The Birthday of the World and other Stories

Ursula Leguin is the fiction author that inspires me the most - across her works, I am fascinated by how she incorporates and critiques anthropology through the lens of science fiction. Out of all her books, this short story collection is my favorite because it focuses on gender politics in a variety of settings, from a world where people have no gender characteristics outside of a limited time period (when they have sex) to a world where women outnumber men thirteen to one, leading to a dark and unusual perspective on matriarchy (which interestingly parallels and subverts the utopianism of Sultana’s Dream.) I love the ambition and imagination of this book, which always reminds me that our society, our values, our understanding of gender and our way of being is not inevitable, and there are so many other ways for a world to be formed.