Patt Morrison asks: 'The Left Hand of Darkness' author Ursula K. Le Guin

Comic-Con, that massive San Diego convention that spawned an international franchise for fans of sci fi and fantasy comics, films, television and genre books, began in 1970, in the basement of a San Diego hotel. The year before, the singular writer Ursula K. Le Guin had already published the best science fiction novel of the year: "The Left Hand of Darkness," a book not about ray guns or rocket ships, but about other planets, other cultures, other sexualities. As Comic-Con begins yet another flashy fest, one of alternative fiction's true masters -- author of children's books, poetry, novels and nonfiction -- is shaping her forthcoming book, "Words Are My Matter." Worlds too are her subject matter, the deep currents of politics, race, culture, ecology, sexuality -- our own earthly conundrums played out and spun out on alternative worlds. Le Guin's parents were the remarkable Berkeley anthropologists and ethnologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, a couple as influential in the field of anthropology as on the imagination of their daughter, and the planets and people of her creation.