Comments

  1. Ed Seedhouse says

    Well, we all have to go sometime, but my world was enough better with her in it that I was hoping I would dissolve back into unconnected atoms first. So yeah, crap…

  2. bcwebb says

    Needed a dream from George Orr to keep her going longer…Or maybe that’s not such a good idea. As always with her ideas, you have to think about it.

  3. waydude says

    Oh no, I loved Earthsea, loved it! But the Left Hand of Darkness is the one that really made me think and challenged my assumptions, thank you so much. RIP.

  4. kestrel says

    For a word to be spoken, there must be silence… both before, and after…

    I need to go sob into my pillow for a bit. One of my favorite authors. An amazing person.

  5. unclefrogy says

    the magic is truly gone now
    no new miracles of vision and heart await
    that is three artists in 2 weeks that have gone and it feels just a little bit more empty
    go on and dance with the dragons
    uncle frogy

  6. KG says

    She was among the greatest writers of the last five thousand years. Her work will live as long as there are people to read it.

  7. rietpluim says

    If there is an afterworld, I hope there are dragons. And Le Guin is teaching them tricks.

  8. madtom1999 says

    I’ve never read her work – seen the stuff Gibly did with it and now, on her death, I am reading thousands of quotes that make me wish my reading list was smaller so I can get to her books faster. She claimed there was no afterlife but it looks like she will live on in many hearts, bits and collections of dead trees that she brought to life again.

  9. Ogvorbis wants to know: WTF!?!?!?! says

    Damn. She was the first science-fiction writer I ever read who actually dealt with social issues, with economics, with ecology, with the idea that humans make mistakes. She taught me at a time when I needed a social conscience.

    Goodbye, Ursula.

  10. vole says

    A sad day. A wonderful lady, and one of the very best writers we had. I was going to put in a link to that brilliant acceptance speech of hers, but that’s already in the page PZ links to. The book I’m going to re-read first is “The Dispossessed”.

  11. oliver says

    The Dispossessed is my favorite. I have a well-worn paperback copy I must have read 7 or 8 times. Sometimes straight through and sometimes every other chapter to get it in chronological order. Every time some new insight and new appreciation of her ability to create an off-world culture. Anarcho-syndicalism made a big and favorable impression on me, although I do wonder if real people in such a dry and semi-sterile world would simply have simply turned on each other and self-extinguished. Still, it is a wonderful dream. I think she does a much better job of creating an alien culture and Herbert did with Dune. Much better. There, that ought to get an argument going :-).

  12. latsot says

    I mourn. The Earthsea books were among my favorite things to read when I was a kid and I occasionally go back to them forty-odd years later. They were a gateway drug to her other works, often more subtle of story but more blatant of message.

    My first copy of the Earthsea trilogy had a picture of a very, VERY white indeed Ged on the front, despite the text repeatedly describing Ged and most of the people in the story as not even a little bit white. I bet she *hated* that cover.

  13. raven says

    I’ve read most of her books, and long ago at that.
    And then read them again.

    Some authors don’t hold up over time.
    Her work has held up very well.
    Ursula Le Guin will be missed by many.

  14. Moggie says

    She has finally walked away from Omelas.
    I can hardly believe she’s gone. She felt that essential to the world.

  15. says

    Ironically my younger daughter gave me a sci-fi anthology for Christmas that is rich with Le Guin stories. I had just read several on the eve of her passing. :-(

  16. says

    She is my favorite author, I am really saddened by her passing. The Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness are masterpieces, all of her novels are excellent. Her translation of the Tao Te Ching is my favorite of the 4 or so I have read.

    I’m sad she didn’t live long enough to see Trump not be president anymore, but I am very grateful that she gave us so much great writing. Her books will always be on the top shelf of my bookcase.

  17. woozy says

    I don’t think she was capable of writing anything bad.

    She wrote a book called “Searoad” which is possibly her least known and least relevant book. It’s basically the typing an author does when between projects– the equivalent of doodles in an artist’s sketchbook. And it was freaking brilliant. Zero story and plot and yet in three pages a completely absorbing and thorough capturing of mood, character, place, and purpose and the ambiguity thereof.

    Maybe, I was simply deceived by a brilliant writer making hard work look effortless but I don’t think so. Her *typing* was brilliant.

    (It was weird; a day and a half ago I was thinking of her and having my depressed 56-year old thoughts about how all the young legends of my childhood simply by the the unfair and ultimately pointless triviality of 50 years passing are now all dead, or old,– that to still be alive one had to have been in ones teens and twenties in the late 50s and that hardly seemed fair– and I thought how glad I was she was still alive and cognizant of the current world. I felt the world needed to be observed by someone like LeGuin. I don’t know who is observing it now.)