Agreed. There is quite a bit of work out there of a fantastical / science fiction bent which nevertheless isn’t interested in being genre-fiction yet is unlike Le Guin’s work. Le Guin’s defining characteristic is absolutely in the political nature of her work. Personally, the works of hers that I’ve actually read recently (Lathe of Heaven, Left Hand) did not strike me as terribly crude politically. That’s actually unusual because her non-fiction political writings are incredibly distasteful to me and I fully expected that distaste to carry over into her fiction work.

That being said, I didn’t think Le Guin was particularly worth reading either. Maybe a little interesting, but largely a footnote because the ideas she explores are (IMO) thoroughly discredited.

Have either of you read any of Michael Flynn’s stuff:

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/

?

Highly recommend.

Prepare to be disappointed. It’s not one of his better ones and he’s overrated in general. YMMV. Atwood does a far better job as Literary author doing speculative fiction.

One of Denver’s newest branch library has discarded the practice of shelving printed fictional material (other than children’s books) by genre. It simply puts the romances, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, mysteries, graphic novels, and “serious fiction” all on the shelves in alphabetical order by author’s name. The effect is really quite refreshing.

While I can’t think of many authors with her particular social perspective, some came close.

Octavia Butler, for example, was much beloved by the academy, due to her being a black woman and writing about race and gender pretty explicitly. I actually think her work was some of the smartest on the “cultural left” of science fiction. Take the Xenogenesis series for example. On one hand, it is presented that humans are naturally violent and were destroying themselves, and thus an alien species benevolently stepped in to “save us.” On the other hand, there are clear parallels with colonialism, because the aliens (despite being nonviolent) are using humanity for their own ends, don’t want to give us independence back, and will ultimately destroy the Earth. Compare this to LeGuin in The Word for World is Forest, who simply made humans into the villains. It was a very smartly-written series. It’s a shame her later books felt a bit more like straight-up polemics.

Another example, who I also outlined above, is Sheri S. Tepper. Every book she has written has been either about feminism, or involved heavy feminist leanings. Every single book involves one or more evil male straw-men who you are supposed to love to hate. Oddly, she was also considered somewhat persona non-grata among feminists for a time despite these themes, because in an early book of hers (The Gate To Women’s Country) she explicitly looked at a matriarchy which was succeeding by using eugenics to breed violent tendencies out of men. The society also used eugenics to eliminate homosexuality. I think this is the reason in a later book she decided to lean to nurture to an absurd degree (Sideshow where two main characters are conjoined twins who are raised as a male/female pair, and acculturate to this successfully.

More recently, I’d say that Ken MacLeod is pretty clear leftist science fiction. His earliest series in particular (The Fall Revolution) is heavily influenced by Trotskyist thought.

Where she does differ from other writers is probably mostly in her kind of 60s-70s left-radicalish anthropology student worldview (I know she was, like a 30-40 year old woman then, but that was when she began being published).

I can’t think of another sci-fi or fantasy writer with quite the same perspective, or who presented the (often implausible or crudely propagandistic, e.g. Kargs) societies, characters and concerns that she presented as a result of that.

nevertheless, as you say it’s an imperceptible spectrum from gene wolfe to hal clement. the big difference from ‘literary fiction’ is that as sam delaney noted lit fiction tends to make individual psychological self-exploration the ends of all great works of fiction. this is not absent in great science fiction or fantasy, but it is rarely the totality of the product.

Hell, most of what’s called hard science fiction isn’t really all that hard. Greg Bear used to get lumped into the movement, even though the actual science in his novels was pretty thin (and usually wrong). Stephen Baxter is often considered to be hard science fiction, but outside of his =professional background his understanding of science is so limited I often recognize the popular science books he lifts from. The only hard science-fiction writer I’ve ever been genuinely challenged by is Greg Egan.

In the end though, I think the division between hard and socio-political science fiction isn’t a real gulf. Most science fiction which aspires to be something greater than mere disposable adventure purposefully uses the setting to explore something which could not be easily explored through conventional settings. Perhaps this means allegory, or perhaps this means putting recognizably normal people into a decidedly not-normal circumstances. But I think, save for a precious few authors, you can’t escape humanity being at the core of the story, either as individuals (perhaps in funny costumes) or as a whole society.

You’d think I’d just learn to stop reading her books, but no… I don’t know how much this speaks to Le Guin’s place providing grand unifying themes for modern society, but she’s been messing with my head since grade school. Brilliantly.