Ursula K. Le Guin: Earthsea, Anarres and the Art of Balance

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote fantasy and science fiction for nearly sixty years, and she changed both. Her Earthsea books gave fantasy one of its most elegant kinds of magic, and her science fiction asked questions about gender, power and freedom that the genre had rarely asked before.

She won almost every major award in the field, and she spent much of her career arguing that genre fiction deserved to be taken as seriously as any other literature. Here is her life, her major books, and where a new reader should start.

A childhood among anthropologists

Ursula Kroeber was born on 21 October 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, were both anthropologists, and she grew up surrounded by the study of other cultures, their myths and their ways of life.

That background runs through her fiction. Her invented worlds are built like real societies, with their own customs, languages and beliefs, and her stories often follow outsiders trying to understand a culture not their own.

A long career

Le Guin published from 1959 until her death, and her career spanned the whole modern history of the genre, from the magazines of the 1960s to the literary acceptance of fantasy and science fiction in the twenty-first century.

Much of her science fiction belongs to what is called the Hainish universe, a set of novels and stories set on worlds settled long ago by a common ancestor people. The books can be read separately, and each uses its world to look at one question about human society, such as gender, government or the meaning of freedom.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Her first great success came with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968, the first book of the Earthsea series. It tells the story of Ged, a gifted and proud young wizard on an archipelago of islands, who releases a shadow creature through arrogance and has to face it.

In Earthsea, magic depends on knowing the true names of things, and every use of power affects a delicate balance, the Equilibrium. Critics have noted how its wizard school and scarred hero anticipate Harry Potter. We look at its magic in how magic systems work.

The Earthsea books

Earthsea grew into a series that Le Guin wrote across most of her life, from early stories in the 1960s to the last pieces published in 2018. The later books returned to the world with new eyes, giving more space to women's lives and questioning some of the assumptions of the first.

Margaret Atwood called A Wizard of Earthsea one of the wellsprings of fantasy literature. Its influence can be seen in the many later stories about schools for magic, about young people learning to control their power, and about magic that has a price.

The Left Hand of Darkness

The next year she published The Left Hand of Darkness, set on a frozen planet whose people have no fixed sex. An envoy from other worlds tries to understand them and to persuade them to join an interplanetary alliance.

The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, and gender became one of the central themes of her work, one she kept returning to and rethinking later in her life.

The Dispossessed

In 1974 came The Dispossessed, about a physicist who travels between two worlds, one capitalist and one an anarchist society living on a barren moon. Neither world is presented as perfect, and the book is a serious examination of what freedom costs.

It too won both the Hugo and the Nebula. Anarchism is explored most fully in this novel, which remains one of the most discussed political novels in science fiction.

Balance and the Tao

Taoism shaped Le Guin's thinking deeply, especially its ideas of balance and of acting in harmony with the world rather than forcing it. That is visible in Earthsea's Equilibrium, and in her heroes, who often succeed by understanding rather than by conquering.

In 1997 she published her own version of the Tao Te Ching, the classic Chinese text of Taoism.

Honours

Over her career Le Guin won eight Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards and twenty-five Locus Awards. In 2014 she received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, one of the highest honours in American literature.

She wrote more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, as well as poetry, criticism, translations and children's books. She died in Portland, Oregon, on 22 January 2018, aged 88.

Where to start

For fantasy readers, start with A Wizard of Earthsea: it is short, beautifully written and still feels fresh. For science fiction readers, The Left Hand of Darkness is the classic entry, and The Dispossessed is the deeper, more demanding follow-up.

Le Guin stands in a line of writers who used invented worlds to think about real ones, a line that goes back at least to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. For where her books sit among the regions of the genre, see our reader's map of science fiction.