Old Women Card

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929 – 2018) was an American novelist best known for her speculative fiction, including A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Le Guin was raised in Berkeley, California, the daughter of prominent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber. Her fictional protagonists are often anthropologists or ethnologists, exploring the unfamiliar worlds that she has created for them, including Orsinia, the Hain universe, and Earthsea. She used these alternate realities to explore important social themes, including race, gender, sexuality. The Left Hand of Darkness, with its androgynous, gender-shifting humans, is considered a pioneering work of feminist science fiction. Le Guin’s work also explores political ideas, contracting pacifist, even anarchist, cultures with warlike, capitalist ones. The writer was as political in life as on the page, taking principled stands against Amazon’s war on writers and publishers, among other good fights.