In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms.



Thriving in an unexpected genre is nothing new for Le Guin. She began to write stories as a child but didn’t achieve mainstream publication until her thirties. Her difficulties may have had something to do with her subject matter. From the start she eschewed the constraints of realism, choosing to write about the alien and the speculative. In her early thirties she finally found her niche, science fiction. It was an unlikely home for a woman. At the time, the genre was overwhelmingly male and regressive in many other ways, too. In the journal Science Fiction Studies, Le Guin described the state of the field as she first found it:

NO TIME TO SPARE By Ursula K. LeGuin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pp., $20.00

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.

Today, by contrast, the genre has become one of the preeminent literary spaces for imagining social and political change. Women like Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Aliette de Bodard, among others, are at the forefront of this transformation, and Le Guin was one of their forebears. Her career is filled with achievements in great storytelling that also offer galvanizing visions of worlds that differ from our own: the feminist and anti-capitalist utopias of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Always Coming Home; the Taoist epic fantasy of the Earthsea novels; the emancipatory historical fiction of Lavinia. Her work shows the moral character of Le Guin’s mind, a quality that comes through still more lucidly in the blog’s compressed form.

“It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says,” writes Le Guin in a blog post:

[This is] a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement. . . . Fantasy not only asks ‘What if things didn’t go on just as they do?’ but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

Le Guin has always been fascinated by the subversive possibility of imaginative writing, and the central conceits of her two best-known series explore it. The Hainish Cycle is a series of stand-alone novels set in the same universe, on separate planets where civilization has developed in radically different ways. Humans can travel between these planets, but they cannot travel faster than light, and so the expenditure of time is prohibitive; but they remain connected through Le Guin’s signature SF invention, the “ansible.” The ansible is a communication device allowing near instant communication between any two points. People on separate worlds who could never cross the vast distances between them in the span of a single life can still communicate. This imaginary technology poses an interesting thought experiment. If two people can only trade information, what effect can they have on each other’s lives? The ansible is an obvious metaphor for writing itself.