In keeping with Le Guin's style, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those diverse environments.
The Hainish novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) have won literary awards, as have the novella The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and the short stories "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974) and "The Matter of Seggri" (1994).
In the fourth, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), it seems[weasel words] that the planets of the former League have reunited as the Ekumen, which was founded by the Hainish people.
Le Guin offers the following thoughts on the order in which readers should approach the series:[3]Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions: where they fit in the "Hainish cycle" is anybody’s guess, but I’d read them first because they were written first.
As for The Lathe of Heaven and Always Coming Home, my Terran science fiction novels, they definitely don’t exist in the same universe as the Hainish or Ekumenical books.
[3]Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the people of Hain colonized a large number of worlds, including Earth, known as Terra.
At least one of the various species of Rocannon's World are the product of genetic engineering, as are the "hilfs" ("highly intelligent life forms")[4] of Planet S[5](whose story has not been told), and probably the androgynous humans of Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness.
Hainish civilization subsequently collapsed, and the colony planets (including Earth) forgot that other human worlds existed.
In City of Illusions it is recalled as having been a league of some 80 worlds at the time it was destroyed by aliens called the Shing, who are uniquely able to lie in mindspeech.
The Ekumen (or the League of All Worlds, though that is also believed to be the previous planetary coalition, before some sort of galactic crisis) contains a very large number of planets and is continually exploring new ones.
[10] City of Illusions mentions automatic death-machines that work on the same principle as the ansible and can strike instantly at distant worlds.
Shevek's work made the ansible possible—it is mentioned in his tale that engineers decided they could build it once the correct theory was found.
The ansible has been adopted by other science fiction and fantasy authors, such as Orson Scott Card,[11] Elizabeth Moon,[12] and Vernor Vinge.
These are portrayed as the end result of the wrong kind of civilizations, i.e., competitive, capitalist, patriarchal, "dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures," while successful societies are close to the land, peaceful, non-authoritarian, non-competitive, static, communitarian, with the holistic outlook of Eastern religions.