ndrosen

The Thursday Washington Post printed an article by Margaret Atwood about the late Ursula K. Le Guin. A couple of days ago, Slate posted an appreciation and obituary, and then followed that with an article on where to start with Ursula K. Le Guin, and after that yet another piece, to the effect that Mrs. Le Guin taught us how to think about the future.

It happened that someone who had been planning to give a Toastmaster speech canceled, so I stepped up with an appreciation of the late author. I gave her due credit, describing how I had read the Earthsea trilogy and The Word for World Is Forest as a child, and then gone on to other books and stories, how she could write lovely prose, and had an interesting perspective as a feminist, pacifist, and anarchist.

I also pointed out that she had become, as one reviewer put it, Saint Ursula of Academe because her work was good in ways that a stereotypical literary intellectual could appreciate, and did not usually involve much of the hard sciences, which the stereotypical literary intellectual wasn't good at, or a sensibility that would offend the stereotypical literary intellectual. It's not so much that she was excessively well regarded for a genre author, but that other sf and fantasy authors were insufficiently appreciated by the supposed gatekeepers of Serious Literature; Slate and the Washington Post didn't give much coverage to the lives and literary careers of Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, or Sprague de Camp when they died.

This is a criticism of the literary establishment, not of Mrs. Le Guin, may she rest in peace.