Circles and Lines: The Voyage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Science Fiction

This book traces the journeys at the heart of Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1929-2018) Hainish Cycle—across planets, across identities, across the very boundaries of time—and explores the diverse implications of her protagonists’ voyages, as acts of escape, confrontation, healing, and transformation. Through close readings of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Telling, and the late stories that reflect on and challenge the traditional quest formula, it argues that Le Guin’s characters are frequently denied the possibility of return, and must reconfigure themselves within the terra incognita of their travels.

The study situates these texts within the wider tradition of New Wave science fiction, and feminist reworkings of the rite-of-passage narrative, offering a nuanced account of Le Guin’s engagement with the archetype of the quest. Positioning Le Guin at the intersection of genre history, cultural anthropology, and feminist criticism, this work demonstrates how her fiction negotiates the dialectic of home and exile, self and other, continuity and rupture.