Ursula K. Le Guin on the worrying abuse of the imagination

It can be used to colonize

A winner of six Nebula Awards and seven Hugo Awards, and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote 24 novels, A Wizard of Earthsea, the first of a series of six, and Left Hand of Darkness being the best known. An interviewer described her as holding “a deep and radically humane conservatism,” but when he also called her a progressive she called “the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. . . . I like stiff, stuffy, earnest, serious, conscientious, responsible people, like Mr. Darcy and the Romans.” This appeared in “Writing Nameless Things: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin” in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017, the year before she died.

There’s a tendency in American culture to leave the imagination to kids — they’ll grow out of it and grow up to be good businessmen or politicians. . . . One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it. . . .

The place where the unbridled imagination worries me is when it becomes part of nonfiction — where you’re allowed to lie in a memoir. You’re encouraged to follow the “truth” instead of the facts.

I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m just a scientist’s daughter. I really like facts. I have a huge respect for them. But there’s an indifference toward factuality that is encouraged in a lot of nonfiction. It worries me for instance when writers put living people into a novel, or even rather recently dead people.

There’s a kind of insolence, a kind of colonialization of that person by the author. Is that right? Is that fair? And then, when we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along, I don’t want to read that. I find myself asking, what is it, a novel, a biography?

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