I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries

[sovay]

The Library of America doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, but nonetheless it loves me and wants me to be happy. I began to suspect as much with its recent publications of classic science fiction and female-authored noir, but I have just discovered that it will be publishing The Complete Orsinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is a big deal. Early imprinting on Coyote and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven notwithstanding, the original Orsinian Tales (1976) is very possibly my favorite book by Le Guin. I discovered it in my sophomore year of college, a slim little Bantam paperback with an inaccurately fantastic cover of a castle on a hill and a medieval walled city; it might suit the country's early history as depicted in "The Barrow" or "The Lady of Moge," but not the twentieth century in which the rest of the stories take place, from the pre-WWI "Brothers and Sisters" to the Cold War-era "A Week in the Country" and all the complicated terrain of memory, nationality, and love in between. I want to say something insightful about the way she looked at real and imaginary history and the way the two can exist in simultaneous superposition or within the cracks of each other, but mostly I know that lines and characters from some of those stories will be in my head forever. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn't it? She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. Damn, I left my cabbage in the bar. I love the linked stories of the Fabbre family best; I think they must have been important to Le Guin, too, since they provide the strongest continuity throughout the cycle. The latest generation features in the title story of Unlocking the Air (1996), the collection I bought just for that one last glimpse of Orsinia in 1989. The novel Malafrena (1979) I can take or leave, but I've been looking for the early Orsinian poems since college. Now I just have to wait until September. That's a good reason to be around then.

Comments

[kore]

That's awesome! Heh, I wonder if that's the poem where she weighed what she got paid for it (zilch) against what she got paid for her first published short story, and decided to go the sff story route.

....no, I got it wrong, at least according to her Paris Review interview -- the story she got nothing for was An die Musik, probably MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE THING SHE HAS EVER WRITTEN (I used to quote it to my mom a lot) and the one she was paid for was April in Paris. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin

Philip K. Dick (she was in high school with him!) went the same route -- he was actually highly educated and read a lot, but none of his literary stuff would sell, so he published science fiction instead. Ditto Delany. Ace books would buy those very short novels by young writers in the sixties and seventies and not pay a lot, but you could actually make money, and you couldn't with litfic (still can't really unless you're J-Franz or whoever).

[sovay]

the story she got nothing for was An die Musik, probably MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE THING SHE HAS EVER WRITTEN (I used to quote it to my mom a lot) and the one she was paid for was April in Paris.

In 2001, most of the literary magazines paid exposure for poetry and the speculative ones would at least kick me five dollars . . .

(I wish it were possible to make a living as an author of short fiction. It would make me so much happier.)

[kore]

An amazing number of writers, including Dick and Le Guin, got their start through paying sff markets. There's so few left of those now I have to wonder what the effect has been on future writers.

[sovay]

There's so few left of those now I have to wonder what the effect has been on future writers.

Demoralizing.