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Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin

Richard D. Erlich is a Professor in English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In collaboration with Thomas P. Dunn, he has edited The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction and Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, and compiled Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF. Alone and in various collaborations he has published essays on the "Buck Rogers opus," Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Shakespeare pedagogy, Alexander Pope, D. H. Lawrence, and science fiction works by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Robert Silverberg, and D. F. Jones.

Dedicated to the memory of Harriette Ryder, Virginia and Sidney Raike, Bea and Harry Erlich.

Light is the left hand of darkness

and darkness the right hand of light.

Two are one, life and death, lying

together like lovers in kemmer,

like hands joined together,

like the end and the way.

"Tormer's Lay," The Left Hand of Darkness

(233-34; ch. 16)