Ursula K. Le Guin’s Maps to Future Worlds

“When Ursula K. Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map,” reads the text for The Word for World at the AA Gallery in London, an exhibition of maps and drawings, many unpublished, by the celebrated late author of science fiction. The show, curated by Sarah Shin and Harriet Jennings with consultation from Theo Downes-Le Guin, offers a peek behind the curtains at the process of one of the most visionary world-makers of our time, at a moment when the world is desperately in need of world-making.

Among the printed cyanotypes on fabric curtaining and layering a deep indigo exhibition space, Le Guin’s original map drawings are precious lost notes from a departed traveller charting the possibilities of our past and future. As some have noted, the protagonists of Le Guin’s novels are not her characters but her worlds—environments and cultures so complete in their descriptions of landscapes, languages, laws, customs, values and belief systems that readers cannot but believe in their existence and imagine themselves within them. This was the case when I read The Left Hand of Darkness, a story of a freezing world, where I was challenged to imagine people without fixed sex or gender for the first time. Le Guin’s works are among those in the canon of science fiction that more than hint at the as-yet-unrealised possibilities of the future. Though gender fluidity has existed throughout human history, it was a work of fiction that planted a seed that would eventually change my reality.

But if Le Guin’s main characters in her books are the worlds she creates, does this make her maps a portrait? In The Word for World , I am looking closely at a slightly crumpled sheet of A4 typewriter paper that has been folded several times like it was sent in a letter. It contains an extremely detailed drawing of the two hemispheres of Gethen, the planet on which Le Guin’s 1969 novel about a human tasked with seeking an interplanetary alliance, The Left Hand of Darkness, is set. It has a legend on it, showing the different types of markings which denote the ‘summer thaw areas, mountains, permanent sea-ice or polar cap, and permanent land-ice’ regions of its continents. On the map, I notice the placement of the rival nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn, and the Gobrin Glacier, which the characters Genly Ai and Estraven cross, in order to escape a labour camp, where the most memorable scene of the book takes place. The characters sit in a tent taking refuge from the icy tundra as they realise their deep love for each other, bridging a cultural divide on a cosmic scale as they learn to communicate in the most intimate way imaginable, entering each other’s minds, hearing each other in the voice of a loved one.

It’s not the alien world or even its reconfigurations of the sex-gender matrix that make me want to feel part of this story, it’s the perspectives and relationships that these worlds allow. Beside one hemisphere of the world of Gethen, Le Guin has written ‘The “Land Hemisphere”’ and on the other, ‘The “Sea Hemisphere”’. Our own Earth contains a strikingly similar land and water split, with our ‘sea hemisphere’ also containing about a fifth of the world’s land and polar ice. The direct parallels that can be drawn between our world and her worlds—whether geographical, political, sociological or emotional—are important. Le Guin makes her worlds familiar enough to us so that we have enough to hold on to, describing the unfamiliar with such detail that we can place ourselves fully there.

It’s no surprise that the design of her planetary architecture extends to drawings. Though finished maps of her worlds are published in their corresponding novels, there is something to be said about the intimacy of her studies, some of them on dog-eared, torn, scrap pieces of paper, yellowed with time and probably never intended to be shared. One map of ‘the Ten Provinces of Orsinia for Malafrena’ from 1979 contains marks made in pencil, typewriter, and three different colours of ink pen; cities are written in and then crossed out, and small doodles show little cartoon men eating, standing, dragging some objects behind them, and wandering around the page’s edges.

Even Le Guin procrastinated. It’s also this nearness to her working process that makes The Word for World invigorating. As I scrutinise the miniscule hatching on the mountains covering the map of rivers that run into the inland sea from Always Coming Home, Le Guin’s 1985 novel imagining a community that survived the end of the world, I think of the Kesh society that referred to our contemporary civilisation as ‘the Sickness of Man’, and wonder what our apocalypse will look like, and if we’re in it already. But the end of the world is only the end for some. As Le Guin taught us, narratives, like time, are not linear or singular: when one world ends, others begin.

As the world around me declines into fascist ideologies and disrepair, I question whose world it was that is ending now, and all the fictions it contains. The Word for World made me reminisce on what we can take from Le Guin’s great project of fiction to make real in the next one. As the exhibition suggests, to begin a new story, to make the next one real, we must begin by mapping it.

The Word for World: the Maps of Ursula K Le Guin was on view at the AA Gallery in London, from 10 October – 6 December 2025.

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