User:Eliza Pearce/sandbox

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 cultural and social structures. In doing so, she draws on sociology, anthropology, and psychology, leading some critics to categorize her work as soft science fiction. She has objected to this classification of her writing, arguing the term is divisive and implies a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction. There are the underlying ideas of anarchism and environmentalism that make repeated appearances throughout Le Guin’s work.

Sociology/Anthropology/Psychology
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 instantaneous 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, to the extent of using the name of the communication device (the "ansible").

This prominent theme of cultural interaction is most likely rooted in the fact that Le Guin grew up in an anthropologist’s household where the remarkable anthropological case of the Native American Ishi and his interaction with the white man’s world surrounded her (Le Guin’s mother wrote the bestseller Ishi in Two Worlds). Similar elements are echoed through many of Le Guin’s stories — from Planet of Exile and City of Illusion to The Word for World Is Forest and The Dispossessed.

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.

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.

Themes of Jungian psychology also are prominent in Le Guin's writing.

Environmentalism
As a long time resident of Portland, OR, the heart of the US environmental movement, it is unsurprising that environmental themes often appear in Le Guin’s work.

This environmental sentiment comes through in Le Guin’s writing. Le Guin, as Elizabeth McDowell states in her 1992 master’s thesis, “identif[ies] the present dominant socio-political American system as problematic and destructive to the health and life of the natural world, humanity, and their interrelations.” This idea is at the fore of several of Le Guin’s works, most notably The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World is Forest (1972), The Dispossessed (1974), The Eye of the Heron (1978), Always Coming Home (1985), and “Buffalo Gals, Won’t you Come Out Tonight?” (1987) in addition to several other of her novels and novellas. All of these works center around ideas regarding socio-political organization and value-system experiments in both utopias and dystopias. As McDowell states, “Although many of Le Guin’s works are exercises in the fantastic imagination, they are equally exercises of the political imagination.”

In addition to her fiction, Le Guin’s book Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country, a collaboration with artist Roger Dorband, is a clear environmental testament to the natural beauty of that area of Eastern Oregon.

Anarchism and Taoism
Le Guin’s feelings towards anarchism are closely tied to her Taoist beliefs and both ideas appear throughout her work. "Taoism and Anarchism fit together in some very interesting ways and I've been a Taoist ever since I learned what it was." She has participated in a numerous peace marches and although she does not call herself an anarchist since she does not live the lifestyle, she does feels that, "Democracy is good but it isn't the only way to achieve justice and a fair share." In an interview with The Guardian Le Guin said that "The Dispossessed is an Anarchist utopian novel. Its ideas come from the Pacifist Anarchist tradition - Kropotkin etc. So did some of the ideas of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies.” Le Guin has said that anarchism “is a necessary ideal at the very least. It is an ideal without which we couldn’t go on. If you are asking me is anarchism at this point a practical movement, well, then you get in the question of where you try to do it and who’s living on your boundary?” (Archived interview, need to find published interview)

Le Guin has been credited with helping to popularize anarchism as her work “rescues anarchism from the cultural ghetto to which it has been consigned [and] introduces the anarchist vision…into the mainstream of intellectual discourse.” Indeed her works were influential in developing a new anarchist ways of thinking; a postmodern way that is more adaptable and looks at/addresses a broader range of concerns.