There are certain writers, you must know, whose words settle into the soul like starlight into water—soft, shimmering, impossible to hold yet equally impossible to forget. Ursula K. Le Guin was such a writer. And now that you have wandered through every corridor of Earthsea, pondered every paradox of the Hainish worlds, and turned the final page with a heart both full and bereft, you find yourself asking that most delicious of questions: What next?
Come along, then. We have gathered here seventeen extraordinary books—tales of wonder that carry within them something of Le Guin’s particular magic: the thoughtful questioning, the luminous prose, the worlds that feel as real as your own kitchen and twice as marvellous.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
In this remarkable novel, we meet Lauren Olamina, a young woman living in a near-future America that has unravelled at its seams—drought, violence, and despair pressing against the walls of her small community. Lauren possesses what she calls “hyperempathy,” feeling the pain and pleasure of others in her own body, and she carries within her the seeds of a new faith called Earthseed.
Butler wrote this in 1993, yet set it in 2024, and readers today find her vision uncomfortably prescient. Like Le Guin’s finest work, Parable of the Sower examines how we might build something new from the ashes of what was—how one young woman’s philosophy might take root and grow when everything else seems to be burning.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Here is a story that uses time travel not for adventure’s sake but for reckoning. Dana, a Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles, finds herself repeatedly pulled back to an antebellum Maryland plantation, where she must protect the life of a white boy who will become her ancestor—and a slaveholder.
Butler crafted something extraordinary: a visceral, unflinching examination of America’s foundational wound. Le Guin herself praised Butler’s imagination, and in Kindred, we find that same commitment to difficult truths wrapped in speculative wonder that made Le Guin’s anthropological science fiction so vital.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
In a world called the Stillness—a name that proves bitterly ironic—the earth itself is hostile, regularly unleashing catastrophic seismic events that can last generations. Those with the power to control this energy, the orogenes, are feared, enslaved, and brutalized. When the world ends again, a woman named Essun searches for her kidnapped daughter.
Jemisin’s trilogy made history by winning three consecutive Hugo Awards, and the reason is evident on every page. The oppression of the orogenes echoes Le Guin’s deep concern with how societies create and justify hierarchy, while the innovative second-person narration creates an intimacy that is almost unbearable.
A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
On the water-moon called Shora, the Sharers have built a civilization without violence, without hierarchy, without men. They are masters of biological science, living in profound ecological harmony with their ocean world. When colonizers arrive, the Sharers resist through radical nonviolence—a resistance grounded not in weakness but in a different understanding of power entirely.
Le Guin called this novel essential reading, and fans of The Dispossessed will recognize kindred concerns: What alternatives exist to our assumptions about how societies must work? Slonczewski, drawing on her own Quaker faith and the writings of peace historians, imagines answers both beautiful and unsettling.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Le Guin herself praised this novel with rare enthusiasm, noting its “accuracy of language absolutely essential to fantasy-making” and its “real music in the words.” High praise indeed from such a master of prose!
Kvothe—arcanist, musician, legend—tells his own story to a chronicler, and what emerges is a tale of extraordinary depth. From his childhood among traveling performers to the brutal murder of his family by mysterious beings called the Chandrian, from his years as a homeless orphan to his time at the arcane University, Rothfuss weaves magic and music together with breathtaking skill.
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
“Quietly, intelligently, unutterably strange”—thus did Le Guin describe these collected stories, and no better words exist for Tidbeck’s Nordic-tinged tales. Here you will find a man who wishes to become a bumblebee, a biological ark drifting through space, a love affair with an airship, and a holiday village where the boundaries between dream and reality dissolve like morning frost.
The collection won the Crawford Memorial Award, and readers who treasured Le Guin’s shorter fiction will find in Tidbeck a worthy companion—someone for whom the strange is never merely strange but always, somehow, profoundly human.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
In a gentle future, centuries after robots gained consciousness and peacefully walked away into the wilderness, a tea monk named Sibling Dex travels the roads offering comfort to those they meet. Yet something is missing. Into this restlessness walks Mosscap, a curious robot with a question: “What do people need?”
This Hugo Award-winning novella offers what its author calls “hopepunk”—optimistic science fiction grounded in kindness rather than catastrophe. For readers who loved Le Guin’s Always Coming Home or her Earthsea tales’ quiet wisdom, Chambers provides that rare gift: a vision of the future worth hoping for.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, which rose from the ashes of America, women are property—their roles, clothing, and very names prescribed by a fundamentalist theocracy. Offred, a Handmaid whose sole purpose is bearing children for the elite, remembers her previous life and quietly, desperately, resists.
Atwood and Le Guin were often compared during their lifetimes, both wielding speculative fiction as a tool for examining our present rather than merely escaping it. Both understood that dystopia is never merely invented but assembled from pieces of what already exists.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026, and what follows is nothing less than a complete reimagining of human civilization. Should they terraform this barren world or preserve its alien beauty? How shall they govern themselves, freed from Earth’s old patterns? What happens when utopian dreams collide with human nature?
Robinson’s Nebula Award-winning novel is hard science fiction of the highest order, yet it shares Le Guin’s deepest concern: the possibility—and the difficulty—of building something better. Those who loved The Dispossessed will find here another ambitious experiment in imagining alternatives.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang writes stories that unfold, as one critic observed, “with a logic that is ineluctable and compassionate.” In the title story, a linguist learning an alien language discovers it alters her perception of time itself—and must decide whether to embrace a future she now can see.
This collection, which inspired the film Arrival, won the Locus Award and multiple Nebulas. Chiang approaches science fiction with the philosophical rigor and humane curiosity that characterized Le Guin’s finest work, asking questions about free will, knowledge, and what it means to be human.
Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh
On a world where humans survive only on sufferance, one man serves as the sole bridge between species. Bren Cameron is the paidhi—the translator, the mediator, the one person fluent in the language and customs of the atevi, the planet’s indigenous civilization. But the atevi do not feel love as humans understand it; their loyalty follows a pattern called man’chi, binding them to leaders rather than loved ones.
This anthropological science fiction shares Le Guin’s fascination with how different cultures might organize themselves, how misunderstanding can grow from the best intentions, and how one thoughtful person might navigate between worlds.
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper
Three hundred years after catastrophe, women rule the walled cities while men train as warriors in garrisons outside. At fifteen, boys must choose: return through the gate to women’s country, or remain among the warriors. The society seems stable, but Stavia begins to discover its deeper secrets.
Le Guin praised Tepper’s storytelling, and this novel shares her interest in how societies might be organized differently—though Tepper’s vision is thornier, more willing to explore the ethical complications of engineering a better humanity.
Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee
In the domed cities of a distant future, you may change bodies and genders at whim, die and be reborn, have everything you desire—except meaning. Our nameless narrator, a “Jang” teenager bored senseless by paradise, searches desperately for something worth caring about in a world designed to make caring unnecessary.
Lee’s novel asks what Le Guin’s work often asked: What makes a life worth living? When all obstacles are removed, what becomes of the human spirit? It is a coming-of-age story dressed in the glittering clothes of science fiction.
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
In an interstellar war, the Alliance intercepts mysterious broadcasts in an unknown language—Babel-17—that seem connected to acts of sabotage. Poet and linguist Rydra Wong undertakes to crack the code, only to discover that learning the language transforms the speaker’s very mind.
This Nebula Award winner explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with dazzling imagination. Delany’s novel influenced Le Guin’s own The Dispossessed, and readers who love Le Guin’s attention to how language shapes thought will find in Babel-17 a thrilling exploration of the same territory.
The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
On the Discworld—a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle—the most incompetent wizard in existence becomes the reluctant guide to an innocent tourist from a distant land, accompanied by a very hungry sentient luggage.
Pratchett’s beloved series begins here, recommended for fans of Le Guin’s Earthsea who hunger for more magical worlds. Where Le Guin is luminous, Pratchett is hilarious, yet both share a deep wisdom about human nature wrapped in fantasy’s guise.
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
In a post-apocalyptic world, healers wander the wasteland using genetically engineered serpents whose venom can cure disease or ease death. When Snake’s rare dreamsnake is killed, she must journey to replace it—a quest that becomes something far larger.
Le Guin called this novel “lively, racy, and likable…ethically and intellectually sophisticated,” and it shares her gift for building worlds that feel lived-in and real. McIntyre won both the Hugo and Nebula for this luminous work.
Nnedi Okofor’s Works
Le Guin wrote with characteristic generosity that “there’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okofor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.” Okofor, who grew up in both Nigeria and America, brings African mythology and futurism together in works that pulse with invention and life.
Begin with Who Fears Death, set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, or Binti, following a young Himba woman who becomes the first of her people to attend an intergalactic university. Okofor carries forward Le Guin’s tradition of expanding whose stories science fiction tells.
View Who Fears Death on Amazon
Finding Your Next Adventure
You see, the magic never truly ends. Le Guin herself knew this—knew that books speak to books across time and space, that writers learn from writers, that readers carry stories forward into new territory. Each book on this list carries some ember of what made Le Guin’s work so extraordinary: the questions that linger, the prose that sings, the worlds that teach us something about our own.
So gather these volumes close, dear reader. Light the lamp. Turn the first page. The adventure awaits—different from Earthsea, yes, different from the Hainish worlds, yet kindred in spirit. For wherever there are stories that make us think as deeply as they make us feel, wherever there is wonder married to wisdom, there you will find something of Ursula Le Guin’s magic still alive in the world.
