Giant Footsteps

First published in 1959 her literary career spanned nearly 60 years yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations and children’s books. Ursula Kroeber Le Guin best known for her works of speculative fiction, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces.

Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel for The Left Hand of Darkness, becoming the first woman to do so. In 2003 she became the second woman honoured as a Grand Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

What would she have thought of the Percivious trilogy? We hope she would have recognized the extent to which she has inspired us, especially with The Left Hand of Darkness which explores themes of gender and sexuality on a fictional planet where humans have no sex.

Perhaps she would approve of the themes presented in Percivious Origins, our second volume, a story about an advanced society in the absence of an industrial revolution. One inspired by her Earthsea which depicts an equilibrium between people and their natural environment as well as a larger cosmic equilibrium.

It would be our hope that she would also appreciate our lyrical style, one also greatly influenced by her own.

We wish she was still with us today in order to see many of the themes she had championed come to the forefront: gender identity, moral development, political systems and social structures. It is our hope that we are able to follow in her giant footsteps and continue on with the style of speculative fiction she pioneered.

She had “defied conventions of narrative, language, character, and genre, and transcended boundaries between fantasy and realism to forge new paths for literary fiction” – The National Book Foundation