In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination of a career in other literary forms.
Thriving in an unexpected genre is nothing new for Le Guin. She began to write stories as a child but didn’t achieve mainstream publication until her thirties. Her difficulties may have had something to do with her subject matter. From the start she eschewed the constraints of realism, choosing to write about the alien and the speculative. In her early thirties, she finally found her niche, science fiction. It was an unlikely home for a woman. At the time, the genre was overwhelmingly male and regressive in many other ways, too. In the journal Science Fiction Studies, Le Guin described the state of the field as she first found it:
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