It's a full life, if a trifle banal

80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin is now available for pre-order from Aqueduct Press. This is a published version of a Festschrift volume presented to Ursula Le Guin on her eightieth birthday, and I'm very pleased to have a short piece included in it.

You can find out more about it here, and pre-order here. There is a pre-order special price of $15.

Happy 80th birthday, Ursula Le Guin! Hardly a day goes by without me finding yet another sentence of yours that I love, but here are a few more I found yesterday, from the 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address:

"...when women speak truly they speak subversively--they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That's what I want--to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you--I want to hear you."

Thank you for this and for everything.

Originally posted on wiscon:

Email from Vonda N. McIntyre:

"Hi everybody,

Ursula K. Le Guin's 80th birthday is on 21 October 2009 and I'm going to post a Happy Birthday Ursula message on my website and my blogs that day, and I think I have some other folks talked into doing the same.

I just thought it might be fun if a lot of websites and blogs wished her Happy Birthday. (It's also the 40th anniversary of Left Hand of Darkness.) Her website is www.ursulakleguin.com (the actual content begins on http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html)"

Make a note of this, and feel free to repost to your own blog.

Not to turn this journal into a constant Le Guin lovefest, but I finished up her anthology The Birthday of the World yesterday. Even when she's at her weakest (the title story, for example) she's pretty damn good.

But I wanted mostly to blog impressions of the last, long story (novella) in the book, 'Paradises Lost'. Because it is so outstanding, and because it's not a story of hers that I hear talked about much. It is a story about a ship from Earth travelling to a new planet, and the 'middle generations' - the generations that have never seen Earth, and may not see the new world. (I suppose spoilers follow, if it matters to you.)

Some of the voyagers have, by the time this story starts, with the fourth and fifth generation, invented a new religion which makes the continuation of the voyage the purpose of existence ("bliss"). And some still want to reach their new destination, exchange their state of innocence for experience. A war in heaven ensues (quite a gentle and moderately conducted war, this being a Le Guin story, but terrifying nonetheless).

I can't say enough good things about this story, but I'll pick out one moment: when the main female character, carrying her baby, steps out on the new planet (leaving the ship is called "doing eva" - DOING EVA, FOLKS!), the sense of banishment is overwhelming. How gutsy is Le Guin as a writer? It's like, "OK, I've done Milton. What next? Oh, yes, Vergil."

I'm now reading Octavia E Butler's Kindred, a time travel story in which a black woman and her white husband fall through time from 1970s America to antebellum Maryland. I have been dying to read this book for ages, and then it came through via BookMooch just after Christmas. I've been so excited about receiving it that I've not been able to start reading it until now. This copy has come to me from Iceland, via Finland. BookMooch is a wonderful thing.