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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. This week I'm speaking with Colin Burrow, a senior research fellow at All Souls College Oxford and long-standing

contributor to the London Review. His most recent book is

imitating authors, Plato to Futurity, and he has a piece in the current issue of the

LRV on Ursula Legwyn. It's a review of two books, Ursula K. Le Guin, the last interview and

other conversations, edited by David Stretfield, and a reissue of Le Guin's essay, The Carrier Bag Theory

of Fiction, first published in 1986, I think, with a new introduction by Donna Harroway.

Hello, Colin, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, Tom. Very good to see you.

It's nearly three years since Ursula Le Guin died on 22nd of January 2018 at the age of 89.

She wrote 20 or more novels and over 100 short stories.

Her first five novels were rejected by publishers in the 1950s,

but her work has now been canonised in Library of America editions.

Most of her books would be categorised as science fiction or fantasy or under the broader and more recent term speculative fiction.

And as you say in your piece, Colin, all fiction asks the question, what if, but speculative fiction generally deals in larger what ifs about the underlying rules that structure the world.

Before Liguin, the rules that it questioned were usually technological, sometimes political,

but less often sociological or social.

...