Happy belated birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm always so busy getting in the Halloween spirit each year that I usually forget to send my best wishes, and if it hadn't been for SF Signal I would have missed it again. Which is really inexcusable, because not only is she a Grand Master of the genre but she's written some of the best sf novels of all time. Her most famous and popular series are the Earthsea fantasy books that, while written for children, hold strong appeal for adult readers as well.
Even more highly regarded is her Hainish Cycle of sf novels interrogating in a nuanced fashion questions of race, gender and politics. Especially the three most famous, award-winning books of the cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World is Forest (1972), and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974).
And if that weren't enough, she even added to the lexicon of sf by coining the name "ansible" to refer to an FTL transceiver. So happy birthday Ursula K. Le Guin, and may you have many more.
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