A Volume on Ursula K. Le Guin
"She is the kind of writer businessmen hate most, producing challenging, unpredictable books whose meanings are too elusive to be easily controlled." - Meredith Tax, The Nation:, January 28, 2002
If Ursula Le Guin were Japanese, she would surely be designated a National Treasure. Her work in Science Fiction and Fantasy spans the fields of fiction and criticism. From her first published story in 1962, her writing has blended elegance and passion, vividness and acuity, and she has the unerring ability to capture the unexpected perspective that is the trademark of science fiction. Her fantasy has achieved that genre's variant sense of wonder, the taste of age and Elsewhere that Tolkien called the air of Faerie. Over the scope of her long career as a storyteller, a poet and a critical thinker, perhaps her greatest achievement has been her work's enduring commitment to ideas as being both politicized and political. It is this commitment, particularly from the 1970s on, when she began thinking about gender in both theory and fiction, that has made Ursula Le Guin a major presence in SF and Fantasy, and in the smaller but more exacting fields of feminist SF and Fantasy.
In these fields Ursula Le Guin's contribution is remarkable, not simply for her fiction's shaping of political debate in the more immediate and gripping form of characters' action, speech, and literal flesh and blood, but also for her jargon-free and emotionally rich critical voice. And, uniquely, for the courage that has allowed her not simply to shift a position, but to admit, freely and in print, as with "Is Gender Necessary: Redux," that her previous arguments, however famous and praised, could have been wrong. It is courage, as much as commitment and talent, that has made Ursula Le Guin not merely one of the best known but one of the most respected and perhaps best loved writers in her field.
Ursula Le Guin has been involved with Paradoxa since the journal's first issue, when she graciously agreed to participate in a "Paradoxa Interview" (1995.) She also agreed to serve on the journal's Board of Editors, and has subsequently contributed articles, and with them wisdom, expertise and entrée at many stages along Paradoxa's path.
Paradoxa is now pleased to propose the publication of a special Ursula Le Guin volume, which will be in part a collection of critical essays and commentary about her work. This call for papers requests abstracts or expressions of interest for essays dealing with her adult SF and Fantasy, her critical writing, her books for children and young adults, and her poetry, including her notable translation of the Tao Te Ching, and ranging from overviews of her work to studies of specific texts. Especially welcome will be essays that assess the value or standing of this work or works to the field(s) as a whole and at the present.
We are also seeking personal reminiscences or memoirs, from those who have known Ursula Le Guin firsthand, those who have worked in these fields, or simply those who have read her work and wish to record and/or honor the value it has had for them. Such memoirs will be very welcome, as a means of deepening the volume's perspective and extending the academic and critical picture to the personal and, of course, the political.
Academic papers may be from 4000-10000 words. We ask that reminiscences or memoirs be substantial, 1000 words or more, rather than paragraph-length tributes. Due date for proposals and/or abstracts is March 30, 2007. Please send proposals by e-mail to Info@paradoxa.com. Final date for submissions will be August 31, 2007, and the volume will be published in 2008. For further information about Paradoxa, please visit our website: www.paradoxa.com
Guest Editor for this special volume on Ursula Le Guin is Sylvia Kelso, who works part-time at James Cook University of North Queensland. She has published several articles on science fiction and fantasy, especially in women’s writing, has analyzed Ursula Le Guin’s SF in detail for her PhD., on the interactions of SF and feminism, 1968-1989, and has an article on the two most recent Earthsea novels forthcoming in the Aqueduct Press collection, WisCon30 Chronicles. Kelso has been on the Board of Editors of Paradoxa since its inception. Her first fantasy novel, Everran’s Bane, was published in 2005, and she has two further novels forthcoming in 2007, The Moving Water and Amberlight.