in a career spanning half a century, Ursula K. Le Guinhas produced a body of work that testifies to herabiding faith in the power and art of words. She isperhaps best known for imagining future intergalacticworlds in brilliant books that challenge our ideas ofwhat is natural and inevitable in human relations and that celebrate courage, endurance, risk-taking, and above all, freedom in the face of the psychologicaland social forces that lead to authoritarianism andfanaticism. it is less well known that she first developedthese themes in the richly imagined historicalfiction collected in this volume, which inauguratesthe Library of America edition of her works. Brian Attebery, the editor of this volume, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal ofthe Fantastic in Arts. He edited The Norton Book ofScience Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin andKaren Joy Fowler, and is the author of Stories AboutStories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) andDecoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), amongother books."