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Authors
Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
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Le Guin’s novels include Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), The Dispossessed (1974), The Word for World Is Forest (1976), Malafrena (1979), The Eye of the Heron (1983), Always Coming Home (1985), Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990), Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight (1994), Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), The Telling (2000), The Other Wind (2001), Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Her short-story collections are The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), The Water Is Wide (1976), Orsinian Tales (1976), The Compass Rose (1982), The Visionary (1984), Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987), Searoad (1992), A Fisherman of the Inland Series (1994) Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1996), The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002), and Changing Planes (2004). Tales from Earthsea (2001) presents a novella and new short stories. She also wrote fourteen books for children, ten poetry collections, two plays, and several volumes of nonfiction, including The Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979, 1989), Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989), and The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004). Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin (1990) by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell is a good introduction; more critically sophisticated are James Bittner’s Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (1984) and Bernard Selinger’s Le Guin and Identity in Contemporary Fiction (1988). Le Guin’s importance is measured by Darren Harris-Fain in Understanding Contemporary Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970– 2000 (2005).
Born in Berkeley, California, and a longtime resident of Portland, Oregon, Le Guin was educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia University. She is the acclaimed author of science fiction that extends the moral and ecological boundaries of her own world to explore new possibilities for human society. Her publications include a celebrated series of children's books known as the Earthsea Trilogy, the novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), the multimedia production Always Coming Home (1985), and essay and poetry collections.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Schrödinger's Cat (1982) exemplifies the mind-stretching science fiction for which Le Guin is famous. The tale is in some ways "about" quantum physics, a body of thought that most of us do not understand at any level beyond the superficial. In fact, the story is about being puzzled and about what can happen to our thinking, and our imagining, when we grasp principles of uncertainty or apprehend the possible instability and contingency of the universe we live in.
1. Relax and play with the first long paragraph of Schrödinger's Cat. What is going on here? Can we be sure? If not, then what can we say is the tone of this opening? What kinds of expectations do we need to suspend, as readers, in order to move onward into the story?
2. When "Rover," the mailman dog, arrives with Schröinger's box, the story begins to suggest a situation comedy. Is the situation amusing? Frightening in its implications? How is the predicament resolved, regarding the box, the cat, and the two humans (maybe) who watch the experiment unfold?
3. Is Schröinger's theory answered, extended, turned inside-out, or refuted by what happens? If we take the narrator's theorizing seriously, then where do we end up--in a more certain reality, or a less certain one?
