Ursula K. Le Guin - Themes

Themes

Le Guin exploits the creative flexibility of the science fiction and fantasy genres to undertake thorough explorations both of dimensions of social and psychological identity and of broader social/cultural structures. In doing so, she draws on Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology, leading some critics to categorize her work as soft science fiction. Le Guin has objected to this classification of her writing, arguing the term is divisive and implies a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction.

Being so thoroughly informed by social science perspectives on identity and society, Le Guin treats race and gender quite deliberately. The majority of Le Guin's main characters are people of color, a choice made to reflect the non-white majority of humans, and one to which she attributes the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers. Her writing often makes use of alien cultures to examine structural characteristics of human culture and society and their impact on the individual. In The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, she implicitly explores social, cultural, and personal consequences of sexual identity through a novel involving a human encounter with an unpredictably androgynous race.

The Left Hand of Darkness, along with The Dispossessed and The Telling, are novels within Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, which employs a future galactic civilization loosely connected by an organizational body known as the Ekumen to consider the consequences of contact between different worlds and cultures. Unlike those in much mainstream science fiction, Hainish Cycle civilization does not possess reliable human faster-than-light travel, but does have technology for instanteous communication. This allows the author to hypothesize a loose collection of societies that exist largely in isolation from one another, providing the setting for her explorations of intercultural encounter. The social and cultural impact of the arrival of Ekumen envoys (known as "mobiles") on remote planets, and the culture shock that the envoys experience, constitute major themes of The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin's concept has been borrowed explicitly by several other well-known authors, even to the extent of using the name of the communication device (the "ansible").

Le Guin's writing notably employs the ordinary actions and transactions of everyday life, clarifying how these daily activities embed individuals in a context of relation to the physical world and to one another. For example, the engagement of the main characters with the everyday business of looking after animals, tending gardens and doing domestic chores is central to the novel Tehanu. While Le Guin often has used otherworldly perspectives to explore political and cultural themes, she also has written fiction set much closer to home; many of her short stories are set in our world in the present or near future.

Themes of Jungian Psychology also are prominent in Le Guin's writing; for example, her Earthsea fantasy collection explores archetypal shadow and anima images. These Jungian themes lend compelling narrative to her complex sociological explorations and connect her collectivistic concerns to individualistic themes of identity and growth.