"For Margaret Atwood, Le Guin is a "quintessentially American writer", of undoubted literary quality, "for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing". Her worlds, Le Guin says, are not so much invented as discovered. "I stare and see something, maybe a person in a landscape, and have to find out what it is." But whether charting inner lands or outer space, her eye remains on the here and now. At 76, Le Guin counts among her affiliations the peace and women's movements ("I take a perverse pleasure in calling myself a feminist"), and Taoism ("profoundly subversive")."