? You’re here—it’s here.”

Hey say who, sweet chance, sweet chance,

Sweet chance to come to me, sweet chance. (2019, p. 676)3

Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—

Listen to the voices of the water in its going.

So perhaps the work of coming home in Always Coming Home enabled Le

Frustrated at their failure to reach consensus about technology or knowl-

PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.

Making Narrative Connections with Ursula

Abstract The form of “Ether, OR” invites comparison with Ursula K. Le

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Keywords Carrier bag theory of fiction • Rosi Braidotti • Teresa de

An inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to

the feminist narratological theories that Le Guin elaborates in several

A Carrier Bag Narrative

common assumption, narrative is not confined to a partitioned sphere of

fitting shape of the narrative might be that of a sack, a bag,” Le Guin

A Town on the Move

constructed. Finally, the exclusive concentration on femininity tends to

In the introduction to the second edition of her book, Braidotti asks,

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121