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 – through a counter-imaginary of place.

Drawing on Taoist thought, she loosens the grip of Euclidean reason to show a way out of the ‘hot’ yang motorcycle trip of colonial modernity and its doctrine of technological progress and future utopias. Instead, she advocates for what is ‘cold’, yielding, cyclical and resistant to abstraction. If we return, go round, go inward, go yinward, 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 demonstrates that how we write is inseparable from how we imagine worlds. In anti-heroic literary style, alternative social imaginaries can be rehearsed so that utopia is realised as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.