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Happy 80th Birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin

Bill Humphries — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:18:19 +0000

Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 80th birthday.

Ursula K. Le Guin reading from "Always Coming Home" at Potlatch 18, streamed into Second Life

I read The Dispossessed for the first time during my junior year of college, and its lesson, in a friend’s words, that “it’s always more complicated” has stayed with me, even if I don’t always remember it. ~~Three Roads~~ Four Ways to Forgiveness should be read by any would-be liberator from oppression.

Earlier this year, I was very happy to help arrange for her reading from Always Coming Home at Potlatch, a small literary SF convention, to be streamed into Second Life. Every time I see that screen shot, I can’t help but think that she’s conversing with the machine intelligences in the City of Mind.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Le Guin, and thank you for your books.

Ursula K. Le Guin calls the NY Times out on Genre Ignorance

Bill Humphries — Sat, 09 May 2009 07:30:13 +0000

When J.G. Ballard died last month, the New York Times, in their obituary, could not deal with the fact that Ballard wrote science fiction, and infamously wrote: But that’s like calling Brave New World science fiction.

Ursula K. Le Guin, who also writes science fiction (while literary critics go into denial), has had enough of that noise.

Ursula K. Le Guin reads from A Wizard of Earthsea

Bill Humphries — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:44:35 +0000

An MP3 of the Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree winning author reading a chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea.