And, while what I’ve quoted from her writing so far might indicate she didn’t believe that could be reflected in writing by (or about) men, it’s more accurate to say Le Guin was pushing back against science fiction and fantasy’s tendency to focus its stories on only one type of identity. Le Guin was insistent that fiction reflect humans’ messy, complicated nature. That “the,” she writes, appeals to people “who’d like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature.” And that’s not how literature works. That “the,” argues Le Guin, positions one novel as better than all the rest. Yet the essay is itself wonderfully nuanced, arguing why the “the” in “The Great American Novel” might appeal more to male writers, and, ultimately, to public relations professionals. That last award is perhaps a bit ironic, given the title for her 2017 essay, “ Who Cares About the Great American Novel? Against a Uselessly Competitive, Hopelessly Gendered Concept”. A multiple-time award winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, she was both named a Grandmaster of Science Fiction and awarded the National Book Foundation for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
But science fiction and fantasy as a whole were another story entirely. In that collection of science fiction, Le Guin saw no place for a voice like hers. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. “I cannot imagine myself,” she wrote, “blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. When the death of Ursula Le Guin was announced in late January, social media recirculated a 1987 letter in which Le Guin declined to blurb a new anthology.