She also wrote the modern classic of fantasy, The Earthsea trilogy, and a number of provocative essays on sf and fantasy. A fantasist, a feminist, a literate and humane writer, Le Guin has often been portrayed as having left science fiction for greener pastures, although sf has always been only one of her major modes.
Confusion often arises concerning what science and technology are.
Being an anthropologist's daughter, I think of technology as encompassing everything a society makes and uses in the material sphere. However, a lot of people now use 'technology' simply to mean extremely high-tech inventions that are predicated on and depend on an enormous global network of intense exploitation of all natural resources, including an exploited working class, mostly in the Third World. Technology in this sense doesn't strike me as having much of a future, I must admit. Le Guin uses technological extrapolation here to explore the relationship between individual identity and personal uniqueness, postulating a protagonist who is not unique and who must confront both the problems of being alone and of being alone. Inverting the supernatural story of the doppeganger, Le Guin shows us how uncanny it is not to meet ourselves at every turn.