Le Guin resembles Poul Anderson in that she wrote both a future history (here) and a fantasy series (here).
Recently, I invited comparisons of Anderson with several other future historians and sf writers:
Mack Reynolds
H. Beam Piper
Cordwainer Smith
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Frank Herbert
Philip K. Dick
Clifford Simak
etc
Clearly, Le Guin should also be on this list. My memories of reading the Hainish History decades ago are that:
it was uneven;
there was disappointment because an Enemy was referred to in some of the books but turned out never to have appeared in any of the books;
it felt as though the whole was less than the sum of the parts;
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Word For World Is Forest and "The Day Before The Revolution" were individually good.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
For some reason Ursula Le Guin never attracted much interest from me. Probably because what little I knew of her books did not appeal to me.
And another writer I should have included in my list SF "future histories" was Julian May's SAGA OF PLIOCENE EXILE and GALACTIC MILIEU books. After all, I did read with much pleasure these books of hers. Some might object to calling these books a "future history," because the "time" it covers is not much more than a century.
Sean
Post a Comment