6. Learning from Le Guin

“It’s curious that you wrote this even before reading Le Guin. It is like your work is highly influenced by her.”

My good friend wrote me this comment right after finishing The Featherweight Augur. He had read Le Guin’s science fiction for years, and specifically had in mind books like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. What he meant was that the books I was writing were similar to hers in important ways: they were speculative fiction, written straightforwardly, and wrestling (sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly) with “big ideas” about how societies organize themselves and orient individuals’ efforts and identities.

And he was right: it was really weird that I’d never read Le Guin before. It was an oversight that needed correcting.

I picked up these two novels – at his recommendation – well after I’d written the first three books in The Locutor Series. I loved (loved) both Left Hand and Dispossessed and, like my friend, I wondered at some of the similarities between what I had in mind and what Le Guin had accomplished so many years before. I began to read about her and her life, marveling at how her work had presaged – and, really, made possible in a fundamental, ground-clearing sort of way – so many trends that would develop within speculative fiction in the ensuing decades.

For my recent birthday, I received a copy of The Books of Earthsea, the handsome, generously illustrated, and weighty collection of all her Earthsea novels. The bookseller at The Raven in Lawrence, KS (quick shout out to one of the very best independent bookstores in the country!) handed it over the counter with eyes wide. “Wow, look at this book,” she’d said. I carried all ten pounds of it back to my car, drove to my son’s school for afternoon pickup, and started reading in the driver’s seat while I waited for the doors to open. I was transfixed. I was sucked in. It was this – this! – that I had been striving to write. And it was this that early readers of my novels were drawing comparisons to. It was an eerie feeling. A foundation-shifting feeling. It was wonderful.

I am hard at work at the fourth book in The Locutor Series, and alongside that workflow, I’m steadily moving through each of the books in The Earthsea Cycle. They provide such a rich template of mechanisms and tools for the aspiring writer of speculative fiction: Le Guin’s economy of language; her ability to traffic in, problematize, and create anew genre archetypes; her efficient approach to narrative which offers stacks of self-contained plots that combine toward a broader trajectory; her assiduous attention to how individuals inhabit, are shaped by, and in turn reshape the environments they’re born into; the deep and long eons of history that effortlessly flow from her pen; the subtle anthropological sensibilities lurking in her backgrounds; and her uncanny ability to infuse her tales with just enough of the fantastical to keep her stories otherworldly, but still accessible.

Prior to encountering her work – and as I have written elsewhere in this blog – my guiding light had been the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. But while that point of inspiration had provided me with some guidance on structure and substance, I was often left wondering how to wrestle some of that work’s “young adult” sensibilities into a more mature narrative, something that would hinge a little more fully on societal dynamics and questions of institutionalism. I was also left to figure out, for myself, how to move my story out of the high literary tradition in which Pullman situates his books, and into a more pragmatic, perhaps colder, but certainly more social theoretical framework.

I learned a great deal about how to approach writing for having sorted through some of these issues on my own. But, I can tell you, it was a damn struggle.

Now that I have found Le Guin (blundered into her, really, clumsily and truant) I feel like I’ve found my new favorite professor at university. If I could nominate myself for the role, I would be included as one of her many, many acolytes. And I hope that future readers of The Locutor Series might emerge from within the ranks of her admirers.