Ursula K. Le Guin is inescapable

[00:00:00]I don't know if I've ever considered Ursula K. Le Guin my favorite writer, and if I did it was never for very long, but she's always been up there among my favorite writers since I discovered her, and I'm realizing she's crossed paths with my life repeatedly at interesting times, and also potentially provides a model for how to think about living my life that I thought was unattainable. So, I wanted to talk about my history with her and then go into more detail about that.

[00:00:28]If you're new to the channel, hi, I'm Magpie. Thanks for watching and I'll introduce myself more at the end. And so, I first discovered Ursula Le Guin in sixth grade with the Earthsea series my sixth grade teacher had and I think recommended it to me. And I was hooked.

[00:00:42]This was the first YA fantasy I'd read.

[00:00:43]It introduced me to YA fantasy. And not long after I started discovering other writers and within like a year I had discovered Diana Wynne Jones. This is her complete Dalemark Quartet, and Diana Wynne Jones became my favorite writer, not just a fiction, my favorite writer period throughout my teenage years.

[00:01:01]But, I liked YA fantasy. However, I ran out of compelling YA fantasy and I started reading adult fantasy.

[00:01:09]And at the time, like everything I could find in bookstores or that people were recommending was all epic fantasy that was I understood it as Tolkien-inspired, but I realized it's more of its own thing driven by the market, which Ursula Le Guin actually has something to say about that, that I'll get to shortly.

[00:01:24]And so, I was frustrated by adult fantasy and eventually I gave up on it.

[00:01:29]And then I decided I was going to try science fiction and I forget which order I read them, but I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Ursula Le Guin's Hainish books, including her two most famous, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, and they hooked me and captured my imagination as I mean, if you've seen my gender video, you know that Left Hand of Darkness captured my imagination for a long time.

[00:01:53]I think I did read Le Guin first. I'm not completely certain cuz I was telling people she was my introduction to adult science fiction after she had been my introduction to YA fantasy.

[00:02:02]And I don't know if I considered her my favorite writer then or not, but I know that by the time I was in undergrad, I discovered Jack Vance, who has been my favorite writer of fiction at least ever since.

[00:02:14]And it's interesting, Vance and Le Guin were actually mutual fans of each other.

[00:02:19]And so I have his the illustrated version of his autobiography, which I splurged for when I had money and full color black photos and stuff. And somewhere in here there's a letter from Ursula Le Guin talking about how much she liked his latest whatever it was. And he mentions that both he and she were fans of each other's work. Which doesn't really surprise me because I remember when I was a kid, like teenager, adolescent, you know, after I discovered Earthsea, I found her site and I was reading and I'm like, "Wow, I get her.

[00:02:48]She gets me in a way that I felt like most writers whose biographies I read I didn't get. And it's the same thing with Vance.

[00:02:56]I would not be surprised if both of them would be diagnosed with ADHD and autism today. But regardless, so I Jack Vance ended up becoming my favorite science fiction writer, where he's been my favorite really fiction writer ever since.

[00:03:09]But Ursula Le Guin yeah, I liked her works and I keep coming across her. And so then I started thinking about doing YouTube in 2019. And while I was thinking about that and how to do it and looking at channels for inspiration, one channel I really loved Worldbuilding Notes, which is unfortunately mostly defunct. She'll occasionally do a short update video.

[00:03:29]She She used to be way more active and she would do reviews of books she liked.

[00:03:33]And she recommended these two books. So one of them was Changing Planes by Ursula Le Guin, and one of them was Calpa Imperial, which it's by Angelica Gorodischer, who is an Argentine writer, but it turns out it was translated by Ursula Le Guin. And honestly, I liked Calpa Imperial better than Changing Planes, but it is interesting because Changing is sort of extremely experimental like philosophical fiction of the kind that I always thought you can't really get away with writing especially if you're writing natively in the English language. Like I love Jack Vance but he was original experimental in some ways but not in sort of the forms that Le Guin did here. And so this got me thinking at least it's possible but it's possible for someone of Le Guin's stature and I don't know if it'd be I could certainly do it but would anyone read it? And then Kalpa Imperial as I I talked about it in some video and as I said it's basically the capital city of this nameless empire is the main character and the story is people are coming and going but the capital city of the empire is persisting and it's the story of its rise and fall and rise again with the times.

[00:04:42]And so looking at both of these books I was like it is potentially possible to at least have some readership for stuff like this. And I think this might have been when I realized cuz I've sort of been thinking about there's at least like four or five levels of I would say accessibility of writers.

[00:04:59]And so you have like the broad popular writers that most or everyone reads when they're in vogue. And so that would be your Stephen Kings, your J.K. Rowlings, right?

[00:05:09]And some of them do end up persisting.

[00:05:11]So Shakespeare has persisted. Agatha Christie seems to be persisting. Most of them end up sort of disappearing.

[00:05:18]Then you have the writers who are seen as highbrow but people still read them.

[00:05:23]And Le Guin is an example of this.

[00:05:24]Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov and of course I made a video talking about the two of them which you can look up there.

[00:05:31]And then you have the writers who people talk about and reference but generally don't actually read. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile that I didn't pull I pulled another of his books mentioned that Borges and Proust both fall into this category. And he was someone who actually read them and it was sort of awkward being in these circles of people who aspired to read them but couldn't. And I want to reiterate again, Borges is extremely easy to read as a writer. He does interesting like dense philosophical ideas. And someone in one of my early comment back when I was reading comments reliably said that there's a translation he worked with that is not Andrew Hurley's, this is Hurley, that is better. But anyways, so Borges and Proust would be people who people reference as highbrow they don't read. And then beyond that you have the writers that people aren't even referencing as much because most people haven't necessarily heard of them. And I'd say Jack Vance is sort of getting into that territory, although he was read back when he was publishing, and that kind of always confused me cuz he was supposedly seen as a lowbrow writer like a pulp writer at the time, and then he became seen as highbrow. But when I read his autobiography, what I realized is his fans were other writers, publishers, and editors, and they kept pushing his books at people. And at the time, the science fiction reading community was tolerant enough to sort of read and enjoy Vance, and he was sort of trying to accommodate them by writing pulpier books.

[00:06:57]And anyways, so talk about sort of three times I came across Le Guin. First, young adult fantasy when I was 11. Then when I was 16 reading adult science fiction. Then few years ago, however long that was, when Worldbuilding Notes had that note introducing me to those two books, Changing Planes and Colpa Imperial, and I realized, "Oh, this actually can work as a thing." And now I'm running into her again, and it's interesting because so in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, he has his guide, it's sort of in some ways inspired by Dante's Inferno, but a lot more optimistic. And so his Virgil is George MacDonald, whose best-known book is The Princess and the Goblin. And I don't know if this was one one books that attracted Lewis to him, but it wouldn't surprise me because Lewis had an appreciation for children's literature, which is part of why he wrote it. And so anyways, I finally decided to read this recently.

[00:07:50]And who did they get to write the introduction to this Puffin Classic?

[00:07:54]Ursula Le Guin. And it's an interesting introduction where she's talking about until like recently, we lived we like in our local neighborhoods and we had sort of a deep sense of time that things aren't going to change much, which is true. And we believed in these supernatural beings that we've now we still sort of believe in, but we don't admit it's a short thing. So if you read this and I do think it's an interesting book to read.

[00:08:20]I don't know how much adults can get out of it, but I certainly if I have kids, I'm absolutely reading it to them. And I'm actually thinking I might do a video at some point soon of books that if when I have kids, which is my goal, I would read to them like classic books cuz I think this would be a good one to read to kids.

[00:08:34]And on that note, so another book that showed the introduction to or actually it was an afterword. So I talked about We in I think it was the same video that I was talking about Atwood and Nabokov.

[00:08:47]And I linked this book. I have an old copy from my father.

[00:08:52]And I noticed that this has an introduction by Atwood and then two afterwords by Orwell and Le Guin.

[00:08:58]And I'm sure I have the Orwell afterword in my big collection of Orwell essays, which I didn't pull.

[00:09:04]But I didn't have Le Guin's essay and I didn't have Atwood's introduction. I was like I was very conflicted because I'm like it was like $11, I think, when I got it.

[00:09:16]But I'm really in a place I'm trying not to spend money right now and I'm like, do I buy this just for the bonus material when I already have the book?

[00:09:23]And I'm like, oh, it's a new translation. Okay, I might reread it different translation.

[00:09:27]That was my excuse. But I'm actually really glad I got it because Le Guin's afterword, it's not an afterword really, it's an essay she wrote called Stalin and the Soul.

[00:09:36]and she's basically she's contrasting the fate of the author of this book, Zamyatin, who couldn't get this book published in his native Russia, and it still wasn't published as long as the Soviet Union existed. This was an early dystopian, by the way, influenced Orwell, which is why his essay is in here.

[00:09:53]And then she's contrasting it to a hypothetical American writer X, who has a number of potential paths to success, but none of them really allow him creative freedom. So, maybe he's a pulp science fiction writer, maybe he's a writer of adult material, maybe he writes his book, it's not quite as good as he hopes because it's his first novel, and then it gets adapted to a screenplay and he becomes a screenwriter and successful at that.

[00:10:19]But it's not art necessarily. It's not deep. It's not I forget exactly how she said it, but it's like combination of being intelligent and having integrity.

[00:10:33]And she's like, not a lot about has this, and it's hard in our market economy to have this. And actually, my 4th of July video talked about freedom of speech, I mentioned that for most Americans, we have some residual restrictions on freedom of speech, of which the biggest one is copyright, but the one that's going to impact most of us is corporate censorship, like in terms of distribution even. And Le Guin is sort of going even beyond that to say, well, if the market and the people who control access to the market don't want to publish work that is sort of deep and meaningful, then we don't get that. And now we have like platforms let people access audiences directly, and a lot of people make a living doing this. But I still sort of thought I couldn't because if I look at, for example, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, I didn't pull anything by her, but she's one of my favorite short story writers. But now what she does is she self-publishes these short serial novels in two science fiction series and one fantasy series that I've read a few of them because she they're all DRM-free and she'll sometimes have sales to get them very cheap and I also I was getting Amazon digital item credits. So, I read a number of them just to see like one of those series.

[00:11:47]And I was like, "This is fine, but nothing special. It is not what Le Guin installing in the soul would describe as art." And I've been thinking about this cuz I've been thinking about it from the other angle of I ruled out I tried a little bit to try to become a professional writer when I was living in Turkey, submitted four stories, none of them got accepted, and then I kind of gave up on it.

[00:12:08]And I think if I'd kept going, I probably could have found an audience somehow, but I just like I was thinking about it and I'm like, "I don't I still don't understand what makes J.K. Rowling work." which talked about in recent video as well.

[00:12:21]So, I can't do that. I can't be a J.K.

[00:12:23]Rowling, and I don't think I can even be like an Ursula Le Guin who I actually like and relate to and people actually do read her work unlike someone like Borges or Vance.

[00:12:35]So, I tried to go do the conventional route of just trying to do 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, and that has not worked for me either. And so, now I'm back to figuring out I think I need to figure out my thing and figure out how to make money from it. And so, I've been thinking about it from the creator angle and sort of asking myself I am extremely weird. And actually, Ursula Le Guin relevant again.

[00:12:57]So, Allison Talks Books did a video talking about The Dispossessed. You might be exceptional. And she did this right after I watched a video from another YouTuber talking about how she wanted to be exceptional or she wouldn't be. And I've never had that concern, and I been thinking I wanted to make a video on that. I don't know if I will after this one or not, we'll see.

[00:13:17]But I will say like I've always known that I've been exceptional in the sense of I'm always the exception. People want to put me in boxes, and I do not fit their boxes, and it will be either I will know I don't fit in and I'll argue with them, and sometimes I'll win, often I'll lose, and then it's like, "Told you so." Or I'll believe them, and then I'll realize I wasn't fitting in the box they wanted to put me in, like genuinely, like most people are trying hard to be more unusual. I've spent my life trying to be more normal. And so, might again make a whole video on that, but Allison was talking about this book as the jumping point for "How do you know if you're exceptional?"

[00:13:52]My problem has been I'm too exceptional, and I've been like, "Can I write anything that people would actually want to read enough to make a living?" And so, of course, I think about the people who I really like and who I relate to as writers, and how did they make a living, and is it possible? And so, for example, C.S. Lewis was obviously successful. I don't know how much he made as a writer, but he got into academia before World War II, and I realized reading talked about Michael Polanyi's book, The Logic of Liberty, shown it a few times, like academia before World War II. I actually would have been a great fit for that, but my whole life I've had people saying, "You should go into academia."

[00:14:31]And I've been like, "Why would I want to spend my life, quarter of it writing grant proposals, quarter of it sitting on pointless committee meetings, quarter of it doing research I don't actually care about to get published, and then a quarter of it teaching people who don't want to learn the subject matter." Which I sort of understood, but I feel like a lot of people don't, but apparently it really didn't used to be that way. And so, Lewis had that secure tenure in academia, whether or not he made enough from his books to live on. And then, as I mentioned with Jack Vance, he made a living with his writing, but that was because he was a writer's writer who editors and other writers and publishers really liked and sort of pushed on a science fiction reading audience who was more tolerant of his eccentricities.

[00:15:11]And then, Borges, again, someone people reference but don't read. I don't know if he was able to make a living on his writing, but he was always like, I think he was sort of a journalist, so he was paid to write more basic stuff, which also probably helped him hone his craft, and that's why I've been trying to write more on my blog to just get better at figuring out what actually works, what appeals to people in what I write.

[00:15:34]And he also had a job as director of Argentina's National Library at some point. And so I don't know if he made a living off his best-known works or not, but it took a while if he did, and it was in an environment where he could actually be like a journalist type person that is not really an option for people like me. That has very much become journalism is for midwits these days, as is academia increasingly.

[00:16:00]And then Alan Paton, who is I mentioned Jack Vance is my favorite writer of fiction, but Alan Paton is the author of my favorite novel, Cry the Beloved Country, which I did one of my earliest videos on. And the story of this book, interestingly, is he wrote this, and he shared it with friends in the United States who loved it, and shopped it around to publishers who were not interested cuz they thought he does a lot of things that are kind of unusual, but I think work really well. And then he wrote two other books in a collection of short stories, none of which did as well as his first novel, where he really had something to say that would be art, as Le Guin describes it.

[00:16:34]And then we have The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which this was his second book, and initially had a small print run and sold like 100 copies, but then someone brought it to America, got it translated, and became a bestseller, and came back to Brazil. But Paulo Coelho, when I look at his life, like he is more normal than I am. Like he is someone I can feel like I can more easily put into recognizable boxes. I've met a lot more people like Paulo Coelho than I have like myself. So he's closer to being accessible. And then with nonfiction, we have Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and his first real success there was The Black Swan, but that was after he made himself credible as someone people should read because he made a lot of money in finance. And this I think is part of why I've been thinking I need to make a company. I need to start a company cuz people are not going to take me as credible on anything non-fiction related until I do that. Cuz Nate Silver did sort of a similar thing. He started 538 and that's how he became credible.

[00:17:31]And Idries Shah, who I talk about a lot in especially this book Reflections, is so he was his father was influential. He was a bit of a nepo baby, although he made the most of it and actually did interesting work. And so I'm looking at all of these examples and I'm like none of them really apply to me.

[00:17:49]But there may be space in the gaps for me to make a living doing creative stuff. And I'm going to have more to say on that, but I just wanted to talk about this in the scope of Ursula Le Guin and her Stalin in the Soul essay that was included in this copy, this translation of We.

[00:18:07]Because again, she's approaching it from the perspective of the reader because she's like, I've never really had issues in terms of like the market. I've heard stories, but everything I've written has gotten published and sold.

[00:18:18]And without really any issues aside from she wrote one article for Playboy where they asked to write her byline as UK Le Guin cuz she's like, our readers are afraid of female writers.

[00:18:29]But she's like, that's the most censorship I've had. And I've been thinking about Le Guin related to Jack Vance, Vance related to Le Guin, I relate to both of them. But Le Guin is someone people I think read more at the time and definitely read more today. And she's someone who gets invited to write the introduction to Puffin Classics. And I think part of it [clears throat] is that Le Guin was willing to experiment and put stuff out there. And she was doing it at a time when people would pay for that more. I have to do it for free until I get to the point I figure out what people will pay for.

[00:18:59]But I still think it's doable and it's sort of inspirational. And so I wanted to talk about that, talk about this idea that Le Guin had in this essay, which I think is of interest to a lot of my viewers and I might talk more about it in the future.

[00:19:14]And so, anyways, thanks for watching.

[00:19:17]I'm Magpie. I have if you want to support [snorts] me, I have Kofi and affiliate links below. And Kofi has a Discord here. I'm also going to start a store soon, sort of inspired by this whole conversation. And I'll have also links to some of the older videos I mentioned. So, thanks for watching, and I'll see y'all in the next one.