Books by Ursula Le Guin

“It’s about a multi-generational space journey from Earth. But though 200 years, for a multi-generational ship, is not that long, if you think politically that’s a very long time. They arrive like a different species of human to the humans that could live on this planet. I think that deep materiality of her vision brings us back down to Earth, if you will, from these fantasies about colonising Mars.” Read more...

The Best Ursula Le Guin Books

Sherryl Vint, Literary Scholar

“With the case of Lavinia, she does careful research about the lives of people in what we now call Italy, when the events of the Aeneid were meant to have taken place. They have different gods, different ways of thinking about violence, different ways of thinking about gender. It’s an alien culture, if you will. It’s a book that really shows the power of stories. And, ultimately, that’s what Le Guin has explored throughout her career—the power of stories in shaping cultural values and political societies.” Read more...

The Best Ursula Le Guin Books

Sherryl Vint, Literary Scholar

This Locus Award-winning novel by American author Ursula K. Le Guin is told from the perspective of Lavinia, the princess with the flaming hair. Though she hardly says a word in Virgil’s Aeneid, she is beautifully reanimated in Le Guin’s modern retelling. Her domineering mother Amata favours King Turnus of Rutulia as Lavinia’s match. But Lavinia has other ideas—she dreams of the famous Aeneas whom she has been told of by the ghost of Virgil, called here simply ‘the poet’. Lavinia’s fate is decided: she cannot concede to wedding Turnus, but with that comes the knowledge that this decision will result in war—Aeneas has her heart.

From our article Books like The Song of Achilles

“What’s really neat in The Dispossessed is that we’re comparing two worlds that are right next to each other, because we have a world and then a moon on which people are also living. The moon has had an anarchist, collectivist revolution, and is living by a set of very strict, collaborative, cooperative philosophical principles, which leads to a life of equality, austerity, hard work, and many other elements…Then the neighbour world is beautiful, and full of rich and gorgeous things…but also full of decadence and corruption and inequality – because when everybody who’s an idealist of that type leaves your planet for the moon, your planet gets philosophically pushed in the other direction. The book holds these two worlds up next to each other.” Read more...

The Best Sci-Fi Book Series

Ada Palmer, Novelist

“This is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle…It follows a human logging company on a small planet that’s covered in ocean and a few islands covered in forest. They’ve cut down all the trees on Earth, so they are excited to come and grab at these resources and send them home to make a lot of money. The conflict is that there are people living on the planet already in the forests. The logging companies immediately start exploiting them for labor and various other abuses. These very peaceful people who have lived sustainably with their forests, one of them snaps and decides to fight back and eventually, there’s a violent overthrow of the logging company and they get shoved back off the planet. It’s not really a happy ending because as the native people discuss amongst themselves at the end, now they’ve accepted violence into their society, which they haven’t before. So again, this is a mirror. It’s a look at how colonizers and especially resource companies—like mining and logging companies—abuse both the land and the people living on the land, and shows us how harmful that attitude could be in space.” Read more...

The Best Sci Fi Books on Space Settlement

Erika Nesvold, Physicist

“Le Guin was writing probably not intentionally Jungian structures but she has a creature or an entity called the Shadow, so it’s pretty hard to escape Jung on that. And then there’s a lot of Daoism, the kind of sense of the balance forces of the universe. What does a wizard do in that kind of a world? And again, especially with death, which is the ultimate fear that keeps coming back throughout the Earthsea books. The formulation of how you deal with it changes from book to book. I think one of the great things about that series is that she didn’t erase anything she’d done before, but she kept rethinking and complicating the relationships.” Read more...

The best books on Fantasy’s Many Uses

Brian Attebery, Literary Scholar

Harry Potter was not the first book to feature a wizard, and it’s worth reading some of the older books that (presumably) inspired JK Rowling. Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) is a perennial favourite on Five Books. In the book, a boy who discovers he has magical powers ends up at a wizarding school and fighting evil. Despite the similarities, A Wizard of Earthsea is quite a different book from Harry Potter. The school (Roke) does not play the central role Hogwarts does and the writing has a bit more of an epic, somewhat formal feel.

One other book to mention in terms of the inspiration behind Harry Potter: if you haven’t read it yet, you’ll find quite a bit that’s familiar from Harry Potter in The Lord of the Rings. This is a book I devoured as a 13-year-old and enjoyed rereading recently for Five Books. My kids found it a bit harder going, though we did listen to the first two volumes as audiobooks in the car.

From our article Books like Harry Potter

“In one of the introductions that it has been published with, she specifically describes it as a thought experiment. It’s a simple idea: what if there was no gender? What if people were neutral in their gender, and only took on gender characteristics for sexual reproduction? If anybody could take on either masculine or feminine characteristics, and if throughout your lifetime you might be both, then what would it mean? We have a world thoroughly saturated with gender difference and patriarchal worldviews, and Le Guin makes us realize how true this is by the contrast.” Read more...

The Best Ursula Le Guin Books

Sherryl Vint, Literary Scholar

The Left Hand of Darkness is probably Ursula le Guin‘s most famous book. Like Dune, it allows us to explore a complex alien culture through the eyes of a visitor; in this case, the diplomat Genly Ai who has arrived on the planet of Gethen as part of a mission to persuade its inhabitants to join the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. Gethen, like Dune‘s Arrakis, has an extreme climate; at one stage, Ai treks with a Gethen native across an ice sheet for 80 days, almost losing his life in the process. And like Dune, we are introduced to an alien religion with prophetic elements. The Left Hand of Darkness is best known as a study of gender—the residents of Gethen take on characteristics of both sexes, but only at certain times, and this has profound impacts on its culture and social hierarchies. Fascinating and thought-provoking.

From our article Books like Dune