A Non-Euclidean View of California as A Cold Place to Be

Ursula K. Le Guin blends Taoist philosophy, myth and literary critique to challenge linear, progress-driven thinking and reimagine utopia as something grounded in the present.

In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin takes a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – to offer a counter-imaginary of place. Drawing on Taoist thought, Le Guin shows a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity – and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias – to return, go round, go inward, go yinward. Advocating for what is yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction, Le Guin shows that the Golden Age is right here, right now – invisible only to the forward-oriented mind.

A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be moves through mythic and Indigenous cosmologies, literary criticism, anthropology and divination to loosen the grip of Euclidean reason. In it, Le Guin demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. Non-linear, ‘cold’ and anti-heroic forms become narrative tools for resisting domination: in literary style, alternative social imaginaries can be rehearsed so that utopia emerges not as an engineered elsewhere, but as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.