Ursula K. LeGuin: The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

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Graduate of Radcliffe College and Columbia University, Ursula K. Le Guin’s name has become, in the last four decades, with the genre of Science Fiction. Often featuring futuristic worlds and themes that trouble and transgress the lines of gender, Le Guin’s fiction asks its readers to imagine inverted realities towards an understanding of their own. A major influencer of other writers in the genre of Science Fiction, Le Guin was the recipient of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and finally, made the Grandmaster of Science Fiction. Her positioning as one of few women writers in the genre stands out among these many impressive accolades.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California in 1929, and began writing stories at an early age. Influenced by such writers as J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling, she submitted her first Science Fiction story to the magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. After having written for a time in genres outside Science Fiction proper (Orisinian Tales and Malafrena), Le Guin began to write and publish regularly by the 1960s. “The Word of Unbinding” (1964) was the first of the Earthsea series of six books. The series drew some success as Young Adult fantasy genre, but it was her novel The Left Hand of Darkness that won her the most acclaim—as well as the Hugo and Nebula awards. The Dispossessed, which followed, won her both awards for a second time.

Le Guin drew from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, to create fictive scenarios that call into question the binary concepts that categorize identity in the contemporary world. That is, ideas concerning racial constructs, gender norms and sexuality, as well as issues concerning the environment and human interaction with that environment were some of Le Guin’s most predominant themes. Her Taoist and Anarchist beliefs were also made evident in The Dispossessed, and in the short narrative “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the subject of a democratic political regime is cast into question in a seeming utopian world.