Books by Ursula Le Guin

“The Dispossessed is as much a political and cultural thought experiment as it is a novel, though it is also extremely entertaining to read and moves really nicely, with characters that you really relate to. It’s about two worlds, a planet and its moon. One is a society very much like our own, patriarchal and capitalist, and constantly various parts of it are at war with various other parts of it. And on the moon, colonists from the first world have seceded to set up their own anarchist, entirely equal society. The Dispossessed is about taking this political concept and picking it apart forensically: what exactly would life be like, if we could do it – if we were living in an anarcho-syndicalist world? Would it work? Would everyone be on board? The cynics would obviously say no, it would fall apart immediately. Ursula Le Guin is much more intelligent than that. Neither world is inherently good; neither world is inherently bad. It’s just about exploring the differences between them.” Read more...

The Best Science Fiction Worlds

Tom Huddleston, 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