They touch upon SF and fantasy mostly only in passing, but they are a delight to read solely on the basis of wit, temperament, style, and ideas – even as the topics range from getting old, to answering fan mail from kids, to the adventures of her cat named Pard (I know, cat tales are the mother of all internet memes, but Le Guin manages to be both fresh and funny, even suggesting insights on the current state of the “human/animal interface”).īut “The Annals of Pard” serve mostly as entertaining intermissions between the four major sections of the collection, “Going over Eighty”, “The Lit Biz”, “Trying to Make Sense of It”, and “Rewards”, the latter of which is something of a catch-all ranging from a discussion modern composers like Philip Glass and John Luther Adams to various encounters with animals (a lynx, a rattlesnake) to a very touching tribute to her longtime friend and assistant Delores Pander.

The latest evidence of this is No Time to Spare, a collection of short essays originally published on the blog that she hesitantly began writing in 2010. Le Guin doesn’t pass herself off as an expert on such things, and she doesn’t need to: her clarity of thought and expression, both in fiction and nonfiction, have earned her respect simply as a writer, and not just of SF or fantasy. Le Guin? Back in the days of the space race, Asimov, Heinlein, or Bradbury would occasionally get hauled before the TV cameras to celebrate all the SFnal dreams that were about to come true (but most didn’t), and even today prominent writers get interviewed for think-pieces about climate change or dystopias, but for the most part the focus is limited to a few familiar SF themes that seem to be echoed in the news. Has the SF arena ever produced a more widely respected public intellectual than Ursula K. No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters, Ursula K.

No time to spare by ursula k le guin