The Complete Orsinia Cements Ursula K. Le Guin’s Status as a Literary Legend

For a writer, being published in a Library of America edition is a really big deal. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing one isn’t likely to be able to appreciate while still alive. Founded in 1979, the non-profit publisher seeks to produce definitive editions of important American writings, from poetry to prose, non-fiction and novels, and everything in-between. It’s by nature a conservative publisher (both meanings), diligently surveying an author’s work throughout their career, and their impact on others. Only rarely is a living writer’s work bound in one of those distinctive black dust jackets. All of this is to illustrate why it is so very cool that Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my very favorite writers, has joined the ranks of Library of America writers with Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Orsinia.
It’s also a big deal because Le Guin is known primarily for her genre writing. There are scant few works of science fiction or fantasy in the series; Kurt Vonnegut, who did his damnedest not to get stuck in the genre section of the bookstore (no matter how many Tralfamadorians people his books), is a rare exception. So is Philip K. Dick—a high school classmate of Le Guin—who was decidedly a science fiction writer, if only because the literary fiction of the day could scarcely handle his intense experimentation and mind-buggery.

Most interestingly, of her vast catalogue of lauded works, Le Guin asked the publisher to highlight her Orsinian stories, neither her best known works, nor science fictional. The Library initially wanted to feature her well-known SF: say, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and the heavily anthologized short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” (Much of her SF is set in a shared universe; Le Guin is but loosely committed to a larger continuity between novels nominally in the same series.) She proposed Orsinia instead. “There’s some innate arrogance here: I want to do it my way. I don’t want to be reduced to being ‘the sci-fi writer’,” she said in an interview with the New York Times.
Instead, Orsinia is a country, situated somewhere in central Europe. (The name is a riff on Le Guin’s own first name, Ursula; it is her very own country.) The thirteen stories, wealth of poetry, and one novel that make up The Complete Orsinia detail the nation’s fictional history from the early 1800s to the wobbly period just before the Soviet Union broke up, but there are a couple set far earlier, in medieval time, and later, post Soviet-bloc.

The politics and past of Orsinia situate it neatly into Czech and Hungarian history (or thereabouts): client state of Austria, brief periods of self-reliance, falling behind the Iron Curtain, tentative steps towards post-Soviet democracy. These aren’t stories of space colonies and ansibles, owing more to 19th century Russian literature and Virginia Woolf than Amazing Stories.
One could, I suppose, argue that because Orsinia is not precisely a real country, has never appeared on our ever-shifting maps, that The Complete Orsinia is fantasy. One could call it magical realism if Orsinia existed, for the way the fantastic is used in the service of real history, though Orisinia is almost the inverse: realistic magic. But I think that would be wrongheaded, and precisely why Le Guin asked the Library of America to release her literary fiction instead. The trouble with being known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy is that everything is considered through that lens, which is neither useful nor germane. Le Guin has been writing on the margins for a long time, and Orsinia is just one more of her marginal states.

But let’s not froth too hard about the distinctions of genre; these are still the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, and they exemplify themes she has returned to again and again. There are few writers who favor utopias these days, but Le Guin has written several. The subtitle for The Dispossessed is “An Ambiguous Utopia.” Utopian themes ripple through Always Coming Home, which I find the most personal of her novels, taking place in a near-far/future-past of her native California. The only novel collected in this volume, Malafrena, owes something to the utopia, especially the ambiguous ones; important sections of it were written alongside The Dispossesed. And no, utopian does not mean everything is ideal and everyone sits around, pleased with their own perfection; it is more a subtle sense of real possibility, of something about to become. Which I say somewhat ironically, as, over the course of the novel, Itale Sorde, its protagonist, moves from heady revolutionary fervor to historically inevitable dethronement of his youthful naiveté.
But it is kindly done. Sorde does go home again. As Le Guin mused in a daybook while writing Malafrena: “True journey is return.” The cycling and circling of lives and history is the central metaphor of so much of Le Guin’s work, and that is all on display in The Complete Orisina. Come and see.