A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF setting

Between 1966 and 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin published seven novels and 17 stories in the Hainish setting, which together comprise a large proportion of her science fiction. Collectively, they have won numerous major awards and sparked a large and growing body of scholarship. Le Guin’s work is frequently invoked in discussions of feminism, anthropology, sociology, and gender in science fiction. She was and remains a major figure in so-called soft SF, and the Hainish stories have a strong anthropological bent.

This is serious-minded SF, a conscious departure from pulp formats and sureties that had long prevailed in the genre. Le Guin’s hostility to violence, openness to change, and call for understanding are everywhere in these pages. The Hainish stories have little in the way of physical action, but are rich with ideas - at their frequent best they are thought-provoking and even moving. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the Hainish stories. 

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