This is an essay from 'The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin' (AA Publications/Silver Press) by Theo Le Guin.

My mother described herself as uneasy with abstraction. Though her writing is scaffolded by concepts of gender, power and progress, and though she used literary abstraction such as metaphor throughout her work, the symbolic and formal systems of mathematics and logic felt alien and uncomfortable to her. Ursula’s preferred form of abstraction, the one at which she excelled, was imagination. Imagination was not, for her, abstract, which is why the worlds she imagined do not feel abstract to readers. And within her imagination, Ursula carved out an exception for cartography — a form of symbolic abstraction, to be sure, but one that worked for her.

Cartography formed an early and integral part of her writing process. Maps acted as a tool to create specificity and consistency within Ursula’s inventions, a realism for places that aren’t real. Early in her writing life, Ursula’s prose was set in realistic places that don’t quite exist, like Orsinia, which looks a lot like — but isn’t exactly — Eastern Europe. Her cartography and writing co-developed more easily within semi-realism. Jumping into a visual articulation of a completely imagined place like Earthsea or the planet Werel would challenge any young writer. Mirroring her early realism, for her final novel Lavinia (2008) Ursula mapped the Latium region of modern Italy to verify that a walk she described as taking three days could actually be done in that time. Whether mapping Latium or a distant planet, the point was to define rules for her stories, lending them credibility and a sense of truthfulness. A sentiment she expressed regarding her preference for book illustrations summarises the role she wanted her maps to play: to create ‘a strong, vivid, striking realism. Not a fanciful dreamworld, but an imaginary world accurately drawn and vividly, intensely seen. A world real people live in, and real dragons.’¹

Some theorists might see this quest for accuracy as a version of ‘all fiction is lies’: in other words, that cartography is used in an attempt to convince readers of places, time and people that don’t exist. Ursula did refer to fiction as a form of lying from time to time, but only playfully, in her mode of author as Coyote trickster. In her formal reflections on the nature of fantasy, she was punctilious about drawing distinctions between fiction and lies, as in a 2013 festival talk (later revised for publication in Words Are My Matter), in which she said, ‘Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying ... Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich it.’²

I can only speculate on the early development of Ursula’s cartographic skills. From childhood, she was a gifted draftsperson, though she never aspired to more than amateur status. Her drawings, sketches, pastels and cartoons evince a natural gift for two-dimensional spatial imagining. She also absorbed the habits of her anthropologist and writer parents, helping her father to map sites mentioned in the song-cycles of Indigenous people he worked with, and to calculate distances between these sites.³ In the way she used maps I can’t help but see a reflection of how her father’s generation of scientists placed great faith in the connection between measurement and enlightenment. Recently I reread my grandfather’s 1919 study of how cultural phenomena might behave according to predictable cycles. He based his analysis on data points of women’s fashion — such as skirt length — during a 76-year period, inferred and recorded from fashion plates. Read against modern standards, it seems like a naïve stab at a grand unifying theory based on a tiny dataset. In historical context, however, I see a brilliant social scientist’s attempt to extend from imagination to symbolic data, and from data to profound understanding — a quest for what Ursula described as the realism of a larger reality.

The strongest family influence might, however, have been the Napa Valley ranch her parents bought in 1930. Here the centrality of the map in Ursula’s life connects to something broader, to ideas of home and place prevalent throughout her writing. Ursula identified deeply and forever as a person of the western United States. She inhabited three main places in her life: her childhood home in Berkeley, California (1929–47); her adult home in Portland, Oregon (1960–2018); and through it all, the ranch (1930–2018). Until her final trip in 2016, Ursula spent the entirety of her childhood summers, and weeks or months of almost every year as an adult, roaming the ranch’s 35 acres of pasture, forest and creeks with complete freedom. There she was taught to write, or at least to form letters, by her brother Ted. There she drew countless sketches of trees, hills and structures en plein air. Until her death she could map those acres’ contours and details from memory. Some version of that ranch courses through nearly all her writing, most explicitly in Always Coming Home (1985), but gently and subtly in other books, stories and poems. The landscape’s topography, imprinted on her more or less at birth, is her ur-map, at once real, remembered and imagined.

Among the maps she drew for books, Ursula was most often asked about the map for the first edition of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968). In her introduction to The Books of Earthsea, she wrote:

... the first thing I did was sit down and draw a map. I saw and named Earthsea and all its islands. I knew almost nothing about them, but I knew their names. In the name is the magic. The original map was on a very large sheet — probably butcher paper, which I had rolls of for my kids to draw on ... Its use to me was practical. A navigator needs a chart. As my characters sailed about, I needed to know how far apart the islands lay and in which direction one from another.³

This description of the practical and navigational uses of the Earthsea map echoes Tolkien’s description of how he fitted Middle-earth to his map, rather than fitting his map to Middle-earth. My mother’s map also aligns broadly with the aesthetics of Tolkien’s. The two authors have distinct styles, but both created maps which are cartographic and also illustrative, and which evoke an out-of-time feel that now universally connotes Fantasy.

Tolkien’s influence on Ursula’s maps is indisputable but not unique. Linguist and publisher Michael Everson recently noted a small map of the island of Saint Helena, the site of Napoleon’s final exile, which my parents likely picked up in the early 1950s at a Parisian marché aux puces (flea market), and which hung in their house for a half-century. The map could easily pass for an island of Earthsea in its shape and style of mountain-shading. (Perhaps, given that the map was printed in the 17th century, I should say that Ursula’s Earthsea could easily pass for an archipelago made up of many Saint Helenas.) I don’t think this represents Ursula’s cartographic Rosebud; indeed I don’t think there is a Rosebud for Ursula, or for Earthsea. Instead, I think the map — along with Tolkien and myriad other influences — was in her subconscious as she drew. In any case, that first map of Earthsea, though magnificent, is sui generis in Ursula’s output. Elsewhere, her use of maps is, as with her stories, more spiral than linear, and primarily for herself rather than for readers.

The majority of the non-Earthsea maps are workmanlike, described by Ursula as ‘research ... into the geography of my own imagination’. In her science fiction and realist fiction, she adopted a simple and contemporary style. Her maps of Urras and Anarres for The Dispossessed (1974) are relatively bare-boned, more a visual reminder of the separation of planet and moon than a key to understanding the narrative. Most editions of this book use Ursula’s little planet and moon drawings mainly as chapter headings to cue the reader to a change in setting. Similarly, her maps for Searoad (1991) render a detailed but less decorative topography of an imagined coastal town — a town very similar to the one in which my parents had a weekend house, in which several local topographic maps hung, and in which she wrote most of the book. Many of these maps wound up in books after being modified or entirely redrawn by their publishers. This didn’t bother Ursula; she loved cartographer collaborations, learned from them, and revised her own maps as a result of what she learned. For my part, publishers’ preferences for making a hand-drawn and hand-lettered map more polished is mystifying. Maps are so personal, as personal as words, and I don’t enjoy seeing another person’s aesthetic overlaid on my mother’s.

My mother worked hard to make her unrealities realistic, harder than many literary fiction writers work to make their realism realistic. Books set in real places, accurately and vividly described, aren’t uncommon in any era. But in my estimation, contemporary literary fiction often relies too heavily on brand names, references to current events, or descriptions of characters’ small-difference narcissisms to inject a feeling of place and moment. As for an actual map, lovingly drawn by the writer and reproduced by the publisher? This seems nearly unthinkable for books aspiring to literary fiction status. Of course, readers can always find a map of a real place on their own initiative, but I don’t think this is the reason we see so few maps in contemporary realism. Somewhere along the way, maps — like illustrations — came to signify less-than-literary. Fantasy and science fiction writers, who even now are accustomed to this kind of genre bias, can’t rely on presumed familiarity or on shorthand descriptions for their inventions. They must create a place, a whole cloth and bring it to life with nothing but words and the occasional map or picture. How fortunate for us that they do.

Theo Downes-Le Guin, Portland, Oregon, June 2025

Bio

Theo Downes-Le Guin is president of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, which continues Le Guin’s legacy of supporting writers and readers of fiction and poetry through programmes such as an annual book prize. Downes-Le Guin also consults on adaptations of his mother’s work. From 2013 to 2020, Downes-Le Guin directed a contemporary art gallery, curating more than 80 exhibitions; he continues to curate independently. Previously he worked in public policy and technology market research. Downes-Le Guin holds degrees in art history and applied social research methods.

Book

Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with the eponymous exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, The Word for World (edited by So Mayer Sarah Shin) brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. Contributors include Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation and Marilyn Strathern.

Notes

1 Le Guin’s notes to artist David Lupton for the Folio Society’s Books of Earthsea, quoted in part in the Folio Society blog, ‘A Celebration of Ursula K Le Guin’, 14 June 2022, https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/blog/this-folio-life-a-celebration-of-ursula-k-le-guin.

2 Le Guin, ‘Making Up Stories’, in Words Are My Matter: Writing About Life and Books 2000-2016 (Small Beer Press, 2016), p 108.

3 Le Guin, ‘Introduction’, in The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (Gollancz, 2018), pix.