Ursula Le Guin: Five Ways to Forgiveness

2013

Interviewed in the Paris Review series “The Art of Fiction.” Publishes a translation of Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony (2013) by Romanian writer Gheorghe Sasarman, which is retranslated from the Spanish translation by Mariano Martín Rodríguez, with both translations being overseen by Sasarman.

2014

Awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her widely quoted speech she calls for “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”

2017

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Five Ways to Forgiveness contains five linked stories: the four stories previously collected as Four Ways to Forgiveness (New York: HarperPrism, 1995), as well as “Old Music and the Slave Women.” They are published here as a complete story suite, as the author intended, for this first time.

Four Ways to Forgiveness contained four linked stories. The original publication of each of the stories is as follows:

“Betrayals,” Blue Motel , Vol. 3, edited by Peter Crowther (London: Little, Brown, 1994), pp. 195–229.

“Forgiveness Day,” Asimov’s Science Fiction , Vol. 18, Nos. 12 & 13 (November 1994), pp. 264–303.

“A Man of the People,” Asimov’s Science Fiction , Vol. 19, Nos. 4 & 5 (April 1995), pp. 22–64.

“A Woman’s Liberation,” Asimov’s Science Fiction , Vol. 19, No. 8 (July 1995), pp. 116–62.

The four stories were then collected as the story suite Four Ways to Forgiveness and published by HarperPrism in September 1995. A British edition was published by Gollancz in June 1996. The British edition is the same as the American edition except for changes to bring about conformity with British conventions of punctuation. The first American edition is the source of the text used here.

“Old Music and the Slave Women” was first published in Far Horizons: All New Tales from the Greatest Worlds of Science Fiction , edited by Robert Silverberg (New York: Avon Eos, 1999), pp. 5–52. It was then included in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories , the source of the text used here.

This e-book presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number of the print edition: 340.28, stole!“; 361.9, soon she; 362.31, somone; 428.17, doctors.); 480.20, owners’; 504.31, give; 546.5, inaccesible; 572.10, third and and; 585.10, tribesman.

In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the print edition (the line count includes headings, but not rule lines). No note is made for material included in the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, except for certain cases where common words and terms have specific historical meanings or inflections. Biblical quotations and allusions are keyed to the King James Version; references to Shakespeare to The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. Blackmore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For further biographical background, references to other studies, and more detailed notes, see Elizabeth Cummins, Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin , revised edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993); Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction,” in The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); John Wray, “Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221,” The Paris Review , No. 206 (Fall 2013); Richard D. Erlich, Coyote’s Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Rockville, MD: Borgo, 2010); Donna R. White, Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999); Mike Cadden, Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (New York: Routledge, 2005); Sandra Lindow, Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); and Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy, Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006).

338.10Cyanid skins] Cyan is a greenish blue color; “cyanid” is different from cyanosis, a bluish skin condition caused by lack of oxygen.

353.5 aiji ] A given name in Japanese, meaning “beloved child,” but here denoting a martial art.

417.26There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.] “Local knowledge” usually refers to such minor items as weather patterns or road conditions, but Le Guin draws here on the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who uses the phrase to show how complex cultural patterns such as religion are built upon, and defined by, those smaller sorts of understanding.

424.15the Terran Altiplano] The high plateau (averaging over 12,000 feet in elevation) that sits amid the Andes Mountains in Bolivia and extends into parts of Peru, Argentina, and Chile.

433.29I believe in it because it is impossible.] Adapted from a line by Carthaginian Christian philosopher Tertullian (c. 155–240 C.E.): Certum est quia impossibile est , “It [the resurrection of Christ] is certain because it is impossible.”

459.36“jump the ditch.”] An echo of the custom of jumping the broom, originally a joking term in Britain for an unsanctioned elopement but later a marriage ceremony practiced by American slaves who were not allowed to marry legally.

518.23–25But how do you get there?… the problem with Utopia] In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”

572.25–26cyanotic skin coloration] See note 338.10.

576.31Kwan Yin–like] Kwan Yin or Guanyin, an East Asian Buddhist divinity commonly called the “Goddess of Mercy.”

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eISBN 978–1–59853–571–6