On the one hand she introduced me to science fiction literature: I read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”-Le Guin’s famous story about a wonderful city whose existence depends on the torture of a single miserable child-when I was perhaps eight or nine and far too young for it, in a neighbor’s ragged old edition of Literature and the Writing Process. I came to Le Guin’s work both early and late. Her passing hit me harder than I expected, considering my slender acquaintance with her work, but that was the thing about Le Guin: to have lost her was to have lost a world I longed to visit. I imagined that I would meet her one day, under ideal conditions that would make me seem interesting enough for conversation, and ask her about poetry, about being a middle-aged woman in the 1970s, and about science fiction. I had assumed, with all the oblivious confidence of youth, that I’d get to read them while she was still with us and talk to her about them. I was unfamiliar with her most celebrated works- The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, books by which she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel, and then, five years later, the first woman to have won it twice. She had always been there, like a mountain, or the sun, and it was easy to fall into the certainty that she always would be. When she died in 2018, I could have fit the span of my life inside hers almost three times.

Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed… I have been changed. Granite makes pinnacles, and then people rope themselves together and put pins on their shoes and climb the pinnacles at great trouble, expense, and risk, and maybe they experience a great thrill, but the granite does not. I am not granite and should not be taken for it. Le Guin’s 2004 collection of nonfiction, A Wave in the Mind, contains a curious, two-page essay titled “Being Taken for Granite” punning on “granted,” she declares that she isn’t granite, she’s mud:

Always coming home ursula le guin