Before Donald Trump ever uttered a word about building a wall, author Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away on Tuesday, wrote of a world that had built one—a wall that divided two ideologies:

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. —from The Dispossessed

I read Le Guin's The Dispossessed when I was 16. While the author's six-part Earthsea book series had a lasting effect on me as well—it influenced, among other things, my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns—The Dispossessed came at a time when I was starting to become more aware of how science fiction could be political and social allegory as much as great space adventure. Newly displaced from the city I had spent most of my life in and settling into a new town, I spent the months before my senior year of high school at the library and used book stores. I largely spent my nights holed up reading books my parents assumed were light summer reading: Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Asimov's Foundation books, and various forms of Vonnegut. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a book I would read later, further demonstrates how completely Le Guin synthesized earth-bound philosophical questions with interplanetary travels.

The Dispossessed held a mirror up to American capitalism and culture in the form of the planet Urras and contrasted it with the anarchist-syndicalist "utopia" of the Odo on Urras' moon, Anarres. Of all the books I read in my youth, that one stirred the greatest amount of internal debate. I was politically aware before, in the way teenagers who go to model Congresses and stage mock presidential debates are politically aware. But the "extremes" of The Dispossessed were a direct assault on what I had been taught about the way the world works, while at the same time foreshadowing language I would hear from all political sides later in life.

There was no "right" side between the two worlds bridged by Shevek, the Odonian physicist at the center of Dispossessed. Both were imperfect, driven by circumstances and by values that resulted in widely differing types of suffering. "Suffering is the condition on which we live," Shevek says at one point. "Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence." The capitalist (and sexist and classist) world of Urras was a world of plenty, and plenty of oppression of the lower classes. The Odonians value conformity and oppress "egoizers"—individualists who express their own thoughts too forcefully, in a fashion some might compare to "political correctness." The division between the two sides resembles the extremes of today's political climate, which might as well come from different planets.

Le Guin's work was full of that simultaneous ambivalence and certainty, drawn from her Taoist worldview of finding balance. The Earthsea stories also reflect that Taoist center, along with Le Guin's incredible world-building skills demonstrated in all her works. While J.R.R. Tolkien may have influenced Earthsea, Earthsea certainly left a mark George R.R. Martin's tales of fire and ice—as seen in Planet of Exile, Le Guin's story of a world with 15-year-long seasons. And there was The Word for World Is Forest, an allegory for the Vietnam War, which presaged (and arguably provided the underlying world and plot for) James Cameron's film Avatar.

Le Guin railed at the marginalization of the genres she was successful in—genres that in many ways she was forced into by the prejudicial natures of the literary world of the time—by the larger literature world. At her acceptance of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards in 2014 (an event she had been shut out of much of her career, as she would later tell The New York Times) she said:

I rejoice in accepting [this award] for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from 'literature' for so long—my fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination who over the past 50 years watched the beautiful awards go to the so-called 'realists.' I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now I think we need writers who understand the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of art.

Those words ring especially true today after Le Guin's passing. She was 88.