Name: Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Novels
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

The Library of America boxed set includes several maps in the endpapers of its two volumes, drawn by Le Guin and colorised by Donna G. Brown. This includes not only the detailed maps of the planet Gethen but a star chart of the ‘known world’ of Hainish descent; the meta conceit of the series being that it concerns the diaspora of the planet Hain, each colony experiencing a unique evolutionary divergence after millions of years of separation.
Le Guin is often regarded primarily as a writer of ideas – her fiction understood as a series of thought experiments refracting and illuminating contemporary political and social concerns, including gender and feminism, environmentalism, and colonialism. Yet her own maps complicate any simple opposition between conceptual focus and world-building. Like J. R. R. Tolkien, she is on record as stating that for her, the map was the starting point.
For an author working on the basis of ‘world reduction’, Le Guin’s maps of Gethen are astonishingly detailed: myriad place names, mountain ranges, ice sheets, and routes of travel. She provides hemisphere-wide maps as well as more focused regional charts. This cartographic clarity serves to underline the judicious selectivity of the novels themselves: only those elements necessary to the narrative are brought into focus, while the wider world remains largely implicit.

Ex Carta

The first novel in Hainish series, by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), 

 was published in 1966, followed in 1969 with the more critically acclaimed novel 

. However, it was not until this 2017 two-volume edition of 

 that Le Guin’s own hand-drawn map of a major setting of the stories, the ice-bound planet of Gethen, was made available to the reader. The planet’s orbit results in protracted seasons resulting in planet-wide ice ages, a conceit later adopted by other writers including Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) in his Helliconia trilogy and George R. R. Martin (b.1948) in 

The Hainish series is defined by what literary critic Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) termed ‘world reduction’, a ‘principle of systematic exclusion’. Instead of trying to enrich a secondary world with an abundance of detail, Le Guin strips away all but the most pertinent details, in order to not only keep a specific narrative focus – e.g. the ‘intriguing gender dynamics' of Gethen – but ‘for the sheer practical purpose of describing an alien world without devoting the entire novel to it.’

 (1972), has proved particularly influential, with its vision of an indigenous people harmoniously integrated with their arboreal environment setting a benchmark in ecological science fiction. Many critics have subsequently noted significant similarities with the 2009 film Avatar.

The Library of America boxed set includes several maps in the endpapers of its two volumes, drawn by Le Guin and colorised by Donna G. Brown. This includes not only the detailed maps of the planet Gethen but a star chart of the ‘known world’ of Hainish descent; the meta conceit of the series being that it concerns the diaspora of the planet Hain, each colony experiencing a unique evolutionary divergence after millions of years of separation.

Le Guin is often regarded primarily as a writer of ideas – her fiction understood as a series of thought experiments refracting and illuminating contemporary political and social concerns, including gender and feminism, environmentalism, and colonialism. Yet her own maps complicate any simple opposition between conceptual focus and world-building. Like J. R. R. Tolkien, she is on record as stating that for her, the map was the starting point.

For an author working on the basis of ‘world reduction’, Le Guin’s maps of Gethen are astonishingly detailed: myriad place names, mountain ranges, ice sheets, and routes of travel. She provides hemisphere-wide maps as well as more focused regional charts. This cartographic clarity serves to underline the judicious selectivity of the novels themselves: only those elements necessary to the narrative are brought into focus, while the wider world remains largely implicit.