When Ursula K. Le Guin won the Nebula Award last month for her novel Powers, K. Stoddard Hayes was delighted. Here, she outlines just why she holds the veteran author in such high regard....

I was delighted when I heard my favourite living writer, Ursula K. Le Guin, had won the prestigious Nebula Award for her novel Powers, the third in her new series The Annals of the Western Shore. She also made this year’s Tiptree Award Honor List for her new novel Lavinia.

Le Guin is one of the most honoured and respected of American writers in any genre. Until this Nebula win, I’d also have said she is also among the most overlooked by science fiction readers and commentators, not to mention booksellers.

Whenever I mention Le Guin to friends who are readers, their response is always that they love Le Guin, especially The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), A Wizard of Earthsea (1970), or perhaps The Lathe of Heaven (1971).

This seems to me the equivalent of saying, 'Oh, yes, I’m a great Tolkien fan. I love The Hobbit.“

Critics and scholars seem to be equally stuck in Le Guin’s early career. Just this year, I’ve read two "overviews" of Le Guin by literary scholars, which begin and end with novels she wrote almost 40 years ago. (The notable exception to this roll of literary dishonor is Strange Horizons, which recently published an essay discussing revisioning in the latest three Earthsea books, and a very fine review of Lavinia.)

In recent years I’ve also found Le Guin’s work increasingly absent from the chain bookstores near me (there are no convenient independent booksellers nearby). The local Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks both have extensive speculative fiction, comics and manga sections; but the last time I stopped in, I found not a single Le Guin novel on the shelves in either one.

Luckily, Le Guin is always in stock on line at her "bookshelf" in Powell’s Books, her home bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and virtually all of her fiction is still in print.

To most SF/F fans, Le Guin is a speculative fiction writer, although in fact her published work includes many realistic literary short stories, poetry, essays, translations, and childrens’ books. I have the impression she doesn’t bother much with genre labels, she writes what she wants to write.

Le Guin once wrote that she thought her main theme was marriage; and perhaps it is, if marriage is taken as one very intimate aspect of working out the messy tangle of human relationships. Many people think of Le Guin as a feminist writer, though it seems to me that some who apply this label to do so because she wrote one novel about a culture of androgynes, where gender conflicts by definition don’t exist. If she fits that genre, its in the most positive sense of feminism: a belief that no one, male or female, should be limited by their gender or sexual orientation; not in the sense of "man hating separatism."

For me, Le Guin’s most important theme is domination versus cooperation. Does society work best if some people and groups have power over others, or if everyone has to work by consensus and cooperation? How much power, how much consensus, and when is either extreme taken too far?

And because there’s no better way to understand the nature and effect of power than to listen to the powerless, Le Guin’s stories often take the perspective of a subservient or disenfranchised group: a literate, civilized people conquered by barbarians who believe all writing is demonic (Voices); a harmonious traditional society whose social and cultural fabric is being shredded by a ruthlessly modernizing government (The Telling); women in several societies where men have all the political, economic and magical power (such as Tehanu, another Nebula winner).

Reading Le Guin for nearly 40 years has taught me to listen for those voices of the powerless in my own life, and in the real world. I count that her most valuable gift to me.

I hope that these two recent honours will remind many people that Le Guin has never stopped writing in all the years since those early classics, and inspire them to discover for themselves that what she’s writing these days is as far beyond The Left Hand of Darkness as The Lord of the Rings is beyond The Hobbit.

Recommended Reading...

Ursula K. Le Guin the worldbuilder seems tireless these days. She has already established several rich and inexhaustible universes to play in; yet at an age when most people are slowing down, she created a new one, The Annals of the Western Shore.

For the benefit of those who think they love Le Guin, but haven’t heard of anything she’s written since The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, here’s a short list of my favorite recent work. They’re all in print, like pretty much everything Le Guin has ever published, so if your bookseller doesn’t have them in stock, order them; or go to Le Guin’s Bookshelf at Powell’s Books, where they will be in stock; or just request them from your library. I’m not reviewing here, you can find plenty of good reviews in print for any of these titles.

In no particular order:

• The Telling
Le Guin evokes no less than 3 distinct societies here; that of the narrator, and two societies of the world she is visiting. She makes me want to stay in one of them, and run like a scared rabbit from the other two. Maybe one of the finest examples of Le Guin’s unique brand of anthropological (rather than technological) science fiction.

• Changing Planes
A worldbuilder’s master class, this collection of linked stories creates a new society in every single story. Her approach here is somewhat anthropological, as a visitor observes and describes each world; and the stories grow from the descriptions. Read and learn how to dispense worldbuilding exposition without sliding into deadly info-dumps!

• The Birthday of the World
My favorite story in this collection, Coming of Age in Karhide, proves yet again that Le Guin can write about the most challenging subjects without either feeling or causing any inappropriate discomfort. Its also a lesson in linguistic sleight of hand to see her dealing with the gendered pronouns of English, while writing about a non-gendered race.

• Lavinia
Set in the age of Troy, Lavinia tells the story of Aeneas’s wife, who has only a line or so in the Aeneid. I went from reading Beowulf to Lavinia without the slightest culture shock, a tribute to Le Guin’s ability to set a reader down in the ancient world as if it were home.

• The Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts; Voices; and shiny new Nebula winner, Powers.
I’ve read the first two of these so far, and this time, Le Guin is writing about people who have “gifts”, which we might call psychic powers. As always she imagines societies that are a blend of the familiar and the strange, yet she makes their strangeness also seem familiar and inevitable.

• The last three books of the Earthsea Cycle: Tehanu; Tales from Earthsea; The Other Wind
Any of these will upend any notion you may have that Earthsea is a commonplace "epic fantasy" (and make the SciFi Channel miniseries look even more of a lame-brained travesty.) Tehanu, in particular, transformed my worldview, by expressing cultural conflicts that I was experiencing in daily life without even being aware of them. Le Guin’s forward to Tales from Earthsea gives some insight into her worldbuilding process, at least for Earthsea, and also some comments on the nature of fantasy and its commercialization. Read (or reread) the early Earthsea novels before any of these, then read these in the order I’ve listed them.

• When K. Stoddard Hayes is not working on stories about her fantasy world of Khasran, or blogging about worldbuilding at WorldBuildingRules! (where this article first appeared), she's a professional writer and journalist. For the past 12 years she's specialized in writing about film and television, especially science fiction, fantasy and adventure TV.