LA Times Ursula K. Le Guin, the spiritual mother of generations of writers; John Scalzi pays tribute:
It's less than an hour since the news broke that Ursula K. Le Guin has died and right now my Twitter feed, populated as it is with science fiction and fantasy writers, editors and fans, is a single, unbroken string of testimonials. N.K. Jemisin, who won back-to-back Hugo Awards for her novels "The Fifth Season" and "The Obelisk Gate," is recounting how a note from Le Guin filled her with joy. Novelist Madeline Ashby recounts meeting Le Guin at a lecture, mentioning to Le Guin that she was writing her thesis on her, and Le Guin insisting Ashby send it to her. She did. Le Guin wrote back with notes.
Neil Gaiman is saying, "I miss her as a glorious funny prickly person, & I miss her as the deepest and smartest of the writers, too." Patrick Nielsen Hayden, associate publisher of Tor Books, is saying, "She wasn't always right, but she was always wise."
Scalzi credits her as a role model as well as an influence on his writing:
This was a subtle gift that Le Guin gave to a young person wanting to be a writer — the idea that there was more to writing fiction than ticking off plot points, that a rewarding story can be told without overt conflict, and that a world wide and deep can be its own reward, for those building the world and those who then walk through it. "Always Coming Home" is not generally considered one of Le Guin's great books, but for me as a writer and a reader, it was the right book at the right time. The book turned me on to the possibility of science fiction beyond mere adventure stories for boys — that the genre could contain, did contain, so much more. The book opened me to read the sort of science fiction I didn't try before.
My own science fiction overtly owes more to writers like Heinlein than Le Guin, but you can find her in my work's DNA if you look, in who I write about and the concerns I play out in my stories. I wouldn't be who I am or where I am without Ursula K. Le Guin. Not too many years ago, I was given the opportunity to write an introduction to a new edition of "Always Coming Home," in which I got to tell Le Guin just how important her book had been to me. I was glad to be able to tell her.
The Guardian UK:
Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: 'Books aren't just commodities':
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for 50 years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
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