Ursula Le Guin, the fantasy and science fiction writer, who influenced other great novelists, has died aged 88. Best known for her Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness, she won many awards, despite having to battle against a male-dominated genre and indeed against the literatti who tended to look down on sci-fi. She wrote about cultural interaction in her books, a legacy from her anthropologist father, and was an activist for peace, gender and environmental issues.
Born 21 October 1929 5.31pm, Berkeley, California, she had a 6th house Libra Sun in a sensible sextile to Saturn on the cusp of the communicative 9th. That contrasted with her dream-like Neptune in the creative 5th square Jupiter Moon in Gemini, which drew her to Tolkien, Philip K Dick and Alice in Wonderland and into her visionary world. Her Mercury in Libra was trine Jupiter, giving her the confidence to speak and write what was on her mind.
She also had Pluto on her IC and despite claiming she had a happy and stimulating childhood, there must have been undercurrents that bothered her, especially about the role of women. She once said: “When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
Her creative 5th harmonic was well aspected; even more so her imaginative 7H; and her writers’ 21H.
I was saddened to hear Ursula Le Guin had died. She’s one of the greatest science fiction novelists since Ray Bradbury. I’ve enjoyed works by both authors.
Chris Romero
Jacksonville, Florida
NYTimes Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”
The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”
Thank you.
Someone on tumblr wrote they were gutted by news of UlG’s death. I feel that too. Oh! through to the core.
I read her “Left Hand of Darkness” in 1976 – well ahead of its time.
What a fabulous writer she was/is. Thanks for posting this.