I remember Le Guin speaking at my university around 1990. She was amazingly open about her writing process. While she did not directly answer questions about the “meaning” of her writing, she did facilitate the discussion about her work’s meaning, and asked the audience challenging questions.
Of all my time at uni, I wish I had a recording of this event.
I understood from students who had attended a writing workshop with her earlier in the day, that she was gifted teacher.
Le Guin's characterisation of magic and the power of Names remains one of my favourite treatments of the themes in modern fantasy. Earthsea remains one of my pleasures.
I could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned about the racial aspect of it.
If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes.
LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over Earthsea.
(Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting opinions are welcome!)
Interesting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most often go back to Le Guin’s audio book reading of ‘Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching’ with short musical interludes and small sound effects. 100% satisfying to listen to.
Slightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century, in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, they never met but they struck up a polite friendship over email when they were both old and chatted back and forth.
Some might consider this raises the stature of Ursula Le Guin. I consider it rather as raising the stature of Harold Bloom. He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
> He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
In the 70s and 80s, Le Guin and other SFF authors were very aware of the literary divide that often regarded most science fiction and fantasy as little better than pulp fiction. Gene Wolfe's essays and speeches in Castle of Days touch on this several times.
What changed was the arrival of a new generation of literary critics, researchers, and readers who knew greatness in some of the SFF works of the era.
Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.
Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)
I read it last year. I found it to be quit boring and it also felt kinda "dated" in the sense that more recent SF is more space-y. However, the social constructs were well thought out.
Funnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
The TLDR is technology is how we cope with reality and for her it was more interesting to describe this reality and how it makes her subjects feel rather than describe the technology they use to address their problems.
what does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is? Or set in outer space?
If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the outdated space focused science fiction of the previous generations.
The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.
I just started reading the Earthsea series to my kids last night, what a coincidence to see this here! I discovered Le Guin relatively late in life and I'm so glad I did.
Why do people rate "The Left Hand of Darkness" so much? Is it because it was good at the time of writing? All concepts there are very shallow and mainstream now
The core ideas are only mainstream in extremely modern and extremely liberal contexts. I bet the majority of teachers in this country would get shit for assigning this book, even at a college level.
"The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969. I'm a transgender person in my 30s and Le Guin's writing makes me emotional every time I reread it. The ideas about gender and sexuality are more mainstream than they were almost 60 years ago, but the future is not evenly distributed and I think TLHOD would be eye opening for a lot of readers. Le Guin's prose and world building also place her among the best science fiction writers of all time.
I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.
Most people on earth still live in social and political environments where the core thought experiment of “The Left Hand of Darkness” – a human society without fixed male/female sexes – is not just unfamiliar but fundamentally unintuitive or threatening, which implies the book’s work is far from done.
In most countries, law, bureaucracy, language, and daily life remain built on a binary model of “men” and “women,” from ID documents to restrooms to family law. Surveys show that even where support for protecting transgender people from discrimination is relatively high, recognition of nonbinary identities and comfort with nonbinary social roles remains much weaker and highly contested. For a majority of readers shaped by these institutions, a society like Gethen, where nobody is permanently male or female and where gender roles have never crystallized, is not a recognizable extension of their world; it is a radical negation of how their societies are organized.
Globally, anti‑“gender ideology” movements and laws frame challenges to binary gender as dangerous Western imports, and they coordinate across borders from the US to Eastern Europe to parts of Africa and Asia. In places where same‑sex relationships are criminalized or where public discussion of queerness is suppressed, the premise of ambisexual humans would not just be controversial but literally unspeakable in mainstream forums. Even in regions that are relatively accepting of LGBT+ rights, polls show large minorities resistant to full legal and social recognition for trans and nonbinary people, indicating that the novel’s underlying claim – that gender categories themselves are contingent – remains outside everyday common sense.
Many major languages encode gender in grammar so deeply that even translating a gender‑ambiguous society is difficult, nudging readers back toward familiar male/female categories. This structural bias means that, for a majority of non‑English readers, the book’s attempt to erase stable gender can be partially blunted or reframed, underscoring just how far their linguistic and cultural worlds are from Gethen’s premise.
Research on nonbinary people repeatedly highlights “binary normativity”: the assumption that only two genders exist and are socially real, leading to erasure, misgendering, and lack of legal recognition. That everyday experience maps directly onto what Le Guin tried to imagine away on Gethen, showing that the novel’s central question – what happens to society when the binary disappears – still addresses a world that overwhelmingly cannot yet imagine such a disappearance. If most readers still inhabit strongly binary, often anti‑“gender ideology” cultures, then the book’s themes remain provocations from the margins rather than reflections of the mainstream, and its work of unsettling those assumptions is clearly not finished.
I would suggest "In the Mothers’ Land" from Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also talk about alternate society centered around gender. I didnt really liked the left hand of the night, but liked that one. And LeGuin saluted the book apparently too.
I remember Le Guin speaking at my university around 1990. She was amazingly open about her writing process. While she did not directly answer questions about the “meaning” of her writing, she did facilitate the discussion about her work’s meaning, and asked the audience challenging questions.
Of all my time at uni, I wish I had a recording of this event.
I understood from students who had attended a writing workshop with her earlier in the day, that she was gifted teacher.
Her book Steering the Craft, is very much her writing workshop distilled into book form.
Le Guin's characterisation of magic and the power of Names remains one of my favourite treatments of the themes in modern fantasy. Earthsea remains one of my pleasures.
I could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned about the racial aspect of it.
If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes.
LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over Earthsea.
(Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting opinions are welcome!)
Interesting perspective of someone curating an exhibit for their famous mother. I am a fan of her writing, but strangely I most often go back to Le Guin’s audio book reading of ‘Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching’ with short musical interludes and small sound effects. 100% satisfying to listen to.
Thanks for the tip. My local library has it; I'll grab it tomorrow.
Slightly tangential, but I discovered recently that the famous literary critic Harold Bloom was a huge fan of Ursula Le Guin and rated her one of the great canonical writers of the 20th century, in all of literature not just sci-fi. Also, they never met but they struck up a polite friendship over email when they were both old and chatted back and forth.
Some might consider this raises the stature of Ursula Le Guin. I consider it rather as raising the stature of Harold Bloom. He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
> He recognized how she transcended genre and belongs alongside (or perhaps, above) writers of highbrow literary fiction.
In the 70s and 80s, Le Guin and other SFF authors were very aware of the literary divide that often regarded most science fiction and fantasy as little better than pulp fiction. Gene Wolfe's essays and speeches in Castle of Days touch on this several times.
What changed was the arrival of a new generation of literary critics, researchers, and readers who knew greatness in some of the SFF works of the era.
Everybody that I know that reads SF has their own favorite Ursula K. Le Guin story. I have a hard time because I have two. 'The Lathe of Heaven' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness'.
I grew up reading Earthsea but later discovered Threshold/The Beginning Place. Some of her short stories are very good, too.
I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, but my favourite of her works is Always Coming Home [1]. Such a rich and varied and humane book.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home
I have a signed copy of 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and I will never let it go.
I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book is a masterpiece!
Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.
If you want some help then check out Mythgard Academy's course: https://mythgard.org/academy/dispossessed/
Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)
Lucky you! Make sure your heirs realize the significance...
I think “The word for world is forest” is criminally underrated.
Yes, true, that's also a great one. I should really re-read all of them.
> ... 'The Left Hand of Darkness'
I read it last year. I found it to be quit boring and it also felt kinda "dated" in the sense that more recent SF is more space-y. However, the social constructs were well thought out.
Funnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
She wrote a short essay on her blog about this: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
The TLDR is technology is how we cope with reality and for her it was more interesting to describe this reality and how it makes her subjects feel rather than describe the technology they use to address their problems.
In the foreward, she calls out to her, great SF is descriptive, not predictive. TLHOD is about sex, gender, friendships and culture in our world.
Also a huge number of spacey contemporary works like A Mote in God's Eye, Rendezvous with Rama, Dune, Ringworld...
The social constructs were the entire point. The spacey stuff was just a vehicle to get a more relatable protagonist into the story.
what does space-y mean in this context? Spacey, as in trippy (vernacular definition), in the way that Phillip K. Dick is? Or set in outer space?
If the second, there was a lot of sci-fi set in space for decades before The Left Hand of Darkness, and the cultural focus of that book and a lot of the new wave of science fiction writers of that time was a reaction against the outdated space focused science fiction of the previous generations.
The Lathe of Heaven was the first I read and had a big impression on me. Much later, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas did.
The WNET film of "The Lathe of Heaven" was wonderful. It was low-budget, and at times looked it, but captured the book well. It was unavailable for quite a while because of a scene centering around the Beatles' "With A Little Help from My Friends"; it was too expensive/complex to re-license it.
I just started reading the Earthsea series to my kids last night, what a coincidence to see this here! I discovered Le Guin relatively late in life and I'm so glad I did.
What a nice link. Thank you.
Why do people rate "The Left Hand of Darkness" so much? Is it because it was good at the time of writing? All concepts there are very shallow and mainstream now
edit: honest question, don't want to flame
The core ideas are only mainstream in extremely modern and extremely liberal contexts. I bet the majority of teachers in this country would get shit for assigning this book, even at a college level.
"The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969. I'm a transgender person in my 30s and Le Guin's writing makes me emotional every time I reread it. The ideas about gender and sexuality are more mainstream than they were almost 60 years ago, but the future is not evenly distributed and I think TLHOD would be eye opening for a lot of readers. Le Guin's prose and world building also place her among the best science fiction writers of all time.
I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.
Agree on "I, robot", but foundation series is still very good (probably because it's not really character-focused)
Most people on earth still live in social and political environments where the core thought experiment of “The Left Hand of Darkness” – a human society without fixed male/female sexes – is not just unfamiliar but fundamentally unintuitive or threatening, which implies the book’s work is far from done.
In most countries, law, bureaucracy, language, and daily life remain built on a binary model of “men” and “women,” from ID documents to restrooms to family law. Surveys show that even where support for protecting transgender people from discrimination is relatively high, recognition of nonbinary identities and comfort with nonbinary social roles remains much weaker and highly contested. For a majority of readers shaped by these institutions, a society like Gethen, where nobody is permanently male or female and where gender roles have never crystallized, is not a recognizable extension of their world; it is a radical negation of how their societies are organized.
Globally, anti‑“gender ideology” movements and laws frame challenges to binary gender as dangerous Western imports, and they coordinate across borders from the US to Eastern Europe to parts of Africa and Asia. In places where same‑sex relationships are criminalized or where public discussion of queerness is suppressed, the premise of ambisexual humans would not just be controversial but literally unspeakable in mainstream forums. Even in regions that are relatively accepting of LGBT+ rights, polls show large minorities resistant to full legal and social recognition for trans and nonbinary people, indicating that the novel’s underlying claim – that gender categories themselves are contingent – remains outside everyday common sense.
Many major languages encode gender in grammar so deeply that even translating a gender‑ambiguous society is difficult, nudging readers back toward familiar male/female categories. This structural bias means that, for a majority of non‑English readers, the book’s attempt to erase stable gender can be partially blunted or reframed, underscoring just how far their linguistic and cultural worlds are from Gethen’s premise.
Research on nonbinary people repeatedly highlights “binary normativity”: the assumption that only two genders exist and are socially real, leading to erasure, misgendering, and lack of legal recognition. That everyday experience maps directly onto what Le Guin tried to imagine away on Gethen, showing that the novel’s central question – what happens to society when the binary disappears – still addresses a world that overwhelmingly cannot yet imagine such a disappearance. If most readers still inhabit strongly binary, often anti‑“gender ideology” cultures, then the book’s themes remain provocations from the margins rather than reflections of the mainstream, and its work of unsettling those assumptions is clearly not finished.
The keyword is now.
The first telephone is also pretty bad compared to nowadays phones.
Yes, but now it doesn't make sense to read it anymore right? It reads outdated and there are better books nowadays
Can you list some better books for those of us who liked Le Guin and are interested in what could be better?
I would suggest "In the Mothers’ Land" from Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also talk about alternate society centered around gender. I didnt really liked the left hand of the night, but liked that one. And LeGuin saluted the book apparently too.
it's hard to understand for me what you liked in Le Guin's books, but maybe Children Of Time?
Lovely.