Visionary novelist known for her ground-breaking science-fiction

Born: October 21, 1929;

Died: January 22, 2018

URSULA K Le Guin, who has died aged 88, was an influential American author who predominantly worked in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. Although this description led to her ghettoisation as a writer amid the sci-fi bookshelves during her life, her preference was always to think of herself as simply a novelist, and the depth with which she considered her stories was reflected in their themes. Even in comparison to the world of realist mainstream fiction, the quality of her prose and thought was outstanding.

Revisiting her work in 2018, it becomes even more apparent how visionary Le Guin’s gift was, with her densely plotted and gorgeously written novels taking in such subjects as the environment, the gender debate, racism, slavery, clashing political systems and religion, often writing stories which served as sophisticated allegories for real world issues, while resisting the urge to be obvious or dumbed-down.

She was a fiercely prolific writer and thinker, and much of what she published was in genres other than the speculative fiction field in which she was known; she wrote children’s books, poetry, essays and works of non-fiction, which took the form of companions to her science fiction, collected writings, and books on her craft. Le Guin’s first published novel was the relatively straightforward SF fantasy Rocannon’s World in 1966, and between then and her final book, 2017’s appropriately-titled non-fiction collection No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, she published in the region of 70 titles.

Most widely known among her works are the books which make up the Earthsea saga, five novels and a bunch of short stories published between A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968 and The Other Wind in 2001, which predate Harry Potter in the way they use magic’s manipulation as an allegory for coming-of-age on the titular planet of different and competing island cultures.

Her other great cycle was the series of Hainish books (beginning with Rocannon’s World and spanning ten titles until 2002’s anthology The Birthday of the World and Other Stories), which was not a series at all; rather, it was a group of books loosely interconnected by the idea that humans had been left to evolve in a different way on different planets across the galaxy.

Le Guin first rose to wider public prominence with 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness, the fourth book in the Hainish series, which introduced the genderless race the Gethenians, and set off feminist debates around science fiction – a genre more usually populated by male writers – in a manner to which it was unused.

The next book in the series, in the order in which they were published, was 1974’s The Dispossessed, which used the differing governments on a pair of twin planets as a lens through which to view a gamut of political structures from anarchism to unrestrained capitalism.

Both The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed won the major Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards after they were published, with other awards including 1972’s Locus for The Lathe of Heaven (1972), in which climate destruction is one possible world invoked by a man whose dreams can change reality; another Hugo for The Word for World is Forest (1976), which bore strong allegories of the Vietnam War in its condemnation of military colonialism; and a Nebula for Powers (2007), the third part of her Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, which brought much of Le Guin’s usual concerns to a young adult setting.

In her lifetime, she was given awards by the US Library of Congress, PEN, the American Library Association and the National Book Foundation, as well as genre awards including the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement and induction to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 1984 she helped to set up the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts in Portland.

Born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California in 1929, Le Guin was the daughter of anthropologist Alfred L Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, who specialised in writing on Native American issues. Le Guin gained an interest in anthropology from her parents, and she and her elder brothers Clifton, Theodore and Karl were encouraged to write by them.

Her interests in literature would range as widely as JRR Tolkien, the science-fiction writer Philip K Dick, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, but as a young girl Le Guin loved fantasy; she wrote her first story aged nine and submitted her first for publication to a magazine at 11, although she was not successful and did not try again for some years.

After graduating from Berkeley High School, Le Guin studied for a BA in French and Italian Literature at Radcliffe College in Massachusetts and an MA in the same subject at Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1952. She met her future husband, the historian Charles Le Guin, while travelling to France to continue her studies in 1953, and they married later that year. Eventually settling in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin lived until her death, she took work as a secretary and started to get published in science fiction magazines; the Le Guins’ children Elisabeth, Caroline and Theodore were born before her first book was published, and she is survived by them, her husband, and their four grandchildren.

One of the defining science fiction authors of the 20th century and beyond, who influenced generations of writers – Iain Banks, Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell were all fans – Ursula K Le Guin looks likely to be remembered by a new, young audience who have already begun to revisit the feminist messages of her work.

In 1983, invited to give a commencement speech to the students of Mills College, she delivered one of her most-quoted pieces of writing, entreating the women in the audience that “when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time.”

She closed by inviting “human beings to grow human souls”, something every word she wrote seemed positively designed to encourage.

DAVID POLLOCK