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Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards in New York.

Just inside Ursula K. Le Guin's front door, on a table near the stairs, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters sits in a velvet box. Le Guin said she wanted to leave it out so family and friends could see it when they came over for Thanksgiving, and joked that the medal is so heavy that she toppled forward when it was placed around her neck at the National Book Awards ceremony last week in New York.

Le Guin's acceptance speech, in which she questioned the inevitability of capitalism and referred to Amazon as a "profiteer (that tried) to punish a publisher for disobedience," was greeted with a standing ovation and caused a sensation in the publishing world that spread across the Internet. The 85-year-old Portland author was praised for her strong defense of artistic freedom and for her criticism of corporate power. A week later, she was still tired from the quick, hectic trip to New York but pleased with the reaction to the substance of her speech and glad she did it. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

When you were giving your speech, could you tell that people were with you and into what you were saying?

No. I was fairly nervous about the speech because I knew I was saying more than what is usually said on these occasions. Early on in the speech I stopped and said "thank you, brave applauders" because there was a kind of deadness to the room. Then when I talked about the library, the public library, that perked them up. Then a lady called out "I love you" and I said "I love you too, darling," and that really broke the ice (laughs).

You had plenty of time to prepare a speech after it was announced that you would receive the award. What was your plan?

I was told I had three to five minutes. The reason for that is that there was a couple of speechs given by medalists that went on and on and on and drove everybody sort of crazy. It is a very highly managed affair, kind of like the Academy Awards, and it has to be that way. Writers are like herding cats. Writers get out of control pretty easily (laughs). They want to talk. I said "OK, three to five minutes. The Gettysburg Address takes two minutes. You can say a lot in three to five minutes." There are things with an audience like that, booksellers and publishers and other writers, things I wanted to say, so I thought about it a lot and tried to boil it down to what was really important.

When we talked about doing readings once before you said "I'm a ham."

I love doing readings, I really do (laughs). The first time I did that I discovered that and I was so surprised because I'm a pretty introverted and shy person. In school I always found it hard to talk, but give me something to read and I'm happy.

You said you had things you wanted to say. Did you think that is a chance to address these publishing bigshots and make the points that you wanted to make?

Yes. Receiving this medal gave me an appropriate bully pulpit. It's a big honor, and they treat it as such.

You started by talking about genre, which is always something that you've ....

Had to deal with.

Right, and in recent years the award you received has been more genre-friendly. Elmore Leonard got it. Stephen King got it. They do seem to be reaching out.

Oh yes. But fantasy and science fiction is still pushed aside in a way that a thriller definitely is not. The whole genre-fication system of walls is breaking down but it is amazing to me how often people say to me "oh, of course I never read sci-fi" as if they feel completely justified in saying that to someone to whom they know writes it. Which means that there's still a totem pole and we're still kind of low on it (laughs). Fantasy is still so sneered at, people making Hobbit jokes and such (laughs). It was another chance to say to people "the walls are down. You can't talk that way anymore."

Do you think some of that has to do with the rise of ebooks?

No, I don't think how you read it makes a difference. But listen, if you're saying science fiction is not literature then you're saying "Brave New World" isn't literature. It's ridiculous. Come off it! There were barriers erected and judgments made that were just prejudice.

You had other points to make ....

Bigger ones (laughs).

And you made them. You went right after Amazon.

I didn't say the name. The Amazon table was right behind the table I was sitting at, and the entire table, I've been told, was very quiet. They always are, I think.

Why did you say what you did about them? You didn't use the name, but there was no doubt about your meaning.

It could be Amazon now and somebody else later, selling books as commodities, and that's what I wanted to talk about, that books are not commodities in the same sense as potatoes, and they cannot be sold rightly in the same way. There is no use-by date for literature. There is for certain kinds of books, of course, but with anything literary a book could be sold for the next 100 years or if it's Homer or something for the next couple of thousand years. You just can't treat art the way you can treat salable goods.

You could go on Amazon right now and buy a book and a washing machine and some clothes on a single transaction.

That's because they're so darned convenient (laughs). You know, I've been surprised that since this speech there hasn't been a backlash.

Toward you or Amazon?

Well, toward me on the Internet. People on the Internet sometimes get all hysterical and call people names. I've been called plenty of names already because I've been outspoken about Amazon and Mr. Bezos. There are people, writers, mostly self-published writers, who treat Amazon as if it's some sort of a god. It's providence, looking after them. I know that and I understand that. It's just that, in the larger sense, it's not a very good god.

You called out your own publisher.

Yeah, I did. It's on a relatively small issue -- how (publishers) sell ebooks, and if they sell ebooks, to libraries. Some of them won't do it at all. Some of them do it in a very punitive way of selling them for six or seven or 10 times what they would sell to a private customer. I said it's a silly panic they're in because if they just look at the figures, the better an ebook does at the library, the better its sales are, both ebook and print. It's so clear if you just look at the figures, but the publishers, the corporations that own the publishers, won't look. They just decided "oh, we can't let libraries have ebooks. It would cut into our sales."

The whole relationship between publisher and public library is very much threatened and very much in danger, and without the public library ... this country seems to be trying to get by without public schools, as much as it can, and if we don't have public libraries either, we're really going to be an ignorant, crippled nation.

What was your publisher's reaction when you said that?

That was during the quiet period (laughs). It was such a formal event, and I don't think anyone expected an 85-year-old lady from the West Coast to get up there and say those things (laughs).

And then you called out capitalism.

I've been doing that for so long (laughs).

But as you noted, people don't do that very much. They assume it's the best and only system, case closed, and don't question it.

Or they think "it's really not working very well and I hate what it's doing to the quality of life, but we can't do anything because that's the way the whole world is." Which it is. We live in capitalism the way people in Russia lived in dictatorship. It's our whole world. You can't get outside capitalism at this point, but you can ... well, you can subvert it, or you can find ways through and out, which is what I think the arts ... they always lead through and out of situations. The arts always give a pathway of "it doesn't have to be exactly like this, and it won't be like this forever."

As you noted, you can't get away from capitalism now, but you couldn't get away from the divine right of kings if you were a serf 500 years ago.

Even if you were a nobleman, you were a serf as far as serving the king went. There was a structure of society that seemed to be ordained for all time and was religiously supported and nobody could get outside it, and yet looked what happened (laughs). It took awhile to dismantle that system, but it's gone, except for maybe in a few emerates or something.

When did you realize what the reaction was?

I travel unplugged. (My son) had his computer. I had a couple of interviews the next morning, and he said "hey, you're getting a wave." I went sort of viral on YouTube. I was as popular as Maru the Cat for a day or two (laughs).

Why do you think you got the reaction you did?

I said some things people wanted to say or wanted to hear said.

Do you think part of it was speaking truth to power?

That phrase is used so much now that I've gotten a little leery of it. Who is power, that I was speaking truth to?

Amazon.

But Amazon is just a profiteer operating under capitalism. The corporations are the power. I tried very hard not to speak against publishers because the publisher and the author have the same goal, but insofar as the publisher is a wholly owned operation of a big corporation they've lost the whole relationship that publishers and authors had, which is that one was no good without the other. That's one reason why I like to publish with small publishers that are not owned by a corporation.

Do you think that what you said about Amazon is what a lot of people in publishing believe but are afraid to say?

Apparently. The settlement, quote-unquote, with Hachette that had just been announced the week before was an opportunity for people to speak out because Amazon was so visibly trying to push Hachette around and say "you do this or we'll punish you." It's not that Hachette is this gentle, sweet, kindly company, but it did stand up and say "no, we're not going to kowtow to you."

I've talked to plenty of publishers and writers who complain about Amazon, and when I ask them why they don't do something or speak out about it, they tell me I don't understand how much power Amazon has.

It is depressing to me to realize that some of the writers are scared in the same way some publishers are. They're intimidated and think there's nothing they can do. Maybe they're right, but what's the sense of being scared? You've got to try, if you want to. Someone people don't want to. They want to be wholly owned.

They can't wait to be wholly owned.

And that's fine. They've got Amazon. They can publish with them if they want to.

-- Jeff Baker