The Carrier Bag

    Today we'll be looking at chapters three and four of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World , from 1966. Chapter three opens with Rocannon's preparations for departure. Lady Haldre, Semley's daughter and now ruler of the realm of Hallan, gives him five companions -- Mogien and four Olgyior, named Yahan, Raho, Iot, and Bien, with windsteeds for all of them. Kyo the Fiia also comes along. Haldre also bestows on Rocannon the necklace which Semley brought back many years ago, which he hides underneath his clothing. The group flies southward, after several days reaching the town of Tolen where they discover that the ruling Angyar family has been kidnapped and their castle stands empty next to the village of Olgyior they had ruled over. Rocannon's company flies on to Plenot, stronghold of the warlord who is responsible for Tolen's devastation. They succeed in defeating the lord of Plenot and securing the release of prisoners and boats that had been ...

Today we'll be looking at the first two chapters of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World . It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign . This is a format in which two short novels are arranged back-to-back and upside down, so that you can flip the book around and read the other novel starting from the other cover. The Ace Doubles format is known more generally in the book-binding world as dos-à-dos or tête-bêche. It became a signature style for the publisher Ace Books, which was founded in 1952 as a publisher of mysteries and Westerns, but quickly took up science fiction as well. The format allowed them to easily publish shorter works, as well as leveraging an established author to advertise a newer one. That's what we see with Le Guin, whose first novel was packaged alongside one from Avram Davidson, who was more well-known at the time. Fans of Davidson would buy the Double for his work, and then discover Le Guin...

 The story "Semley's Necklace" was first published in 1964 under the name "Dowry of the Angyar" in the magazine Amazing Stories. It was republished as the prologue to her first novel Rocannon's World in 1966, and then again as a standalone story under the current name in The Wind's Twelve Quarters . In the introduction to that collection, she calls it her most characteristic early story. The story opens with an anthropological report on the world of Fomalhaut II and its inhabitants, referred to as HILFs -- High Intelligence Life Forms -- written by representatives of the spacefaring Hainish people. There are three of these -- the subterranean dwarflike Gdemiar, the elfin or fairylike Fiia, and the humanlike Liuar. The story focuses on a woman named Semley, from the ruling Angyar race of the Liuar. She has married another Angyar nobleman, but neither of them brought much wealth to the marriage. So she leaves the palace in hopes of recovering the Eye of ...

Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). Today we'll be looking at Le Guin's first professional publication, the short story "April in Paris," published in 1962 in the magazine Fantastic . She was paid $30, which is the equivalent of $280 today. That's not too far off the current rate of $.08 per word paid today by Amazing Stories, which absorbed Fantastic in the 80s. It was the first "genre" piece, that is, a work of science fiction or fantasy, that she had written since age 12. It was republished along with her other early genre short stories in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975. This is a story about two men living in the same apartment in Paris five centuries apart. Barry Pennywither is a professor in 1961 who has gotten a leave from teaching to come to Paris to do archival research. Jehan Lenoir is an alchemist in 1482, work...

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). In this episode I'll be talking about Le Guin's first two published works. "Folk Song from the Montayna Province" is a short poem published in the Fall 1959 issue of the Prairie Poet , and "An die Musik" is a short story published in 1961 in the Western Humanities Review . She was not paid for either of them, so they predate her career as a professional writer. They were both republished in the Library of America collection The Complete Orsinia , which is the easiest place to find them today. Both of these works are set in the first major fictional world that Le Guin created, the central European country of Orsinia. I'll have a lot more to say about Orsinia when we get to the publication of her story collection Orsinian Tales and her novel Malafrena . For now, we can say that Orsinia is a quasi-realist setti...

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). For this introductory episode, I want to introduce the goals of this podcast, say a little about myself, and talk about the essay the podcast takes its name from: "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most influential writers of science fiction and fantasy of the second half of the twentieth century. She also wrote a large body of poems, literary essays, children's books, and realist fiction. The core of this podcast will be a series of examinations of each of Le Guin's notable works, moving in generally but not strictly chronological order. Sprinkled in with it will be consideration of other authors inspired or influenced by her work, reader reactions and fan works, and scholarly analyses. Right now this podcast is just me, but if it becomes a big enough enterprise I may also bring on some ...