The Word for World is the first book to gather Ursula K. Le Guin's maps together, publishing many for the first time alongside new writing that probes how cartographic imagination shaped her worldbuilding and the limits of what any map can represent.
About This Book
Le Guin began every novel by drawing a map — an act that positioned spatial thinking at the heart of her creative practice. This volume uses those maps as a point of departure for a wide-ranging inquiry into architecture, placemaking, and the politics of representation. Essays, poems, stories, and theory from a distinguished group of contributors examine what it means to construct a world on paper: where its edges fall, what knowledge it encodes, and how it carries memory across time. Published to coincide with an exhibition of Le Guin's maps at the Architectural Association in London, the book frames cartography not as illustration but as a generative technology — one that sits at the intersection of literary fiction, spatial practice, and cultural theory.
Key Features
- 176 pages of maps, poems, essays, stories, and critical theory, many maps published here for the first time
- Contributions by Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Michael Everson, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Rivers Solomon, Standard Deviation, and Marilyn Strathern
- Timed to coincide with an exhibition of Le Guin's maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening late 2025
- Published by Silver Press, 2025
What You'll Discover
- How Le Guin used map-drawing as a foundational step in her fiction-writing process, and what that reveals about the relationship between spatial imagination and narrative worldbuilding
- The role of a map's edges — what is excluded, where the known world stops — as a site of epistemological and political meaning
- How contributors across poetry, fiction, and theory reimagine Le Guin's maps as technologies of memory that carry cultural and cosmological knowledge
- The connections between Le Guin's cartographic practice and broader questions of architecture, placemaking, and alternative paradigms of knowledge
About the Author
Sarah Shin is co-editor of this volume alongside So Mayer. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 176
- Dimensions: 12.9 x 19.8 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781068591815
- Publisher: Silver Press
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Architects and spatial thinkers interested in worldbuilding, scholars of speculative fiction and cultural theory, and readers drawn to the intersection of cartography, literature, and critical practice.