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Re:Ursula Le Guin Books by kijin on Saturday May 08, 2021 @12:00PM (#27088302)
> since it has spaceships it must be the latter.

I look forward to the day when spaceships become as mundane as trains and helicopters, so that their presence alone will not make a novel "science fiction".

Le Guin never identified her books as science fiction. Sadly the world can't seem to look at a book without shoving it into the bounds of a familiar genre. This doesn't help readers, either, as GP was apparently given the wrong expectations by these labels.

Re:Ursula Le Guin Books by minnca on Saturday May 08, 2021 @12:14PM (#27088426)
I'm a big Le Guin fan and I consider her books to be sort of like "anthropological science fiction," as in they're focused on the societies and people of science fictional societies and less so on the science behind those societies.
Re:Ursula Le Guin Books by 8fGTBjZxBcHq on Saturday May 08, 2021 @12:33PM (#27088603)
Yeah that's a big part of her thing right. She was raised by anthropologists I think? It's very present in a lot of her books and Always Coming Home is like 1/3 straight fictional ethnography.
Re:Ursula Le Guin Books by vidarh on Saturday May 08, 2021 @12:51PM (#27088777)
Both her parents were anthropologists. This is her father [1], and this was her mother [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._L._Kroeber

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodora_Kroeber