When I think about Ursula Le Guin's writing, I remember a powerful and palpable presence of death. And her magnificent, wild, mysterious worlds. As a young reader,I loved the maps at the beginning of the Earthsea books. (This one is taken from the Harvard Map Collection online: https://twitter.com/HarvardMapColl). Her stories are at least partly about boundaries, and transgression. When there is transgression, dark and evil break in, established certainties collapse, the world is irreversibly cleft. Characters are scarred. They travel with the loneliness of terrible consequences, wearing it like a black cloak. They sail the straits between conflicting forces to the horizon where life becomes death, and the world ends.  A great writer.