Ursula Le Guin was a good writer of high end sci-fi, she wrote some OK poetry and some essays, outside of creating unreality she made some astute points about life, not to be confused with profound observations. I would have loved to go with her through my unanswered questions debunking the atheist faith that our minds are a product of physical structures in our bodies, apparently the article of her faith that you botched. I suspect she came to see that she was not identical with her body in the twinkling of an eye.
I am not a huge fan of sci-fi, though I've enjoyed a few book by a few authors, Clifford Simak, Le Guin, . . . but I know of no work of sci-fi I'd class as great literature. Having last year, as a result of a trolling here, read Howard Fast's novel, Spartacus, a minor novel by a minor novelist, and it was far better than any classic of science fiction I've read.* I loved Simak's novella All The Traps of Earth, Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven while knowing, full well, they can't hold a candle to the three short novels of Katherine Anne Porter in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. I wouldn't say that any science fiction rises above the level of superior entertainment. If people want to suggest titles that do, I might read them and if I agree I will amend that statement.
However, I have read enough of Le Guin to say that her idea that the mind is corporeal is illogical and doesn't match the human experience of thinking, of coming up with new ideas, even of dealing with the most mundane of human intellection necessary to navigate even the most mundane aspects of everyday life in real time and the real vicissitudes of life and the time it takes for the body to make the molecules that comprise biological structures and to build the biologically active structures from them. I find it remarkable that someone who spent so much time creating worlds and psychologies for imaginary beings SOMEONE WHO CLAIMED TAOISM AS A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON HER, never thought about how a brain would know that it needed to make the structure to BE an idea, how it would know what it needed to make to BE that idea novel to that brain and not some other idea, how it would know just what structure to build to BE that idea (which it doesn't yet contain), how it would know it had made the right idea structure instead of the wrong one, BEFORE THE STRUCTURE TO BE THAT IDEA EXISTED IN THE BRAIN. And to do that in the virtually instantaneous real time in which we do that a thousand times before we've been awake for an hour.
She should have stuck to making up her fantasies and to making observations on human experience. She was certainly superior to Billy Collins in it, probably in the same class as E. B. White. She was not a deep systematic thinker, her insights were seldom profound.
* I say that knowing that Fast's and all movie-fiction versions of Spartacus was about as ahistroical as the Macbeth of the play, or the Richard III of the play. He is a construction made out of ideological motive, not an historical figure.
Despite all of the modern attribution of abolition of slavery to those who led (and "led" is a stretch from the scant evidence we can base our conclusions in) the Spartacus rebellion we have no idea what their goals may have been. All we know about it is the product of what the Roman aristocrats, probably every one of them a member of the slave-owning families and class, cared to say about it.
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