Axon: Creative Explorations

The Antarctic of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Sur’, a speculative short story that imagines the continent as a vast unchartered wilderness of ice largely untouched by the human, no longer exists. At the time the story was published in 1982, only a few dozen to a few hundred people were visiting Antarctica annually (SAT 2023). They followed upon the explorations of Ernest Shackleton, Robert F. Scott, and Roald Amundsen earlier in the century, and the work of scientists and governmental agencies which led to the original twelve-nation Antarctic Treaty of 1959.1 Today, well over 70,000 people visit Antarctica each year (SAT, 2023). But for a very long time, the Antarctic was unique amongst the world’s continents for its ‘complete absence of women’ (Leane 2009:509) and, until the late twentieth century, it was almost exclusively through literature that women experienced the Antarctic. This gendered history makes ‘Sur’ doubly speculative. Firstly, it’s an invented feminist genealogy integrated with the real history of exploration of the South Pole: it is not Admunsen, but an intrepid group of nine South American women who are the first to arrive at 90 degrees South. Secondly, despite a life-long fascination with the continent, Le Guin (1929–2018) did not visit Antarctica. As two women with a love of Le Guin and a passion for the short story, we asked, could we write about ‘Sur’ in a way that was faithful to the feminist, collaborative spirit of the story? Tired of the solitary page, of facing the questions of where to next, we decided to explore the enterprise of writing together. We asked, why do we so often write alone? Why write alone? Why write alone when you can write with a friend, a colleague, a conspirator, who laughs and frets with you, or pushes back and willingly says they do not agree and asks, ‘have you thought of this X or Y or Z instead?’. This essay–dialogue is our other way. Its structure honours the feminism of the great Ursula K. Le Guin and her story ‘Sur’.