Book #24 of 2021: Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #1) First published in 1966, Ursula K. Le Guin’s debut novel already shows her promise, spinning a genre-bending tale that sets off her loose Hainish Cycle of related books and gifting future writers with the name and concept of the ansible, a …
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Book #106 of 2019: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #4) There’s some interesting philosophizing in this 1969 sci-fi novel (which author Ursula K. Le Guin herself refers to as a ‘thought experiment’ in the Introduction), but the plot is scattered and a lot of its weighty, groundbreaking ideas …
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Book 160 of 2018: The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #2) This Hugo-winning novella may feel somewhat familiar by today’s standards, but that’s simply because so many later works have copied from its playbook. From Avatar‘s plot of industrialist humans seeking to bulldoze an extraterrestrial forest, to the …
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