[Ursula K. Le Guin] has been compared to C. S. Lewis, with some appropriateness, especially as concerns her juvenile trilogy, but that comparison fails ultimately because she is a better writer than Lewis: her fictions, both juvenile and adult, are richer, deeper, and more beautiful than his. She is probably the best writer of speculative fabulation working in this country today, and she deserves a place among our major contemporary writers of fiction. For some writers, the SF ghetto serves a useful protective function, preserving them from comparison with their best contemporaries. For Ursula Le Guin, as for others, this protection, and the sense of a responsive, relatively uncritical audience that goes with it, may have been helpful during her early development as a writer. But with The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) she displayed powers so remarkable that only full and serious critical scrutiny can begin to reveal her value as a writer. (p. 2)

The Earthsea trilogy consists of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972)—the order of book publication not quite coinciding with the narrative chronology of the texts. These books have been compared to C. S. Lewis's chronicles of Narnia, especially by English reviewers, for whom this constitutes considerable praise. But the comparison is misleading. Lewis's books are allegories in the narrow sense of that much abused word—his Lion is Christ, and the whole structure of the chronicles is a reenactment of Christian legend…. Ursula Le Guin, in the Earthsea trilogy, relies on the mythic patterns of sin and redemption, quest and discovery, too, but she places them in the service of a metaphysic which is entirely responsible to modern conditions of being because its perspective is broader than the Christian perspective—because finally it takes the world more seriously than the Judeo-Christian tradition has ever allowed it to be taken.

What Earthsea represents, through its world of islands and waterways, is the universe as a dynamic, balanced system, not subject to the capricious miracles of any deity, but only to the natural laws of its own working, which include a role for magic and for powers other than human, but only as aspects of the great Balance or Equilibrium, which is the order of this cosmos. Where C. S. Lewis worked out of a specifically Christian set of values, Ursula Le Guin works not with a theology but with an ecology, a cosmology, a reverence for the universe as a self-regulating structure. This seems to me more relevant to our needs than Lewis, but not simply because it is a more modern view—rather because it is a deeper view, closer to the great pre-Christian mythologies of this world and also closer to what three centuries of science have been able to discover about the nature of the universe. No one, in fact, has ever made magic seem to function so much like science as Ursula Le Guin—which is perhaps why it is no gross error to call her work science fiction, and also why the term science fiction seems finally inadequate to much of the material it presently designates in our book stores and other rough and ready categorizations.

A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of the making of a mage, the education and testing of a young man born with the power to work wonders but lacking the knowledge to bring this power to fruition and to control its destructive potential. (pp. 2-3)

The great gift of Ursula Le Guin is to offer us a perspective in which [magic, religion, and science] all merge, in which realism and fantasy are not opposed, because the supernatural is naturalized—not merely postulated but regulated, systematized, made part of the Great Equilibrium itself. And of course, this is also art, in which the sounds of individual sentences are as cunningly balanced as the whole design, in which a great allegory of the destructive power of science unleashed, and a little allegory of an-individual seeking to conquer his own chaotic impulses, come together as neatly as the parts of a dove's tail…. In her most mature work [The Left Hand of Darkness], Ursula Le Guin shows us how speculative fabulation can deal with the social dimensions of existence as adequately as the most "realistic" of traditional models—or perhaps more adequately in some important respects. For she does not present us with the details of a social chronicle but raises questions about the nature of social organization itself. She is not so much a sociologist as a structural anthropologist, dealing with the principles rather than the data of social organization. Her method, of course, is distinctly fictional, fabulative, constructive. She offers us a model world deliberately altered from the world we know, so as to reveal to us aspects of the "known" that have escaped our notice.

The concepts that rule the construction of The Left Hand of Darkness are those of likeness and unlikeness, native and alien, male and female. The questions asked are about the ways that biology, geology and social history control our perception of the world and our actions in it. The convention of representation adopted in this novel is one of the most fundamental—in some hands the most hackneyed—of the SF tradition: the alien encounter…. Ursula Le Guin's achievement in The Left Hand of Darkness lies in her ability to maintain a powerful narrative interest in characters who grow richer and more interesting to the very last words of the book, and who themselves embody the larger problems and ideas that are being investigated. (pp. 5-6)

On one level, the story is the story of Ai's mission, his attempt to bring Gethen into the Ekumen, with Estraven's assistance. On another, it is simply the story of two human beings, two aliens, seeking to communicate with one another through cultural and biological barriers. On the level of the mission this is an exciting story, but not more so than many other works of science fiction. On the personal level, this is a richer and more moving tale than most. But the great power of the book comes from the way it interweaves all its levels and combines all its voices and values into an ordered, balanced, whole. In the end, everything is summed up in the relationship between the two main characters, and the narrative is shaped to present this relationship with maximum intensity. (p. 8)

As in the Earthsea narratives, Ursula Le Guin remains the poet of the Great Balance, but here the balance as a tension, an opposition like the halves of an arch, is emphasized. "To oppose is to maintain," Estraven says, and so says the creator of darkness by light. As the Master Hand said on Roke, "To light a candle is to cast a shadow." And thus for us to see what it is to be human, as opposed to merely male or female, we need a non-human shadow, a world other than our own. And this is the value of the harmless illusion worked by this Mistress of Fiction in The Left Hand of Darkness. (p. 11)