Celebrating the women authors who shaped science fiction and fantasy

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most well-known speculative fiction authors of all time. Though she sadly passed away in 2018 at the age of 88, she left behind a legacy of written works across a breadth of formats, including 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. Rarely do authors hit on all those different types of storytelling, let alone with as much success and power as Le Guin.

With that many stories under her belt, it can be a challenge to choose which of Le Guin’s works were most influential. But the ones that have best stood the test of time are her Earthsea Cycle novels, which began with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968. Though it was marketed as a children’s fantasy novel similar to The Hobbit, this book has touched readers of all ages over generations. Any time you think a fantasy novel has to be an immense door-stopping tome, it’s worth referring to A Wizard of Earthsea. At just under 200 pages, it’s so short it can easily be read in a single day, while still telling a vast and moving coming-of-age story for the wizard Ged.

Beyond Earthsea, Le Guin has written many other immensely influential stories, but perhaps none more than The Left Hand of Darkness. Published only a year after A Wizard of Earthsea in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is a vivid science fiction novel that challenges human ideas of gender roles and morality. Phrases like “ahead of its time” can get thrown around a bit, but it feels appropriate for The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin was a visionary who inspired so many people and was an active voice in the fantasy and science fiction fields right up until her passing.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler was a profoundly influential author in her own day, but the visibility of her novels has really grown in recent years. Butler was the first Black author to win a Hugo and Nebula award, writing upwards of 15 novels as well as numerous short stories. For all that, the biography on her website claims that the vast majority of her life as a writer was spent struggling to get her work out there. Butler often woke at 2 a.m. to work on her novels before going in to various day jobs over the course of her career. In 1995 she became the first science fiction author ever to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, a large grant that allowed her to focus more exclusively on her craft to the entire genre’s benefit.

As with Le Guin, it’s hard to nail down any one of Butler’s stories as her most influential or important. She authored numerous groundbreaking books and series throughout her career, including the historical novel Kindred, the far future examination of humanity Xenogenesis (which began with Lilith’s Brood), Parable of the Sower, and The Patternist series. Butler’s works are important not just for their profoundly insightful examinations of things like humanity, race, women’s rights, global warming, and societal expectations, but also because she was getting these books out there as a Black woman during a period where the book industry was notoriously unsupportive of Black authors. (It still is, to an extent, but strides have certainly been made since Butler’s day, which is a conversation for another article.)

Butler herself classified her stories as “cautionary tales,” and their relevance today speaks to just how true that was. She was another author ahead of her time, which is proved by the fact that her novels are more widespread and relevant today than ever. Butler’s works have only grown more popular since the author’s passing in 2006, with the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred receiving both the Hugo and Eisner awards, and numerous television adaptations of her various novels in development.