by Siri Paulson
A Bit of Background
Ursula K. Le Guin has always been one of my favourite writers, but I had drifted away from her over the years, as one does. When she died in January 2018, I decided to go back and read all of her Hainish universe works, many of which I had missed (she wrote novels, short stories, and various lengths in between). I’m about halfway through, reading each of them in order. It was fascinating to watch her craft develop. I fell in love with her work all over again.
And…well, I’m a writer, so I process things by writing…
The first poem is about a (fictional) invention of Le Guin’s called the “ansible,” a way to communicate faster than light in her Hainish universe, which does not have FTL travel. The second poem is about her three early SF novels and how they led her to writing her fifth and most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. (The first Earthsea book is her fourth novel, but I left that out since I haven’t reread it yet…might need to write more poetry later on!)
Enjoy!
Ansible
vast gulfs of darkness
separate humanity
each in our own tiny orbit
bridging that distance
would take years
she gave us a way
to reach out,
not to touch
but something greater—
conversation
the yearning to hear another,
satisfied
the need to be heard,
met
the wish to understand
still out of reach
but just a little closer
we whirl in our orbits
knowing now
that we can talk
and for just an instant
the vast distance between us
is gone
Wor(l)ds
She began cautiously
yet already with a poet’s eye
telling tales of adventuring men
on planets new and strange
in ways acceptable to her peers and readers—
the aliens met and misconstrued,
the technology discarded for a better future,
the search for self across a pastoral post-apocalypse,
the battle with the shadow-self over islands and oceans—
but already her light shone through
here and there a glimpse
of her uncommon sensitivity to people,
to moments, to details
of her worlds
Left Hand came out of nowhere
captured the Hugo with its brazen ideas
but when one reads it now, fifty years on,
what lingers in the mind
is not the alienness of the Gethenians’ sexuality
nor Genly’s struggles to impose his worldview
on the planet where he is ever and only a stranger—
it’s the philosophy that Genly and Estraven trade
in the tent at the icy crown of the world,
it’s Genly’s quest to live a good life by the Handdara teachings,
it’s his struggle to grok the workings of shifgrethor,
it’s the way he emerges so deeply altered
by his days with the other he once thought so strange
to face the equally peculiar humans at last
it’s the conviction of Estraven and of Genly
to do what is right
to live by their codes
to find commonality—
to change, in return, the world
She was ever a poet
and ever a philosopher
and she left us with a world
shifted on its axis
by the width of
her words
In memory of Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018