Nine Lives

When Ursula K. Le Guin sold "Nine Lives" to Playboy, they asked if they could byline her as "U. K. LeGuin". She agreed to use the initials (she says in The Wind's Twelve Quarters) without much thought about what the request implied - implications that annoyed her later. All her other fiction, and any reprints of "Nine Lives", have been published under her usual name.

Publications

• 1969;
• originally published in PLAYBOY Magazine in 1968 or 1969 under U. K. Le Guin with "a good many minor changes in the story" (Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters);
• substantially revised version appeared in World's Best Science Fiction: 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr;
• the World's Best Science Fiction: 1970 version reprinted in Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader, in the "Theme: To Mean Intensely" section, edited by Robin Scott Wilson (New American Library: New York, 1973);
• Le Guin's version republished in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975);
• republished by Pulphouse Pub: March 1992 (ISBN 156146550X)

Le Guin on "Nine Lives"

From Ursula K. Le Guin, "On Theme", in Those Who Can, edited by Robin Scott Wilson (Signet: NY, 1973, pp. 204-5):

Every now and then one can say of a specific short story that it did begin with a single, specific idea with a single, specific source. This is the case with 'Nine Lives'.

I had been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, a splendid book for biological ignoramuses, and had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. I knew a little about cloning... but so little that I had not got past carrots, where it all started, to speculate about the notion of duplicating entire higher organisms, such as frogs, donkeys, or people. I did not have to read between the lines: Rattray Taylor did it for me. He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities quite seriously (why don't people ever ask biologists where they get their ideas from?). In thinking about this possibility, I found it alarming. I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is — the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death....