The New York Times reports that Renowned fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin has died at age 88. From the article:
Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.
Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.
I'm not a fantasy fan (except for Prachett and Tolkien), but she will be missed none the less. I'm sure quite a few Soylents are fans of hers. Any author's loss is a loss to us all.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:06AM (1 child)
And also to all the established and aspiring writers for whom she was a mentor.
There was an article linked either here or on the green site within the past year detailing both her personal writing struggles and accomplishments, as well as her lengthy tenure mentoring others, including running writing workshops monthly near her home in Oregon, if I remember correctly.
Truly a loss to the community, but I hope if there is an afterlife that she is looking back satisfied with accomplishments here, for there are certainly a lot of them, and then looks forward to wherever her new journey is taking her :)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:29AM
What was that!?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! A fraction of a yoctosecond. That was all the time it took for my disease-ridden, fetid little friend to shoot itself right into your rancid asshole when you weren't paying attention. Now then, let's get this mythical feces fiesta started! Ugh... this feces...!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:28AM (7 children)
Women in Sci-Fi and Fantasy has been a thing, in recent years. Ursula was my first female author. I asked myself a time or two, "Isn't Ursula a girl's name?" I wasn't certain, but didn't care - if the story was good, that was all that mattered. After a couple of her stories, I went to the trouble of reading about her. Yep, a woman! And, what a woman!
Rest in peace, Ms. Le Guin. You certainly enriched my life.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:36AM (3 children)
Latin, diminutive form of Ursa, hence 'little she-bear.'
Semantically equivalent to 'ursa minor' in a sense, you mean when you found her you didn't immediately pun on the constellation?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 25 2018, @07:45AM (1 child)
He was a sailor, not a Latin college boy or an astronomer.
(very large grin, with a big woosh handy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:23AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:00AM
No, I discovered Ursula in sixth grade, I think, maybe seventh. For whatever reasons, I didn't connect the obvious dots. Naturally enough, when I did connect the dots, it was a face palm thing. ;^)
Oh - seventh grade. I had walked up and down the library aisles, and saw all the names that I was familiar with. Found a book of short stories, saw a name or two I was familiar with, and there was Ursula, halfway down the contents page. I checked the book out, and read it that night.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @06:46PM (2 children)
Yes, women are indeed a thing in SF. The head of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (they award the Nebula award) is Cat Rambo, a woman who has been writing SF since the 1970s. Of the authors listed on the cover of the current F&SF magazine, half are women. Don't forget, a woman wrote Frankenstein.
As to the name, I once new a man named Gail, and a woman named Charlie. Also, many writers use pen names; for instance, The Running Man was written by Stephen King under a pen name.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 26 2018, @10:43PM (1 child)
Yeah, I was tangentially referring to that whole Sad/Rabid Puppy thing. :^)
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:51PM
At the 2016 Hugos, Cat Rambo had a bullwhip to keep them in line (true, she really did, although jokingly). I think that controversy is pretty much settled. The new controversy should be "why are so few black folks SF fans?" Except for the Asians and hispanics, Worldcon 2016 looked like a Trump rally with space aliens and rockets.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:48AM (17 children)
So did she write science fiction or fantasy or both? I find it depressing people have difficulty telling the two apart.
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:46AM
Yes
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aim on Thursday January 25 2018, @09:47AM
She wrote both.
Earthsea is fantasy (young wizard, long before Harry Potter).
The Dispossessed is great science fiction, exploring sociology and psychology (not hard scifi IMHO, but very much worth the read).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by letssee on Thursday January 25 2018, @10:46AM (8 children)
Both, mixed.
In a way, fantasy and sf are the same genre imho. SF purports to be 'realistic, in the future', but if you replace the 'future science' with 'magic' they are the same genre more or less.
Good fantasy has rules for the magic, too. Which makes Earthsea good fantasy btw.
Both genres give a writer the freedom to break free from the constraints of realism and to explore interesting ideas without bothering if they are even possible. I'd lump in 'magic realism' and surrealism in the same category. Though you can always split out the categories further if you want to of course :-)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:13PM (4 children)
science fiction: no accepted scientific "truths" are contradicted by the in-story universe, but speculations are made about the unknown. In this sense, worm-holes are hyperspace stuff are still ok, but this may change.
fantasy: the in-story universe has its own set of laws. I like those fantasy universes that have a certain degree of self-consistency, but not all of them do.
For instance "Frankenstein" was sci-fi when written, but it is now fantasy.
Same with "To the Moon and Back" (although it's arguable whether or not scientists would have tolerated those ideas, especially since one of the characters in the story itself says that the bullet will melt and the humans won't survive).
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:27PM (1 child)
I always thought Frankenstein was traditionally considered part of the horror genre.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday January 26 2018, @07:51PM
For what it's worth--according to Stephen King, horror is a sub-genre of fantasy.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 25 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)
If a dude can teleport "because science" it's sci-fi. If a dude can teleport "because magic" it's fantasy.
no accepted scientific "truths" are contradicted by the in-story universe,
You think faster-than-light travel doesn't violate accepted scientific principles?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @06:57PM
Wormholes and warped space are both theoretically possible. When Star Trek came out, self-opening doors, flip phones, flat screen displays, voice-activated computers with realistic images were all fantasy and are now all commonplace. A real hospital today looks more like science fiction than McCoy's sick bay.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 25 2018, @12:26PM (2 children)
I would consider true science fiction writers to be people like Andy Weir (he admitted taking a few liberties with scientific fact in The Martian), Charles Sheffield (The Compleat McAndrew, among others), Jack McDevitt, Peter Watts, and Cory Doctorow. They tend to write stories with a setting like, "what would happen to society and human interaction if the following not-yet-proven-to-be-impossible technology was invented?".
The other side is futuristic space fantasy: Star Wars, Star Trek, writings by Frank Herbert, Peter Hamilton, David Drake, David Weber, and countless others. Space Opera.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @07:04PM (1 child)
Andy Weir (he admitted taking a few liberties with scientific fact in The Martian)
Citation? The only scientific mistake I saw in the book was that a 200 mph wind on Mars wouldn't knock a rocket down, but that wasn't known until the book was already a couple of years old. The cover has astronauts (who are mostly scientists and engineers) praised its accuracy greatly, as did astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson about the movie (the movie had a glaring error; sound is very different at different pressures. In the airlock the alarm would rise in pitch and volume as it was pressurized).
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(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday February 01 2018, @12:13PM
Interview with Andy Weir, he starts to go into the inaccuracies at about the 13:45 mark: https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/163 [twit.tv]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 25 2018, @11:02AM (3 children)
Be depressed, then. The two overlap, many times. I don't know why that should be depressing, but it's your life.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 25 2018, @04:58PM (2 children)
The only difference between sci-fi and fantasy is swords.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday January 25 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
> The only difference between sci-fi and fantasy is swords.
Arguing this shows insufficient training in Use of Weapons...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 26 2018, @05:16AM
Any sufficiently advanced swordplay is indistinguishable from science?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday January 25 2018, @03:51PM
As many have mentioned, she wrote both.
But SF and fantasy tend to share an audience, and when they're good they both rely on inventive settings and allegory to make important points about us real-world humans. Lord of the Rings is in many ways about how World War I affected the Brits who had to go fight in it, even though he's talking about orcs and such. Foundation is about (among other things) the limitations of science as a method of solving political problems.
When it comes to le Guin, I absolutely love The Dispossessed: What better way to describe the flaws in political ideologies than to give them a foil?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 26 2018, @06:51PM
Sometimes I have trouble telling whether a story is fantasy or SF as I'm reading it. I wasn't sure about 11/22/63 until I was almost finished reading it (it's SF). I thought Black Bead was fantasy until its author, whom I met at Worldcon, informed me that it is indeed SF and you find out in a later book in the series.
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