My daughter and I were discussing what makes U.Le Guin so unusual in sci fi/fantasy. Taoism, anthropological realism, emotional subtlety, unique vision, also, she can really write? We could not think of any authors like her.
I don’t really enjoy sci fi (probably because, I admit, the sci part bores me), and fantasy is usually too cliched and predictable. But I’ve love Le Guin since the 1970’s.
Any suggestions for authors to try who might be even a bit like her?
You might want to check out some stuff by Alice Sheldon, who wrote mostly under the name James Tiptree Jr. (You can probably guess why.) Like LeGuin, she wrote science fiction with a decidedly humanist slant. Kind of a downer, sometimes, though.
I read one long short story of hers, long ago, and thought it was great. Forgot about her.
Thanks!
Also she invented one of the greatest pseudonyms of all time, Raccoona Sheldon. Which I have on occasion stolen.
i loved those who walked away from omelas…
i like sci-fi because it provides a ‘not true to now’ platform upon which one can explore morality tales in more depth than society normally ‘allows’…
i love Heinlein. Cyberpunk is a great Sub-genre of Sci-fi.
For Mom & Daughter reading, pure fiction- have you read any alice hoffman?
Some stories i recall that left me thinking- like those who walked away:
The Stone Boy, Gina Berriault
the lottery, shirley jackson
The Rocking Horse Winner, DH Lawrence
“All Summer in a Day” Ray Bradbury
Do these appeal to you? i have many more…
I will look up Alice Hoffman. I’m familiar with all the others except Gina Berriault. I wouldn’t describe any of them as being reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin though.
You may want to play around with literature-map.com—though when I tried her name there, none of the names that came up made me go “Oh yeah!”
In terms of writing about the characters, using an alterniverse as a milieu rather than a raison, I really like the work of Harlan Ellison. He does tend to be much edgier than Le Guin, though, his stories are not so much for pre-teens or people who like tepid.
Not into tepid and my daughter is twenty two.
Only a handful of writers do what I’d call social science fiction, with the emphasis on anthropology and sociology rather than hard science. But the 60s and 70s and 80s were the Golden Age for them so several of LeGuin’s contemporaries or direct successors could be mentioned.
Michael Bishop, the early Samuel R. Delany up through the Nevèrÿon series, Octavia E. Bulter, Vonda McIntyre, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Robert Charles Wilson.
Harlan Ellison does stories about characters, but he doesn’t do novels or build worlds with that anthropological style. I’d suggest trying a lot of others before him.
Actually, you probably couldn’t. The main reason was to completely hide her real identity, not just that she was a woman. Some have suggested it allowed her to articulate her sexual feelings toward women without making them seem out of the ordinary (lots of her stories were about sex).
Her works were pretty bleak, though.
Sheri S. Tepper’s works have been described as ecofeminist dystopias, for the most part. Personally, I thought that her True Game series was kind of boring, but she wrote plenty of other things. My favorite would probably be The Gate to Women’s Country.
“A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”
–Alice Sheldon in the April 1983 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
I guessed it pretty good. 