Ursula K. Le Guin 1929-2018

This past Monday, science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin passed away at the age of 88.  Her family announced her death yesterday.  She was known for her "groundbreaking" novels and has been called "legendary".

Ursula Kroeber was born to Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist at U.C. Berkeley, and Theodora Kracaw, a writer most noted for her accounts of Ishi, the last of the Yahi tribe.  She obtained her BA and MA in French and Italian literature, and afterwards won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in France.  While there, she met the man she would marry, historian Charles Le Guin.  After they wed, she discontinued her academic career.  They moved to the United States and had three children.

Although she started writing during her childhood, Le Guin was unable to have anything published until 1964, starting with collections of short stories.  In 1966, she published Rocannon's World, the first of the Hainish Cycle.  In 1968, she published A Wizard Of Earthsea, which started the Earthsea series.  Le Guin was influenced by anthropology, feminism, environmentalism, anarchism and Taoism, which she claimed to have practiced since she learned what it was.

Read more at Variety, CNN, The Guardian and Vulture.

During my own time in college, I read two of Le Guin's novels for a science fiction class.  As a result, I would think back to one of them whenever someone says anything about "gender fluidity".  This is because The Left Hand Of Darkness, one of the Hainish Cycle novels, is set on a planet where the natives are gender fluid.  Each person becomes either male or female during two days of a 28-day cycle, and then reverts back to androgyny for the other 26 days.  The sex each person becomes from one cycle to the next is completely random.  Thus, while I regard "gender fluidity", at least among humans in real life, as complete male bovine solid waste, I can cite the setting of The Left Hand Of Darkness as the only place I know of where gender is truly fluid.