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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Fantasy books, stories, ＆c
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The pronoun thing bothered Le Guin a bit too. If you dig around, you'll find a short story set in the same world, Winter's King, that uses she/her pronouns instead. (I confess that I don't remember much else about it, though.)
Yeah, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but the idea of a spacefaring civilization only having a concept of he/she pronouns is very amusing.
Eh, I put it in the same category as spaceships with ashtrays, or spacefaring humanity still building giant 1960s-style batch-oriented mainframe computers even though they've reached distant solar systems. It's something you have to be able to ignore to enjoy the older works.
(It's also better than James White's solution of calling anyone who wasn't a gender-distinguishable member of the speakers's own species "it".)