URSULA K. LE GUIN Passes Monday January 22, 2018 (Age 88)

"What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do each morning. waking?"

from The Lathe of Heaven

Yesterday my wife mentioned that Ursula K.Le Guin had passed away, we read and enjoyed her science fiction and many years ago took the opportunity to attend a talk she gave in Calgary. She was a thoughtful and compassionate voice within the libertarian sea infesting much of science fiction. I hope to post a discussion of my favourite of her novels, The Lathe of Heaven on my science fiction site, I will post a link when it is completed a later this week.

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.ca/2018/02/what-will-creature-made-all-of-seadrift.html

Helen supplied to this link to a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Le Guin by John Freeman which appeared on The Literary Hub.

My Last Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin
// Literary Hub

"These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveller must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

from The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas