The science-fiction toolkit is hugely useful in the tale, allowing Le Guin to embed her two contrasting utopian worlds – the increasingly rigid, anarchist Anarres, and the wealthy but hierarchical Urras. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, it has become a staple of university courses, though this time its influence has been stronger in the field of utopian studies. It also won Hugo and Nebula awards, the only time an author has gained both awards more than once for single titles. Perhaps the most intellectually formidable of Le Guin’s attempts to embed into fiction her speculations about human nature and nurture is The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). The balanced incisiveness of the tale seems almost anthropological, though infused with story. The ethnologist’s trek across the snowbound planet with a native of Gethen gives some deep lessons about our parochial understanding of the nature of gender.

In The Left Hand of Darkness an ethnologist from Earth visits Gethen, a distant planet populated by human-like beings whose nature transgresses his earthly frame of biological understanding: for they are androgynous, only electing to become male or female at the height of their sexual cycle.

The effect of the series as a whole has been likened to that of CS Lewis’s Narnia books a generation earlier.

The book created, in the increasing number of readers who discovered it, a longing to be there. But there is no preaching, beyond an abiding sense that a good life can only be achieved through prayerful attention to just balance the influence of Carl Jung, and of Le Guin’s elsewhere explicit interest in the principles of Taoism, are here unspoken. A Wizard of Earthsea is a young-adult fantasy tale set on an archipelago scattered across a translucent world-ocean, each individual island peopled with men, women and children whose lives, though necessarily shaken by dramas, seem mysteriously exemplary.

The dispossessed by ursula k le guin