Mark's Booklog

Hmm. Haven't read the last two and it's been a very long time since I read the Dispossessed, but as I recall the latter is about more authoritarianism vs anarchy than about technology. My guess is that if you asked Le Guin, she'd say that the political ideas are what interest her and the technological innovations are merely props to enable the societies that she wants to investigate. This is much more evident in her later works such as Always Coming Home, where feminist political philosophy is undoubtedly at work. I certainly wouldn't say that she's a "hard" SF writer like Asimov, Clark or more recently Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling, who are all interested in technology for its own sake. You're right though - I should have made clear that when I used the term SF, I mean "hard" SF. Like Humpty Dumpty, words mean what I want them to mean...