Ursula K. Le Guin - Adaptations of Her Work

Adaptations of Her Work

Few of Le Guin's major works have been adapted for film or television. Her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven has been adapted twice: first in 1980 by thirteen/WNET New York, with her own participation, and again in 2002 by the A&E Network. In a 2008 interview, Le Guin said that she considers the 1980 adaptation as "the only good adaptation to film" of her work to date.

In the early 1980s animator and director Hayao Miyazaki asked permission to create an animated adaptation of Earthsea. However, Le Guin, who was unfamiliar with his work and anime in general, turned down the offer. Years later, after seeing My Neighbour Totoro, she reconsidered her refusal, believing that if anyone should be allowed to direct an Earthsea film, it should be Hayao Miyazaki. The third and fourth Earthsea books were used as the basis of the 2006 animated film Tales from Earthsea (ゲド戦記, Gedo Senki?). The film, however, was directed by Miyazaki's son, Goro, rather than Hayao Miyazaki himself, which disappointed Le Guin. While she was positive about the aesthetic of the film, writing that "much of it was beautiful," she took great issue with its re-imagining of the moral sense of the books and greater focus on physical violence. "...evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain," Le Guin writes, "the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions."

In 1987, the CBC Radio anthology program Vanishing Point adapted The Dispossessed into a series of six 30 minute episodes, and at an unspecified date The Word for World Is Forest as a series of three 30 minute episodes.

In 2004 the Sci Fi Channel adapted the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy as the miniseries Legend of Earthsea. Le Guin was highly critical of the adaptation, calling it a "far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned", objecting both to the use of white actors for her red, brown, or black-skinned characters, and to the way she was "cut out of the process".

Her novella Paradises Lost, published in The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories, has been adapted into an opera by the American composer Stephen Andrew Taylor. The opera premiered April 26, 2012 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Illinois.