Le Guin's Children

One of this week's books-to-be-read was Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire (winner of the 2020 Best Novel Hugo). It reminded me, in a number of respects, of Ann Leckie's similarly Hugo-winning (2014 Best Novel) Ancillary Justice. (Apparently I wasn't the only one to come to this conclusion. Well, I no longer claim to be original in anything.)

Cover art by way of the
Wikipedia article

The thing about those books that stood out for me was their focus on culture, and on conflict arising out of cultural confusion or variation. Martine's protagonist, for instance, is considered a "barbarian" by her host culture simply because her culture is different (an attitude with a long and very human history, of course). For some reason the thing that stands out most in my memory about Leckie's first novel is the gloves. (Again, I'm by no means the only one here.)

Anyway, the point here is culture. And when I think about SF that's about culture I think of Ursula Le Guin. (Don't you? Doesn't everybody?) The US Postal Service seems to have followed this way of thinking: the upcoming postage-stamp tribute to Le Guin features an illustration drawn from her The Left Hand of Darkness, which seems to me to be an ur-text of cultural SF.

Ursula le Guin tribute stamp; image ganked from USPS press
release

What I hadn't known about Le Guin (and I freely admit there's a lot I don't know about a lot of people and things) was that she came by her cultural approach to fiction honestly, as the saying has it. One could almost say she came by it genetically.

Because not only was Le Guin's father one of the pioneering scholars in the field of relativistic cultural anthropology, he was a student of the legendary Franz Boas, and a contemporary of the writer/scholars portrayed in Gods of the Upper Air, a history of the first generation of Boas's students I read at the end of 2019. In other words, Ursula Le Guin grew up in a household influenced by the works of Boas, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ruth Benedict.

This article provides the background, but I recommend going to the King book in order to get a deeper understanding of the concepts behind cultural relativism and so perhaps make your own connections between cultural attitudes to sex and gender as described by Margaret Mead and in The Left Hand of Darkness.