He recently left us the writer Ursula K. The Guin, the benchmark for fantasy writing in feminine and one of the largest of this genre without differentiation of the sexes. Many readers approach this author for her well-known Earthsea Stories saga, but there are many more in the Le Guin universe, as I hope you will see.
Because if recently we were talking about Elia Barceló, who wears the vitola of a great writer of the fantastic genre in Spanish, today we have to visit the work of one of those who would surely be his references, the greatest author of the fantastic.
The thing about Úrsula and the fantasy genre was a literary idyll. Recipient of the most prestigious awards around the world repeatedly, the brilliant Californian writer remained faithful to this cult genre during her more than 30 publications.
A fidelity that is perfectly understood when discovering a conscientious will in each and every one of his works, from the most extensive to the shortest. Because fantasy and its distant focus can serve to try to show us our weaknesses and defects, that dark side faced with fantasy and imagination.
Fantasy found in Úrsula one of its fundamental pillars to continue growing in the second half of the 20th century, proposing dystopian stories, great sagas, stories and tales about endless universes in which the imagination finds the infinity necessary for its most fruitful expansion.
So, faced with what is a true monster of fantastic literature, I am going to encourage myself to rescue his three best books from my complete subjectivity.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
The left hand of darkness
When a fantasy narrative is offered that in turn is capable of awakening debate and discussion about morality or sex, it is undoubtedly because we are before a controversial book, disturbing for some, or ultimately capable of the analysis of the essentially human from the allegorical.
If, in addition, the novel is structurally a commendable, entertaining, dynamic and precious plot in its details, we sentence what has been determined as an author's masterpiece, for me at the height of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, at least in terms of thematic significance.
The point is that in a space colony live some humanoid specimens whose main difference from our species lies in their androgynous nature. And to that place known as planet Winter comes an earthling who will certainly be surprised by the evolution of this species and its adaptation to its nature in order to survive.
The name of the world is forest
When one is a great fan of dystopian narrative, of those novels that speculate about the future that awaits us, discovering a new novel on the subject is always memorable.
On this occasion, the conception of dystopia is inexorably associated with the human condition. It is the human being and his ambition, his assumption of the present as the only truth and his subjectivity incapable of assuming necessary external balances, the only ones to blame for why a world can lead to its extermination.
As if we had little to do with Earth, we humans reached the planet Athshe. If we could at least extract a lesson from what happens there and from the adjustment between subjective and objective existence, we would have a lot to gain.
But the task is very difficult... and Athshe, under the influence of man, will have to assume his new destiny of perdition or entrust his natives with the defense of that world.
The dispossessed
The planet Urras is an authentic reflection of our world, a sinister allegory relocated in the middle of an alternative and distant cosmos from which we can see with the necessary perspective some of our greatest defects.
Shevek serves as an outpost to move us through this translation of our world. Thus we know the basic system of the order established in that place, the proprietorship. The evolution of that planet, which has certainly led you to self-confinement with respect to the rest of the known universe, has placed you in the most complete confusion.
Ownership puts the individual first and serves to put force first, to park those who do not consider the status quo to be the most correct. The ideology of the planet Urras serves the cause of defending the current system.
And that is where the similarities with our civilization begin to reveal the mechanical creak of a clearly unjust form of organization.
