People compare Native Tongue disparagingly to The Handmaid's Tale, but first of all, Native Tongue was published a year earlier, in 1984. Second, Native Tongue has a vision not just that women can resist oppressive patriarchy in subtle and in dramatic ways, but how. And that's through... the sapir-whorf hypothesis. How fun! The Handmaid's Tale doesn't have ~cool aliens~. Native Tongue is a feminist classic and a scifi classic. What more could you ask for.
For the record, the 2023 Ursula Mention was The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe, and 2022 was Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer (trans. Ursula Le Guin.) The Ursula Mention is whichever book I read that year that Ursula Le Guin was compared to or connected to somehow that I liked the best/thought was the most Guinlike.
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