Major SF works

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Themes

Much of Le Guin's science fiction places a strong emphasis on the social sciences, including sociology and anthropology, thus placing it in the subcategory known as soft science fiction. Her writing often makes use of unusual alien cultures to convey a message about our own culture; one example is the exploration of sexual identity through the hermaphroditic race in The Left Hand of Darkness, which forms an important plank in the canon of feminist science fiction.

A number of Le Guin's science fiction works, including her award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are set in a future, post-Imperial galactic civilization loosely connected by a co-operative body known as the Ekumen. The Ekumen is very specifically not in any sense a governing body, but rather a conduit for the exchange of information, goods, and mutual cultural understanding. Novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and The Telling deal with the consequences of the arrival of Ekumen envoys (known as "mobiles") on remote planets and the culture shock that ensues.

Le Guin is known for her ability to create believable worlds populated by strongly sympathetic characters (regardless of whether they are technically 'human'). Le Guin's worlds are made believable by the attention she pays to the ordinary actions and transactions of everyday life. For example in 'Tehanu

A notable feature of her conception that sets her work apart from much of mainstream 'hard' science fiction is that neither the old Empire nor the Ekumen possesses traditional faster-than-light travel (the Ekumen are developing "churten" technology, a form of instantaneous travel), although the politically progressive Ekumen thrives where the old Empire has failed mainly because it possesses a means of instantaneous interstellar communication, through a device called the ansible, the invention and consequences of which form the main plot of The Dispossessed.

In this loose background scenario, the human species originated on the planet Hain in the distant past, near the galactic center. A Galactic Empire had expanded far across the galaxy over many millennia but, because it lacked faster-than-light (FTL) travel or communication, the Empire was finally stretched beyond its limits by the vast distances involved and it collapsed catastrophically. Thousands of years passed, during which time the populations of many outlying planets became so isolated from the central galactic civilization that they lost all knowledge of their origins, reverting to more archaic forms of civilization and technology.

Novels of the Hainish Cycle: Rocannon's World, 1966; Planet of Exile, 1966; City of Illusions, 1967; The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969 (winner of the Hugo Award and Nebula Award); The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974 (winner of the Hugo Award and Nebula Award); The Word for World is Forest, 1976 (winner of the Hugo Award); Four Ways to Forgiveness, 1995 (Four Stories of the Ekumen); The Telling, 2000 (winner of Endeavour Award); Miscellaneous novels: The Lathe of Heaven, 1971 (made into TV movies, 1980 and 2002); Always Coming Home, 1985, a memoir-as-novel mixed with an anthropological collection of folk tales, recipes, rituals, poems, glossary, etc.; short story collections: The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975; The Compass Rose, 1982; Buffalo Gals, and Other Animal Presences, 1987; A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, 1994; The Birthday of the World, 2002.

Le Guin is a prolific author and has published many works that are not listed here.

Despite her many awards and her considerable popularity, Le Guin is also notable as one of the few major science fiction writers of her generation whose major SF and Fantasy works have not as yet been widely adapted for film or television.

One of Le Guin's best-known novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, is being developed by Zoetrope production as a feature film to be released in 2008.

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Hogg, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic.

Samuel Delany, also known as "Chip", was born to a prominent black family in 1942 and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father ran a successful undertaking establishment, Levy and Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue in Harlem, between 1938 and his death in 1960.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), and their marriage lasted nineteen years.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His tenth and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. He spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo, then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays, and a best-selling book (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 1999) about the effort to redevelop Times Square and what it means for working class gay men in New York City.