Dear Ursula LeGuin,
I sat on this letter for too long. It formed in my head several years ago, and I did not send it. It's too late now. You've gone to join the stardust and galaxies that you spun in visions for me, but everything you've done is going to live on.
When I was a child, I lived terrified and ecstatic through Ged's adventures in Earthsea. I gained weapons I would use in the struggle with my own shadows. The tombs of Atuan still haunt my dreams.
When I was older I discovered just how much you'd done with science fiction, how much you'd turned it inside out, how much you'd taken the old tropes of gender and conquest and thrown them away and built entire new universes.
I felt your struggle to write in a voice that wasn't a man's. I read the letters you wrote my other favorite author, James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon, read both your correspondence, and felt you reach into the heart of my struggles with gender.
I read The Telling, and watched you transform science fiction's relationship to aliens from one of human conquest to one of mutual curiosity - from colonialism to mutual exploration, each culture willing to be changed by the other, and for humans to be decentered and often wrong.
I read your advice to young writers and took it to heart.
I don't think everything you did was perfect, but you were the first in many ways for me and you always will be. I'm just sorry I took too long to write these words, and you're not going to read them.
Starbear, find your own constellations.
"His life, that was what underwrote her bargaining. His life, Pao's life. Those were the intangible, incalculable stakes. The money burned to ashes, the gold thrown away. Footsteps on the air." (from The Telling)
"The Future, in fiction, is usually just a way of looking at Now." (from the preface to The Telling)
I sat on this letter for too long. It formed in my head several years ago, and I did not send it. It's too late now. You've gone to join the stardust and galaxies that you spun in visions for me, but everything you've done is going to live on.
When I was a child, I lived terrified and ecstatic through Ged's adventures in Earthsea. I gained weapons I would use in the struggle with my own shadows. The tombs of Atuan still haunt my dreams.
When I was older I discovered just how much you'd done with science fiction, how much you'd turned it inside out, how much you'd taken the old tropes of gender and conquest and thrown them away and built entire new universes.
I felt your struggle to write in a voice that wasn't a man's. I read the letters you wrote my other favorite author, James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon, read both your correspondence, and felt you reach into the heart of my struggles with gender.
I read The Telling, and watched you transform science fiction's relationship to aliens from one of human conquest to one of mutual curiosity - from colonialism to mutual exploration, each culture willing to be changed by the other, and for humans to be decentered and often wrong.
I read your advice to young writers and took it to heart.
I don't think everything you did was perfect, but you were the first in many ways for me and you always will be. I'm just sorry I took too long to write these words, and you're not going to read them.
Starbear, find your own constellations.
"His life, that was what underwrote her bargaining. His life, Pao's life. Those were the intangible, incalculable stakes. The money burned to ashes, the gold thrown away. Footsteps on the air." (from The Telling)
"The Future, in fiction, is usually just a way of looking at Now." (from the preface to The Telling)