An inward journey into writing and philosophical temporality via myth, cosmology and literary criticism from the late Ursula K. LeGuin.

In this refusal of futurity, Ursula K. Le Guin loosens the grip of Euclidean reason by taking a non-linear journey – full of side trips and reversals – through a counter-imaginary of place.

Drawing on Taoist thought, she shows 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. From alternative social imaginaries rehearsed within an anti-heroic literary style, utopia emerges as a practice of staying with and inhabiting the present.