SF&F author Ursula K. LeGuin passed away recently.

NYTimes obituary, Locus Magazine.

File770 reports

David Mitchell on *A Wizard of Earthsea

LeGuin herself on writing SF (foreword to A Left Hand of Darkness)

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life - science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.