During my work placement at the University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Collections in April to May 2025, I came across a striking letter from Ursula K. Le Guin, dated 1979 and addressed to British editor and publisher Malcolm Edwards. In it, Le Guin responds to an invitation to speak at the 37th World Science Fiction Convention held in Brighton in August 1979. What might have been a routine reply instead offers a window into her feminist convictions, her wit, and her deepening frustration with the status quo of science fiction culture in the 1970s.
This single-page letter is a sharp, humorous, and revealing artefact. One that distils Le Guin’s shifting position not just as a writer but as a public voice in the genre’s evolving conversation on gender.
Introducing the Letter
Le Guin’s 1979 letter is courteous but pointed. What follows is a clear-eyed critique of how women were being engaged (or sidelined) within the science fiction community.
“I hope there is some feminism going at this convention!!” she writes, with double exclamation marks. But then she undercuts the thought: “Please, do not have a panel called ‘Women in SF.’ There have been 34,000 panels on Women in SF, and they are all red herrings & I won’t participate.”
What leaps off the page is her exasperation with tokenism: “Ladies Night, bah.” Then she flips the script, “I will be on one called ‘Men in SF’ if you like”, a concise and brilliant inversion of the genre’s gender norms. In just a few lines, she exposes the absurdity of treating women as anomalies in science fiction, rather than as equal participants.
Le Guin’s letter also advocates for participatory dialogue, suggesting that panels focus less on formal speeches and more on engaging the audience. These remarks reflect her broader concern with flattening hierarchies; something that would increasingly define her fiction in the years ahead.
Who Was Le Guin in 1979?
By 1979, Le Guin was already a towering figure in speculative fiction. Her Earthsea trilogy had cemented her reputation, and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) had radically expanded the possibilities of gender in SF. But in many ways, she was still in transition. That same year, she published The Eye of the Heron, a novel she would later describe as her “first actively, purposefully feminist novel.”
Her admission at the time, “The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women”, reveals just how consciously she was re-examining her own work. Feminist theory, she later explained, helped her break away from writing “as a man,” and reimagine stories told “as a woman, and from a woman’s perspective.”
The 1979 letter, then, doesn’t just critique the world around her. It shows her in motion—confident enough to challenge stale conventions but still working through how to bring that revolution fully into her fiction.
The Letter as Feminist Artefact
The letter’s real value lies in what it captures: a writer no longer content with being a participant in the conversation about women in science fiction. She wanted to reshape the terms of the conversation itself.
Le Guin’s challenge to “Women in SF” panels echoes broader critiques within feminist SF circles at the time. Panels and anthologies often segregated women’s writing into special categories, reaffirming the notion that “normal” SF was male by default. Le Guin wasn’t rejecting feminism; she was rejecting how it was being tokenised.
Her line about joining a “Men in SF” panel wryly exposes this double standard. It’s an echo of Joanna Russ’s oft-quoted line from 1970: “There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
Beyond the Letter: The 1970s Feminist Shift
Le Guin’s frustrations weren’t isolated. The 1970s saw a groundswell of feminist activity in science fiction, from the 1974 Khatru symposium on women in SF to the founding of feminist publishing houses and anthologies like Millennial Women (1978), for which Le Guin wrote The Eye of the Heron.
That decade also saw her wrestling with earlier work, particularly The Earthsea Trilogy. While The Tombs of Atuan featured a compelling female protagonist in Tenar, Le Guin later said the series failed as feminist literature. She admitted that when she began writing, “it was easier to be an honorary man”, that boys would not identify with female heroes, and neither, often, would adult men.
These reflections culminated in Tehanu (1990), a radically different Earthsea novel that places women’s lives, labour, and inner strength at its centre. But the journey to Tehanu began much earlier, and the 1979 letter captures a key moment in that trajectory.
What the Letter Tells Us
The 1979 letter to Malcolm Edwards is more than just an author’s polite refusal, it’s a political statement in miniature. It reveals Le Guin’s weariness with superficial progress, her demand for structural change, and her desire for genuine conversation rather than performance.
It also marks her shift from a writer aware of feminism to one actively and publicly engaged with it, not just in essays and panels, but in the evolving texture of her fiction.
Seen in this light, the letter isn’t just a relic from the past. It’s a dispatch from a writer finding her voice anew, challenging old assumptions, and daring science fiction to be better, not just in who it includes, but in how it thinks.
Works Cited
- Dintino, T.C. (2020) ‘How Woman Writer Ursula K. Le Guin Got Her Feminist Groove On’, Nasty Women Writers, 25 August. Available at: https://www.nastywomenwriters.com/how-ursula-k-le-guin-got-her-feminist-groove-on/
- Guynes, S. (2020) ‘The Eye of the Heron: Le Guin’s Introduction to Feminism and Ode to Nonviolence’, Reactor, 28 October. Available at: https://reactormag.com/the-eye-of-the-heron-le-guins-introduction-to-feminism-and-ode-to-nonviolence/
- Le Guin, U. K. Letter to Malcolm Edwards (1979). University of Liverpool Science Fiction Collections, Uncatalogued.
- Le Guin, U.K. (2024) The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. 1st ed. New York: Scribner.
- Le Guin, U.K.. and Naimon, D. (2018) Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. Portland Oregon Brooklyn: Tin House Books.
- Merrick, H. and Williams, T. (1999) Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism. University of Western Australia Press.
- SFE: Women in SF (2024). Available at: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/women_in_sf
- Smith, J.D. and Frane, J. (1975) Khatru, No. 3/4. Baltimore, Maryland: [s.n.].
Text written by Toni Burns.