Bb 1: Paige Sanderson

In the first essay that I read entitled “American Science Fiction and the Other” written by Ursula K. Le Guin talks about how women are either ignored in science fiction stories or presented as characters that are mistreated and/ or less then. She also describes how different classes of aliens such as the sexual alien, the social alien, cultural alien, and the racial alien are portrayed as a large faceless and nameless mass running from dangerous situations such as over flowing sewers that kill most or all of them . She goes on to state that there are many other types of people that are not represented in science fiction stories and believes that sci-fi writers and their readers should change things up by thinking about the future and create characters that are positively represented such as women in the science fiction world.

In the second essay entitled “What is Science Fiction” also written by Ursula K. Le Guin is an introduction to her novel “The Left Hand of Darkness”. She states that science fiction is often described and defined as extrapolative, but she goes on to say that her book is not extrapolative and it is about experiment of a doctor creating a human being in a laboratory. I feel like she is trying to change how science fiction is written as she stated in her other essay. She wants sci-fi characters portrayed in a better light and by writing her own novel in her own way, she will be able to achieve just that.