The Ambiguous Utopias of Ursula Le Guin

Introduction
After the first World War the genre of utopian science fiction slowly started to disappear, almost vanishing later in the century. A new fiction genre had started taking its place, Dystopias, easily described as the opposite of a Utopia (a purely evil place where the people are suppressed). However, after this Utopias experienced a revival. They were mostly written by relatively young Americans and were fuelled by the social renaissance of the 70's. Le Guin and some of her more outspoken critics, such as Samuel R. Delany ("To Read the Dispossessed") were among this new br…