Ursula K. Le Guin is a writer who truly changed the world. Starting in the late 1960s, she created fantasy outside of the usual white male-dominated stories, pushing the genre through the years to be more diverse and more feminist. Her stories challenge concepts about gender, and her public activism has focused on human rights, a healthy environment, a free and thriving press and arts, and egalitarianism.
Getting started with a writer like Le Guin can be intimidating because she’s written so much. Fear not, we have a “If you like this, then try that” primer for you right here. Some of her work is intensely cerebral, some is fun, some is romantic, and some is not. Here we go!
- If you like fantasy, try: the Earthsea books, starting with A Wizard of Earthsea.
A Wizard of Earthsea, which was first published in 1968, began as a young adult fantasy trilogy about a boy named Ged who is sent to wizarding school. Ged has great power but also great arrogance. In the first three books (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore) Ged comes to terms with and atones for his actions.
The series contains dragons and jewels and adventure, along with great pain and great happiness. Most of the characters, including Ged, are dark-skinned. As Le Guin grew personally as a writer and a feminist, she added two books to the series. Tehanu was published in 1990, almost twenty years after The Farthest Shore was published. Tehanu is told from the point of view of Tenar, a character from Tombs of Atuan. In this book, Tenar and Ged have a romance that is dependent on Ged’s redefining himself as a wizard and appreciating that women also have great power. The book, as well as the following book, The Other Wind, confronts the misogyny and structural patriarchy of the Earthsea world.
I’m not gonna lie – my attachment to this series is so personal and intense that I can’t read it anymore with clear eyes. It was a big part of my tweens in a way that I didn’t appreciate until I became an adult. You can read more about my personal history with the series at Interfictions Online. A Wizard of Earthsea has had a profound influence on the field of fantasy, and the last two books stand as powerful feminist stories without losing a sense of wonder and excitement.
- If you like high concept science fiction, try: The Left Hand of Darkness
The Left Hand of Darkness is one of Le Guin’s most famous and cerebrally challenging books. Written in 1969, it uses science fiction to explore religion, culture, and gender roles.
The plot concerns Genly, who is from Terra (our Earth). He is sent to the planet Gethen as an ambassador from a confederation of planets. On Gethen, people are without gender unless they are going through a brief period called ‘kemmer’ during which they can adopt a sex and reproduce. This lack of fixed gender has a powerful effect on Gethen society. Genly spends years on Gethen and at one point endures a grueling imprisonment and subsequent escape. There’s a very intense romance, but no happy ending.
Genly has the ability to communicate telepathically, but this doesn’t help him navigate the culture he encounters. Most of the book involves the trouble he gets into because he cannot understand the codes or the behaviors of a non-patriarchal, genderless society. Nor can he understand the meaning or social significance of the planet’s two religions.
At this point in our history, discussions about gender fluidity and sexuality are happening every day, and in more nuanced detail than Le Guin accomplished in 1969. However, at the time of publication this book was revolutionary, and it’s still a fascinating work. The Left Hand of Darkness is part of a series of novels called the Hainish Cycle, which were written between 1966 and 2002, so if you like the style you can read other books set in the same universe and watch Le Guin evolve as time passes.
- If you like short story anthologies, try: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
This anthology was first published in 1975, and I love every single story in it. Here are some highlights:
“April in Paris” is charming, funny, and sweet. It is very difficult to write a romance short story from first meeting to HEA, but Le Guin pulls it off beautifully. There’s also friendship, time travel, and a dog. One of my favorite comfort reads.
“Semley’s Necklace” is a tragic story about what happens when science fiction meets fairytale.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is Le Guin’s most famous short story. If she’s remembered for anything, it should be this. Don’t Google it, don’t let anyone spoil it, and don’t read it in public.
- Just for Fun: Catwings
Need a break from high concept stuff? Catwings, first published in 1988, is a series of children’s books about winged kittens. What’s not to like? The illustrations, by S.D. Schindler, are to die for.
What about you? Do you have a favorite of Le Guin’s work? Which do you recommend for new readers, especially romance fans?
I also truly love _The Disposessed_! Heartily recommended.
Those who walked away from Omelas is a story that resonates with everyone who abors the concentration camps currently being run by the Australian government in Manus and Naru. The torture of some can never justify the well being of the many.
Excellent review, filled with good advice. In addition to heartily recommending The Dispossesed, I’d strongly recommend LeGuin’s essays, starting with The Language of the Night; get the revised edition, which includes LeGuin grappling, with typical grace and generosity, with the arguments about gender sparked by Left Hand. I’m delighted to see this post, as I consider LeGuin the greatest living American writer.
I absolutely adore LeGuin. She also has a really wonderful blog.
When I was little, my dad was usually the one who read to my sister and I but my mom had a couple of books she read to us and the catwings series were 80% of them!
She also recently was giving me some of her favorite old or out of print sci-fi and I read “The Word for World is Forest” by Le Guin and it was very good
Fantastic! suggestions all around! LeGuin made an impact on me very early on with A Wizard of Earthsea. The Left Hand of Darkness featured prominently in my college senior thesis on using Science Fiction to teach anthropology – you can definitely see the influence on her work of growing up in an anthropologist’s household. She continues to be a passionate figure today in everything she touches.
Every time someone demands why I don’t love the gritty, “realistic” shows like Jessica Jones or Game of Thrones….
I tell them that some of us walk away from Omelas.
Sometimes they get it. Often they don’t.
This is lovely, thank you! I always get pretty overwhelmed looking at her books. On a separate note, I was on a committee with Ursula Le Guin, and she’s as amazing in person as you would think.
I love Ursula LeGuin, she is so brilliant and sees so clearly. The Left Hand of Darkness is a brilliant think-piece as well as drama, especially as we move toward a gender-fluid society ourselves. The Lathe Of Heaven is also very good, and has been adapted to film once or twice. In contrast the adaptations of Earthsea have been atrocious, and I wish someone would adapt it, and especially cast it, more faithfully.
One of the most brilliant writers I have ever been privileged to read.
I add my love to the chorus of love for the Earthsea series–but be warned! SyFy (back when it was SciFi) made an Earthsea miniseries that was SO VERY BAD. Ursula LeGuin disowned it pointedly, but in my time as a bookseller, I had several people refuse to read the series, or any LeGuin, because “OMG that miniseries was so crappy!”
I have been told that Goro Miyazaki’s animated “Tales From Earthsea” is much, much better, but haven’t had the opportunity to see it yet. At any rate, read the Earthsea series! Accept no substitutes! And if you’re me, mentally cast Idris Elba as Ogion the mentor-wizard.
WARNING, INCOMING THINKPIECE: I love OMELAS, but I think I read it differently and perhaps less lightly than others may. I think it’s a piece that is honest about both the costs of resistance and the benefits of oppressing and exploiting the powerless. Standing up against oppression and exploitation is dangerous, high-cost, and doesn’t automatically have a happy ending. That’s why so many humans, an overwhelming majority across time, have gone along with the prevailing wind. Everyone in Omelas knows the price of their peace and prosperity, and everyone is troubled by it to some extent, but the overwhelming majority decide that it’s “worth it”. Those few who don’t give everything up and walk into exile, they walk away from human community because it is not possible to stay in human community without that price being paid, even passively, on your behalf. There isn’t an easy answer. There isn’t even a good answer. I think in the story, as in our own culture, the people who walk away from the cost-benefit system of culture are radical exceptions. Many of us assume that we would of course also be the exception… even as we don’t notice the ways in which our own existence is made possible by oppression and exploitation. It’s just that the oppression and exploitation often comes in the form of things like capitalism and globalism… things like the impact of free-trade agreements on regional labor or the impact of the production of cheap goods on ecosystems far away from where I live, the benefits are easy to see and the costs land on someone else and are easy not to notice. (I am typing this on a laptop produced at least partially by exploited labor far away from my own homeland, so I certainly don’t pretend to be outside this system.)
Life is complex and difficult. This is at the center of what I admire about Le Guin as a writer and a thinker – I believe that she, more than any writer working today, really understands that life is complex and that often people don’t have as many choices as we would like to believe.
There’s no Le Guin I don’t like. I am a bit of a superfan. I really recommend THE DISPOSSESSED, it explores the benefits and costs of anarchy as a philosophy very seriously, and it’s one of the most thoughtful things I’ve read about marriage. The short story collection THE BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD is great. I LOVE HER SO MUCH!
@EC Spurlock – I think she also hates the Earthsea adaptations, right? For many reasons including the dumb casting of Ged, a man of color, as Iceman from the X-men… It’s such a shame, because they’re so awesome and could be so great.
UK Le Guin hates the adaptation, yes.
I find it unlikely that anyone reads The Ones Who Walk Away lightly. It’s not subtle in making its point.
I see that so differently. I think it’s very subtle.
I love Ursula Le Guin. I also can’t be objective about The Earthsea books – I read them in my 20s and they had a huge impact, especially The Tombs of Atuan (young girl discovers that everything she believed growing up was a lie and has to choose what kind of person she wants to be – as a survivor of a disfunctional childhood this resonated with me so, so much).
My other favorite is Four Ways to Forgiveness, which I think is her late masterpiece. It’s set in the same universe as Left Hand of Darkness and is a collection of 4 interconnected novellas about two planets with a history of slavery and revolution. It’s a lovely, challenging meditation on freedom and slavery. And it has a couple lovely (if understated) romances in it, with actual hfns.
Here’s my favorite quote from FWTF:
“What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our times, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery.”
And for an unconventional suggestion, her translation / interpretation of the Tao Te Ching is stunning.
@ Lara
It’s been a few years since I watched the “Tales from Earthsea” movies, and while I’m pretty sure *anything* is better than the SciFi series, I…didn’t really like it. I thought it lacked a clear plot, especially since it smashed together the last two books.
To me it’s a lot like the “Howl’s Moving Castle” adaption. In that it’s not *bad*, but it probably could have been a lot better if they’d stuck to the story’s story and not added their own *side eyes the pointless war plot*.
But YMMV.
When I was a child, I loved the first Earthsea trilogy (that was what I would choose to read when I was sick) and her early science fiction like Rocannon’s World. She now thinks those early works were a bit naive; I don’t entirely disagree but they’re very much worth reading anyhow. Lately I’ve been slowly working my way through the later work. I adore Lavinia (in which the title character, mostly just a pawn in the Aeneid, uses the power of words and the right ritual gestures to shape the future of her nation) and Always Coming Home.
By the way, speaking of fantasy, I just ran across a wonderful short fantasy love story online: “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover from the Bottom of the Sea” by Ada Hoffmann.
By the way, speaking of fantasy, I just ran across a wonderful short fantasy love story online: “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover from the Bottom of the Sea” by Ada Hoffmann.
Thank you for these posts. I must admit I’d never even HEARD of Ursula Le Guin until I had first seen ‘The Jane Austen Book Club’ two years ago, so I didn’t know where to even start with her work.
Did my undergrad comps many moons ago on Le Guin. It’s all mostly a blur, but I remember when it came time to choose my topic, I knew that it needed to be something I could live with for 80-hour weeks for months on end. And Ursula Le Guin was that something.