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.
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!)
Maybe for people that don't subscribe to this, something a bit less... Action-y makes it more interesting.
I love the left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, all the hainish books, but I have never loved any book as much as my conversation partner loved his book about many many Kung Fus.
Like most things in that tradition, it’s less about a “message”, and more about learning something about yourself. Cf meditation.
[edit] spelling
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainish_Cycle
She is one of my writer-heroes.
I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book is a masterpiece!
I feel you on not wanting to read stuff that can't be read without footnotes.
I don't know if it's a difficult book, but I can see how it might land differently for me in different situations.
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.
Also a huge number of spacey contemporary works like A Mote in God's Eye, Rendezvous with Rama, Dune, Ringworld...
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 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.
edit: honest question, don't want to flame
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 first telephone is also pretty bad compared to nowadays phones.
There are always better books, but how do you know? Do you take my word for it? “Hey, I’ve read ALL the books, and these new books here are the best … trust me.” Better to read the old books yourself and be sure, right?
Books aren't made just from concepts. It's a great exploration of human concepts and interactions.