The Map of Middle Europe, Redrawn

How do you write about a world you have never seen? It’s a strange question for a writer of science fiction to ask, yet this was the spark that led a young Ursula K. Le Guin to Orsinia. Orsinia, “an unimportant country of middle Europe,” was where, as a young writer in the early 1950s, she began to wrestle with ways to describe those worlds. She yearned to grapple with themes of government, revolution, and liberty; but having never left the United States, she felt unequal to the task of setting a story in Europe.