Science Fiction Great Ursula Le Guin died

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Ursula Le Guin, a Grand Master SciFi writer, died last week.

Her “greatest greats” bibliography:

The Earthsea Cycle
Disposessed
Left Hand of Darkness
Word for World is Forest
Lathe of Heaven
Orsinian Tales
Annals of the Western Shore

She was honored with the “Living Legend” Award from the US Library of Congress.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born October 21, 1929 and died January 22, 2018. She was an American novelist. Working mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. Her writing was first published in the 1960s and often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality, and ethnography. In 2016, The New York Times described her as “America’s greatest living science fiction writer”, although she said that she would prefer to be known as an “American novelist”.

She influenced Booker Prize winners and other writers, such as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, and science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2003, she was made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of a few women writers to take the top honor in the genre.

Le Guin received wide recognition for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1970. Her subsequent novel The Dispossessed made her the first person to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel twice for the same two books.

In later years, Le Guin worked in film and audio. She contributed to The Lathe of Heaven, a 1979 PBS film based on her novel of the same name. In 1985 she collaborated with avant-garde composer David Bedford on the libretto of Rigel 9, a space opera.