"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Barrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Barrow

Like Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin started publishing in 1962 in the pages of
Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing, but her career would rise in a less meteoric
way, even if, in the end, its arc would take her as high or higher. Her first
novel, Rocannon’s World, published in 1966, was another one of those
garishly covered Ace Doubles, and was resolutely ignored. Her next few
novels, the excellent and still-underrated Planet of Exile, and the complex
(perhaps too complex) and Van Vogtian City of Illusions, were also mostly
overlooked, and would only be discovered retrospectively by most readers
(in the same fashion as was Delany’s early work) after her plunge into wide
public notice was accomplished by the publication of The Left Hand of
Darkness in 1969 as part of Terry Carr’s new Ace Specials line.

Rarely has a novel had as sharp and sudden an impact, or been
accepted as widely as a modern masterpiece. The Left Hand of Darkness
won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award that year, and it deserved
them. A starkly poetic, emotionally charged, and deeply moving exploration
into the nature of humanness and the question of sexual identity, it would be
the most influential novel of the new decade, and shows every sign of
becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—even ignoring the
rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel on future SF and future
SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard
of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High
Fantasy writers.)

By the middle of the decade, Le Guin was possibly the most
talked-about SF writer of the ‘70s, rivaled for that position only by Robert
Silverberg, James Tiptree, Jr, and Philip K. Dick. By the end of the decade,
she had won Hugo and Nebula Awards, for her monumental Utopian novel
The Dispossessed, two other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her
short fiction, and the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her
novel The Farthest Shore, and was probably one of the best-known and
most universally respected SF writers in the world. She won another Hugo
in 1988 for her story “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”

“The Barrow” is an almost unknown Le Guin story, but it is a stunning
evocation of period and place, and it packs a powerful impact into a very
short package. Like all Le Guin stories, it is about responsibility and
consequences—and the making of hard choices.
 Le Guin’s other novels include The Lathe of Heaven, The Beginning
Place, The Tombs of Atuan. The World for World Is Forest, The Eye of
the Heron, and the controversial multi-media novel (it sold with a tape
cassette of music, and included drawings and recipes) Always Coming
Home, which critics seem either to love or loathe. There are four
collections of her short work: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian
Tales, The Compass Rose, and, most recently, Buffalo Gals and Other
Animal Presences. Her most recent novel is Tehanu, a continuation of her
Earthsea trilogy.