In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite-sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. LeGuin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pp., $20.00 In the journal Science Fiction Studies, Le Guin described the state of the field as she first found it: At the time, the genre was overwhelmingly male and regressive in many other ways, too.

In her early thirties she finally found her niche, science fiction. From the start she eschewed the constraints of realism, choosing to write about the alien and the speculative. Her difficulties may have had something to do with her subject matter. She began to write stories as a child but didn’t achieve mainstream publication until her thirties.

Thriving in an unexpected genre is nothing new for Le Guin. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for the writer, who by then had a long career in 20 th-century traditional publishing behind her. In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K.

No Time to Spare by G.S. Mauro