Ursula Le Guin

Author of the marvelous and best-selling AlwaysComingHome, as well as much ScienceFiction and critical non-fiction.

As an SF author, part of the ScienceFictionNewWave, best known for The Left Hand of Darkness, which imagines a world of hermaphroditic hominids. My favorite work of hers (though I certainly haven't read them all) is The Dispossessed, about a colony of anarchists living on a barren moon, struggling to maintain anarchist ideals when generations of tradition and complacency have taken root.

Around 1980, her novels became much more political, driven, it seems, by a kind of new age feminism. In a lecture at Portland State University that I attended, she said it was motivated by a conversation with her mother, who asked Le Guin why she never wrote about women. These more recent Le Guin novels are kind of hard for me to swallow, because they feel rather pedantic and moralistic, but her writing and stories and SF ideas are still quite strong and are challenging in unique ways.

I'm told she lives right up the street from me.

-- RobertChurch

She also wrote the EarthSea books.

More on The Left Hand of Darkness: Le Guin uses masculine pronouns throughout the novel to refer to the dual-gendered hominids, leaving the reader with the general impression of maleness. In above-mentioned lecture, Le Guin said she could have done a better job today, and the 25th anniversary edition included one chapter rewritten to eliminate the use of gender-specific pronouns. Compare to the approach taken by SamuelDelany in Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, where both males and females are referenced with female pronouns and are referred to as women, resulting in phrases such as "women of both sexes".

See also SpivakPronouns for the discussion of gender in language.

"The more action in a story, the less that happens," she said, or something like that.

CategoryAuthor, CategoryScienceFiction