RIP: Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, Whose Novels Plucked Truth From High Fantasy, Dies At 88

Ursula K. Le Guin, a prolific novelist best known for the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness, died Monday at the age of 88 in Portland, Ore. Across more than 20 novels and scores of short stories, Le Guin crafted fantastic worlds to grapple with profoundly difficult questions here on Earth, from class divisions to feminist theory .... Le Guin stood as a towering figure in science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, she completed a triple crown of the genres' biggest prizes, earning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards several times over ...

I read her book The Left Hand of Darkness when I was a teen and it made a big impression on me. She was one of the early feminist science fiction writers and this book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, envisioned a world in which people were of a neutral gender except for when they reproduced, at which time they could end up being either female of male. What would our lives and our culture be like if our gender wasn't fixed, if we all had a common experience of being both male and female?

Here she is talking about the book and gender ...