An 11-year-old girl mailed a science fiction story to a national magazine, received a rejection, and did not write again for a decade. She grew up to become the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in the same year. This episode explores Ursula K. Le Guin's childhood in Berkeley as the daughter of anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, with Robert Oppenheimer as a living-room visitor, and how that upbringing plus a lifelong grounding in Taoism turned her toward fiction as a sociological laboratory.

We follow her elite academic path through Radcliffe and Columbia, the Fulbright voyage where she met Charles Le Guin, the five rejected Orsinia novels, and the pragmatic pivot to science fiction that got her published by 1962. The conversation covers the 1968 Playboy request to hide her first name, the Hainish u ...