Ursula Le Guin Dies At 88; Beloved Author Challenged Her Readers

PORTLAND, OR – Ursula Le Guin, a beloved author of science fiction, fantasy, and more, died at her Portland home on Monday. She was 88-years-old.

Le Guin, whose novels – often set on other worlds and aimed at young adults without writing down to them – challenged people to confront many of the social issues here on Earth.

Her best known works were the Earthsea series and "The Left Hand of Darkness."

She was a multiple winner of the most acclaimed awards in science fiction and fantasy: the Hugo, the Locus, and the Nebula.

Her death was quickly noted on social media where noted authors praised her life and work.

"I’m fumbling for the words to properly express how much Ursula Le Guin’s work has meant to me, and that’s no way to commemorate a writer, so I’ll say no more until I can say it better," the writer Laurie Penny wrote.

"Her words are always with us," Neil Gamian tweeted. "Some of them are written on my soul. I miss her as a glorious funny prickly person, & I miss her as the deepest and smartest of the writers."

"I'll have more to say about Ursula Le Guin's passing, probably tomorrow," John Scalzi wrote on Twitter. "But for now, "God damn it" will suffice."

Le Guin wrote five unpublished novels and one published before her editor suggested that she try her hand at something aimed at young adults.

The result was 1968's "The Wizard of Earthsea," a novel about a young wizard going through his training, years before Harry Potter came along. It was followed by two more books, forming a trilogy. More than ten years later, she added two more books to the series.

While Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings books by JRR Tolkien – which were an inspiration – focused on the struggle between good and evil, Le Guin's worlds were much more nuanced.

A long-time student of Taoism, Le Guin's characters were often trying to find a balance.

The year after the first Earthsea book, she published perhaps most acclaimed novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin was born in Berkley in 1929. Her father, Alfred Keoeber, who recorded Native American oral histories and started the anthropology department there while her mother, Theodora, was like-minded and wrote a book, Ishi in Two Worlds, about the last member of the Yahi tribe in California and his encounters with people.

After getting degrees at Radcliffe and Columbia University, she moved to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. There, she met another scholar who would become her husband, Charles Le Guin. They moved to Portland in the late 50s where they stayed for the next 60 years. While she wrote, he taught at Portland State University..

Asked once why she had settled on fantasy as the setting for much of her work, Le Guin harkened back to Tolkien .

"Fantasy is about power," she told The Guardian in 2005. "Just look at Tolkien. It's a means to examine what it does to the person who has it, and to others. If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly.

"Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters - completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy."

She was a staunch defender of science fiction and fantasy and would use her blog to take on authors who would write in those genres without acknowledging it.

When Kazuo Ishiguro came out with his novel, The Buried Giant, he said that he hoped people wouldn't consider it fantasy (it has a giant, a dragon, and other familiar fantasy elements).

"It appears that the author takes the word for an insult," she wrote. "To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.

"Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality."

When she received a lifetime achievement from the National Book Award Foundation in 2014, she spoke of the importance of fantasy, of being able to find other ways of looking at things.

"Hard times are coming," she said in her acceptance speech. "We'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.

"We'll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality."

At the same time, she was quick to draw the line between what she did and politicians who don't tell the truth.

After the Trump administration posited the existance of "alternative facts" and a letter writer to Le Guin's hometown paper compared alternative facts to science fiction, she wrote back, having none of it.

"The comparison won't work," she wrote. "We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real - all invented, imagined -- and we call it fiction because it isn't fact.

"Facts aren't all that easy to come by. Honest scientists and journalists, among others, spend a lot of time trying to make sure of them. The test of a fact is that it simply is so - it has no "alternative." The sun rises in the east. To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or "alternative fact") is a lie."

Le Guin's last book, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters," was a collection of essays from her blog. It came out in December.

She is survived by her husband, a son and two daughters.

Photo by Michael Buckner, stringer/ Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images.