Review of The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is the GOAT. I think the only one who rivals her in my esteem of science fiction and fantasy authors is Octavia Butler. I say this not to claim to be an expert on either author or even that I like their work beyond any other SFF author … but those two gals just … have something. So naturally, when I heard that The Language of the Night had been revised and reissued with a new introduction, etc., I jumped on it.

This is a collection of essays by Le Guin from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Some first appeared in print form; others are transcripts, edited by Le Guin or another, of talks she has given at various events. A couple even have annotations or updates presented as footnotes or even side-by-side! Professor Susan Wood has organized the essays thematically and provided a brief introduction to each theme: “Le Guin Introduces Le Guin” (cute), “On Fantasy and Science Fiction,” “The Book Is What Is Real,” “Telling the Truth,” and “Pushing at the Limits.” It is a book packed with introductions. This new edition has an introduction by Ken Liu, followed by a preface written by Le Guin in 1989 for the ten-year-anniversary edition, followed by the original introduction by Wood. Then you have Wood’s mini intros before each theme. Plus, several of the essays are themselves introductions Le Guin wrote to some of her novels! As a result, The Language of the Night takes on a fun, nesting-doll-esque atmosphere.

I love the title to this collection, and I think it’s very appropriate. One thing that shines above all else? Le Guin’s love for, passion about, the SFF genres. Like, this should come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with her—but it is one thing to read her books versus hearing her talk about the art and craft of writing SFF. She travels through the genre with such purpose and poise, acknowledging the tension between commercial and artistic endeavours. SFF has historically been a genre of pulp, and writing it a craft rather than an art. Le Guin has no time for this, however; indeed, it is notable how deliberately she avoids engaging with literary fiction as an appreciable genre. To her, SFF is art, should be seen as art, and indeed, SFF authors have a responsibility to take their genre seriously as art. There’s a trace of restrained anger in some of her essays, the tone of a woman very much aware she is one of the few in her field, so used to having to talk to (and be talked at in return) men, yet schooling all of us all the same with her elegant and erudite arguments.

This is why Le Guin is the GOAT. She doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Not the readers, not the writers, not the publishers. Certainly not herself. Her constant allusions to Soviet Russia and its science-fiction authors feel almost prescient reading this now in the censorship-heightened atmosphere of 2024/2025. Living through the Cold War, Le Guin understands the stakes for creative freedom and self-expression and the unique way SFF is positioned to deal with these issues. She is happy to critique Tolkien and his contemporaries for their sexism, racism, jingoism, etc., while at the same time hold them up as truly fascinating storytellers.

In short, The Language of the Night demonstrates the dexterity I think is typical of Le Guin’s writing. She knows language, and she knows story, and I think it’s the mastery of these two skills in harmony that makes someone stand out as a writer. You might have one or the other and be good, but you need both to be great. And you need a third thing—a kind of ruthless intuition, a sensitivity to the politics of personhood, that Le Guin and Butler both embody in their works in a way that makes them GOATs.

I took my time reading this collection, starting it at the end of August 2024 and picking it up and putting it down all throughout the last half year. I have lingered on Le Guin’s language and deliberated on her declarations. I’m not sure I agree with everything she has to say, but I loved hearing her say it. I loved her discussion of how she might have approached gender in The Left Hand of Darkness differently had she written it ten years later—I think when we put certain books from previous eras on a pedestal, we freeze their author in amber and have trouble acknowledging that the author’s views might have changed or their language might have evolved in the years since the book became a classic, and this novel is a fantastic example. To see this cross-section of Le Guin’s thoughts through three decades, hear her acknowledge where her views have changed or which ones have stayed the same, is truly fascinating.

Though billed as “essays on writing, science fiction, and fantasy,” one might also call it “essays on writing science fiction and fantasy.” But to be clear, this is not a book that teaches you writing. Nor is it a definitive examination of SFF as a genre or even a particularly opinionated tour of how to write good SFF. (Though, as always, I will forever stan Le Guin for criticizing the more masculine or macho strains of SFF without forever pigeonholing the genre and cynically distancing herself from it like, say, Margaret Atwood, boo.) So if you are coming here hoping for Le Guin’s secrets, I don’t think you’ll find any. Lots of discussion of Frodo and Mrs. Dalloway and Tolkien and Woolf and Solzhenitsyn though!

The Language of the Night is the perfect kind of book for a millennial like me. I was born in the year Le Guin wrote her introduction to the ten-year edition. I grew up on flashy nineties science fiction on TV and reading everything from pulpy classics to the more cerebral parts of the genre. I have followed SFF through its modern ups and downs, the trends towards literary fiction and the swing of the pendulum back to doorstopper fantasy now reified into big-budget TV shows by Amazon and the like. What a time to be alive. And a time that never would have come to pass, were it not for Le Guin and her contemporaries. This window is a valuable portal into an era of which I was not a part, and one that I think modern readers would do well to learn about and understand.