The Word for World exhibit at Architectural Association Gallery in London (photo: Elena Andreea Teleaga)

Mapmaking lay at the heart of Ursula K. Le Guin’s worldbuilding. An able illustrator whose subjects ranged from realist watercolors to cartoon cats, the author of such SFF classics as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed used cartography as an instrument not just for situating her fictions in space and place, but charting their inhabitants’ minds, histories, and intricate cosmologies.

This fall, a show at London’s Architectural Association Gallery and its companion book The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin (Silver Press) explored this artistic landscape, shedding new light on its creator and the vast topography of her imagination. Below, Sarah Shin, who co-curated the gallery exhibit with Harriet Jennings and co-edited the book with So Mayer, discusses her research into the personal and political valences of Le Guin’s mapmaking practice.

Library of America: Le Guin would often draw maps for her fictional settings before she began writing about them. Can you talk about how she used these visual materials in her world-building?

Sarah Shin: I’ve always loved how Le Guin describes writing as translating, asking “What is the other text, the original?” Similarly, I think that drawing maps, for Le Guin, was a way of making visible what already exists elsewhere in the source: “the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them.”

Of her Hainish cosmos, she said: “Though I’ve put a good deal of work into my fictional universe, I don’t exactly feel that I invented it. I blundered into it, and have been blundering around in it unsystematically ever since—dropping a millennium here, forgetting a planet there . . . I did not plan these worlds and people. I found them, gradually, piecemeal, while writing stories. I’m still finding them.”

While seekers will usually consult conventional maps to go somewhere where they are not, or to find what they don’t yet have, in Le Guin’s world of many centers, maps are not tools for finding.

Drawing maps helped Le Guin find out qualities of her worlds to make them robust and coherent, such as how long it would take to get from one place to another. They were also images of her discovering the shapes of her own imagination—as if she is discovering herself, which is, in part, why we describe her maps as “journeys of consciousness.”

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin (Silver Press, 2025)

LOA: How would you describe Le Guin as a visual artist? Where did her knack for cartography come from?

SS: Le Guin’s image-making practice was prolific. Her son and literary executor, Theo Downes-Le Guin, head of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and consulting curator for The Word for World exhibition, told us her sketches “number in the hundreds or thousands,” but that “she never aspired to more than amateur status.”

In other words, she drew for pleasure. While she created astonishingly rich worlds, she loved and paid intense attention to the landscapes around her. I think her drawings, paintings, sketches and doodles reflect this attunement, revealing an artistry in flow with both the imaginal and the material. Her images are difficult to characterize as a whole, being diverse in style and experimentation, but they are playful, curious, and alive, in conversation with one another.

The importance of place and context for Le Guin cannot be overstated, and her cartography is anti-colonial. In one of my favorite essays by her, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” she says that California was not a “wilderness” or chaos before the settler cartography mapped it; it was known because “Every hill, every valley, creek, canyon, gulch, gully, draw, point, cliff, bluff, beach, bend, good-sized boulder, and tree of any character had its name, its place in the order of things.” Each place, “each of those names named, not a goal, not a place to get to, but a place where one is: a center of the world.”

“Rivers that run into the Inland Sea”, 1985, Ink on paper. Courtesy Ursula K Le Guin Foundation

I think this emphasis on narrative and movement being present-centered rather than future-oriented resonates with her practice of making images—inhabiting time. Some of the maps draw on symbolism of the collective unconscious: we have included her instructions for “How to Draw a Dragon” as a map, or the curves of the brain in “The Labyrinth of the Tombs of Atuan.” Others have striking graphic designs in black and white, suggestive of her Daoist themes, such as her hemispherical maps of Gethen from The Left Hand of Darkness, while others appear similar to conventional maps.

LOA: The Word for World exhibit coincides with the publication of a book of Le Guin’s maps that you co-edited for Spiral House. Can you discuss the link between the gallery show and this volume?

SS: This project was born from another one: Space Crone, which gathers Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender, published by Silver Press in 2023 and also edited by So Mayer and me. One of the most special things about working on The Word for World was being able to continue and nurture relationships with those making beautiful contributions to Le Guin’s legacies and beginning new ones.

I began by speaking with Theo, who originally told us about Le Guin’s mapmaking; her official biographer, Julie Philips, who so generously shared insights from her research for her forthcoming book; and Michael Everson, whose research in Le Guin’s archive at the University of Oregon was invaluable. The Word for World would not have been possible without their generosity and trust.

Then the book and exhibition came to life thanks to the collaborative and talented spirits at the Architectural Association—especially Harriet Jennings, Molly Evans, Max Zarzycki, Caspar Bailey, Ryan Dillon, and Elena Andreea Teleaga—where the exhibition showed from October through December, 2025, and which co-published the book with Spiral House, a new imprint of Silver Press.

More images from the Word for World gallery show in London (photos: Elena Andreea Teleaga)

Julie said that the best way to think with Le Guin’s stories is to tell stories about them. So for the exhibition design, we at Standard Deviation, a multidisciplinary collective, interpreted Le Guin’s stories to create a dreamlike space, a world in itself where the maps and images are both objects on display and components of the world. Beginning from understanding myth as a multidimensional map, we were interested in bringing the unconscious together with consciousness and emphasizing nature, metamorphosis, and fluidity. Our challenge was to translate into three dimensions our interpretation of the metaphysics and fractality of Le Guin’s worlds—and her insistence on uncertainty, non-euclideanism, and nonlinear side trips and reversals out of the one-way journey of Westernized modernity.

LOA: Did you make any surprising or unexpected discoveries while working on the book and exhibit?

SS: Julie shared such interesting details. For example, we learned that Le Guin lived in London at two points in her life, and on one occasion, just around the corner from where I used to live in Dalston. We are lucky to show a couple of her illustrations from her time in the UK in the exhibition, including one watercolor of Hampstead Heath from Golders Green, where she also lived.

Once, I casually referred to the talismanic map of the valley as a tardigrade and Julie told us that Le Guin had seen one wander across her lens during a period in which she was interested in microscopy. She made a little drawing of it and wrote “HORRID” next to it, along with the speculation that it “came from Some Other Place.” This was the inspiration for the Shadow in Earthsea!

Hemispheres of Gethen, unpublished, for The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969, Ink on typewriter paper; and Orsinia, the Ten Provinces, unpublished, for Malafrena, 1979, Ink and typewriter text on tracing paper (Courtesy Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation)

LOA: Do you have a favorite map from the exhibit or the book?

SS: Without question, my favorites are the set of talismanic maps; we used one of them as the main image for the show. Some of them evoke creatures like the tardigrade, or cybernetics, or the meridians that, in traditional East Asian medicine, are known to run through the body, a microcosm of the landscape and universe. I wanted to understand these talismanic maps by reading Always Coming Home, in which they feature, and Le Guin’s other writing in which she talks about place.

In “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” she writes that in the history of settler colonialism, “one of our finest methods of organized forgetting is called discovery,” but where one is—one’s center or “lived time, the place people call home, the seventh direction”—is within a present that remembers. While seekers will usually consult conventional maps to go somewhere where they are not, or to find what they don’t yet have, in Le Guin’s world of many centers, maps are not tools for finding.

The Kesh of Always Coming Home, the people of the Valley, draw maps of what they already know well: the Valley. In fact, “the better they knew them, the better they liked to draw and map them.” Since they knew the landscape so well, maps “were less guides than talismans.” A talismanic map is not oriented toward the future; in fact, a person of the Valley “doesn’t perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere.” These maps locate you where you are in the landscape of time and they hold a magic that cannot be fully explained, only remembered.

“Draft for the Labyrinth of the Tombs of Atuan, with note”, c. 1970. Ink on paper. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries and Ursula K Le Guin Foundation; and “Talismanic map of the Valley, with place names”, 1985. Ink on paper. Courtesy Ursula K Le Guin Foundation.

LOA: On a personal note, can you discuss how you initially became interested in the work of Le Guin? Do you have a favorite book of hers or any recommendations for those coming to her art for the first time?

SS: I read The Dispossessed when I was eighteen or nineteen. In Le Guin’s exploration of anarchism and Daoism, I read the phrase “To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return” and it has remained with me since. I felt like I’d found a mirror for how my mind worked—I’m drawn toward expressions of inherent relationship between seemingly disparate things and the symbolic language of the Dao is perfect for nuanced expressions of difference. I learned more about Le Guin’s Daoism from her rendition of the Dao De Ching. In her introduction to this book of wisdom by Lao Tzu, she says, “I was lucky to discover him so young, so that I could live with his book my whole life long.” Her engagement with a multiplicity of worldviews from a young age is something that I’ve been interested in connecting with the radical imagination of her stories. I would recommend this edition for those who would like to know more about Le Guin’s advocacy of going “yinwards” and the philosophy of harmony with the Way: the interplay of waxing yang and waning yin, giving rise to the mysterious “power that is not force.”

Ursula K. Le Guin in 1995 (Marian Wood Kolisch)