... Okay, this one got to me.

I started off reading fantasy by a common route when I was young - Tolkien, CS Lewis, and too many children's classics to name. And there it might have stayed, if I hadn't also been given a copy of the Earthsea books.

All my preconceptions were turned upside down. Magic became a vivid, consistent thread instead of the handwaving it was in most books. Cultures broadened beyond the Western medievalism of most created worlds. Wizards went to strict stone universities, years before Rowling. Her writing was lyrical and poetic without being wordy, and her villians weren't simple caricatures of evil but reflections of the self.

Most of all it was Tenar who drew me - Priestess of the Nameless Ones, Mistress of the Labyrinth, then farmer and mother and saviour of a broken wizard and a burned child. I'd never read a character anything like her before.

I put a lot of childhood books aside when I grew older, but Earthsea stayed with me. Then as a teenager I discovered her other work - the inter-space diplomacy of the early Hainish novels, the incisive social anarchy of The Dispossessed, and most of all the groundbreaking gender fluidity and deconstruction of The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that challenged my preconceptions all over again.

No other author in my lifetime taught me so much about feminism and gender, but also about self-awareness, about the richness and breadth of human culture, about the importance of magic. No other author has affected my own writing so much.

RIP, Ursula le Guin. You left a hell of a legacy.