Don Alexander wrote:Well, now my interest was piqued! My Day 2.4 had been the first of a 2.5 week vacation, and instead of returning to Robot City or starting on Wheel of Time, I continued with Le Guin.
And now, after reading wayyy too many pages, I return to finally write some reports and spam up this thread again!
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Telling: This is, to my knowledge, the newest full novel of the Hainish Cycle, from 2000. My physical copy is something rather special, it's a galley draft, a trade paperback which emulates the coming hardcover and has been sent to language editors to check for further mistakes. Astonishingly, I did not find a single one, and I usually have a good eye for that. Anyway, it is a very typical UKLG story. Take, on the one hand, an alien world, but then introduce the familiar (humans or nearly humans, as it is a Hainish seed world), and use this setting to tell a story mirroring aspects of our own Earth. This world is Aka, which has not shown up yet in any other stories.
But first, our tale begins on Earth itself. Sutty is a girl of Indian ancestry, and in her youth, our planet suffers under the rule of terror of the Unionists. I was delighted in predicting Commander Dalzul would show up
, to be worshiped as a God but to also end the rule of the religious fanatics. Thereafter, Sutty flies to Ve and begins studies of a newly discovered world, Aka. She is then sent there as an envoy of the Ekumen - but when she arrives, something like 80 years later, she finds an extremely transformed planet. It turns out someone has sent the Akans (a Pangaea-World with a single supercontinent and a quite monolithic culture) a little technology package via ansible which gives them all the blueprints to achieve technological superprogression. Think early Steam Age to Space Age in half a century! And this has allowed a tyrannical regime to achieve rule - the Corporation. Now all citizens are "producer-consumers" and everywhere, neon banners exhort the Great Leap to the Stars!! In other words, it's a mirror of China's Cultural Revolution. And in advancing, the Corporation has forbidden the old "religion" (as so often with UKLG, not any kind of God-worshipping theism, but more of a variant of Taosim) and all the old ways as superstition, and suppresses them with ardor. Sutty believes herself to be the only one who even remembers the old forms of writing. After a long bureaucratic battle, she gains permission to travel from the great coastal city (~Shanghai) to the hinterland, in the hope of rediscovering and preserving the old culture, which is based around stories and fables - the eponymous Telling. Of course, the government sends a monitor to keep her from finding out too much...
A quite quick and very enjoyable read at about 250 pages. As often, the protagonist was a highly sympathetic person, a self-assured woman who is also historian, scientist, and freedom fighter.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Four Ways To Forgiveness: A collection of four rather long short stories/novellas, and again a Hainish cycle book. A bit older, 1995. Very similar to The Telling in taking an actual historic period of Earth and projecting it on to an alien world. In this case, that period is slavery, and the worlds are Werel and Yeowe. Werel, by the way, is NOT the Werel of Planet of Exile and (more indirectly) City of Illusions - UKLG later admits she completely forgot she had used the name before...
Several thousand years ago, the "black" people of a southern continent on Werel invaded the northern continent and enslaved the pale-skinned people there, the "dusties". They formed a capitalist empire driven by slavery which has remained astonishingly stable. The world is separated in "Owners" and "Assets", and, furthermore, there is an extreme difference in the rights of Men and Women - think the more extreme leanings of Muslim faith. While Owner women are of higher status than any Assets, they are separated from the men and basically prisoners in the great plantations. The Asset women are fair game for any men to "use" (the euphemism for rape) and over the millennia, the original separation between "black" and "white" has become a muddy grey. Several centuries ago, the very first Observers of the Ekumen arrived. Werel denied them landing rights, stylized them as an aggressive "alien empire" and initiated a rapid technological advance. Just half a century later, the first fusion ship lands on Yeowe, another ~Earth-sized planet one closer to the Sun (think, kind of, Venus). This planet is significantly hotter than Werel, and features no sentient life. Several powerful corporations establish rights to brutally exploit the planet, using "human resources" in the most atrocious manner. Finally, after several hundred years, a single incident flares into a revolution (just as with the Arab Spring), and while the Corporations try to suppress it in almost unspeakable ways (I daresay the atrocities described in this volume exceed anything which happened here on Earth), they are destined to lose this war. And of course, now Werel itself fears revolution... All this background is given quite extensively in an appendix of the book.
Betrayals: The first - and shortest - story begins these tales in a reasonably harmless manner. On Yeowe, long after the revolution, an old woman lives in a house in a swamp, with her pets, Tikuli, the foxdog, and Gubu, the spotted cat.
Not far from her, an old man has taken to living in another deserted house, and one day he becomes sick. She starts caring for him, and they grow together. This man is not just anyone, but Abberkam, who was once the leader of the first political party to emerge from the revolution, a xenophobic group who would have established a tyranny almost as bad as the Corporations. But he becomes corrupt and is disgraced, making way for a true democratic party which also welcomes the Ekumen. So hardly a sympathetic patient! But he regrets his misdeeds and seeks absolution. All in all, a cute story.
Still... I really wonder if Abberkam torched Yoss' house there in the end, to force her to live with him - after all, he had already prepared her room for her and everything, claiming he "knew she would come back"... The story IS named Betrayals after all. At least he saved poor Gubu!
Forgiveness Day: This was my favorite story in the book!
It is the one rather classical, plot-driven story. Solly is an envoy of the Ekumen to one of the smaller nations on Werel (who are all puppet states of the main nation of Voe Deo, which I decided rhymes with "rodeo"). She is a "space brat", daughter of an Ekumen observer, who essentially grew up travelling from world to world and is, outside of relativistic time distortion, over a millenium old. She's also a VERY sexually liberated woman - who suddenly lands on a world where women have essentially no rights even if they are not Assets, but where the view on sex is decidedly Victorian... She gets a cultural advisor, a man she gets along with well, and a bodyguard/monitor, Teyeo, who is this huge ebon warrior, a
veot, which is a lineage of traditional warriors (think: Samurai) who are most often also
gareots, owners with only one or no slaves. Teyeo is absolutely disgusted by Solly and her slanderous ways. But then the revolutionary war also reaches the capital of this country, and Solly and Teyeo are kidnapped by amateurish revolutionaries and land in a prison cell where they must get along to survive... You can guess what becomes of them. ;)
A Man of the People: One of UKLG's coming of age tales, initially. It tells of the youth of Havzhiva on Hain itself, I think one of the few tales which tell more of humanity's true homeworld. Despite a million years of space age technology, parts of the planet have specifically back-evolved to more "primitive" societies. So it is seen with distaste when a visiting aunt, who is a Historian (gasp!) "pollutes" young Hazhiva, who decides he'd rather travel the Universe and learn. He ends up on Werel and has some very bad experiences during the revolution.
A Woman's Liberation: In many ways the centerpiece of the book, it tells us of the revolution on Werel through the eyes of a young female Asset. For a short moment, her life seems to immeasurably improve, as the young Owner of her plantation deems himself progressive and frees all of his slaves. His more conservative neighbors have different views and quickly squelch any hopes of freedom. This tale was
harrowing as fuck, think Twelve Years a Slave levels of gruesome, and then some.
Of course, all the way at the end, it ends well...
And it is revealed - something I had guessed a long time before - that the historian and teacher Hazhiva has taken as a wife post-revolution in the former story is, of course, no one else than the protagonist of this one.
All in all, a really good book, though parts of it were really hard to stomach. Considering I usually read to escape, it was not almost my cup of tea.
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Wind's Twelve Quarters: This is one of UKLG's oldest short story collections, from the mid-70s, containing stories going back to the early '60s. I'll only mention some specific ones.
Semley's Necklace: This seems to be the very earliest Hainish Cycle story. As it was later used as the prologue to Rocannon's world, I assume I have read it, but I did not remember it all. The planet Rokanan is "proto-Le Guin", instead of telling us of cultural revolutions, she mixes Barbarians, Hobbits, Dwarves in a kind of Sword but no Sorcery tale. Semley, a barbarian queen, pursues a necklace, a lost heirloom, and eventually finds it as a museum display on a planet 25 light years away... This tale is still set in the League of Worlds time, and the Shing are mentioned, though not named, as an enemy force which is approaching.
April in Paris: This was kind of juvenile but fun and hilarious. A depressed middle-aged man in our "now" manages to summon a medieval alchemist in his Paris flat. Neither have girlfriends, so they begin to trawl time for booty.
The Rule of Names: Together with the preceding story, The Word of Unbinding, a tale of Earthsea. On a small island, a bumbling wizard (Mr. Underhill - was that not the name Frodo gave in the Prancing Pony?) serves the population. Then, a dashing, much more powerful wizard arrives, seeking information on the horrible dragon which once vanquished the island of his ancestors. The ending of this tale had me in stitches, it was so awesome.
Winter's Tale: Another Ekumen story, playing on Gethen, the Winter World, a planet where everyone is usually genderless but also rather hermaphroditic, and can then turn male or female during a special period of breeding (where they are also horny as all get-out). That aspect has little to do with this tale, though, which deals with a ruler whose mind is poisoned and who is spirited away to the Hainish system to be cured.
Vaster then Empires and More Slow: An Ekumen story, which could also be standalone SF. A team of "deep explorers" lands on "World 4470" far outside the sphere of the Hainish seed worlds. This world is fertile, covered in vast grasslands and forests, but devoid of animal life and especially sentience. This according to one of the team members (who are all damaged in some way, as only crazy people would willingly go on such missions) who can read thoughts and thus detect sentience - and who is, by the way, a horribly abrasive asshole. But then, people start getting this feeling that something in the forest is watching them... This was a REALLY good story, by far the best in the book, with a real space horror feeling. Loved it!
Direction of the Road: On inertial systems. Highly creative.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: This story has its own Wikipedia page. It seems to be really famous. I did not really like it, though.
The Day before the Revolution: This is probably the chronologically oldest Hainish Cycle tale, it is a prequel to The Dispossessed, telling of the anarchist philosopher Odo and the circumstances just before, well, the Revolution...
All in all, some good tales, some mediocre, some plain baffling... Decent.
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Birthday of the World and other Stories: In reading all this UKLG, I researched what all she had published, and found that there is a further short story collection, the newest one, from 2002, which consists mostly of Hainish Cycle tales. I have much of UKLG's writings, but was missing this one, so I ordered it off Amazon - cost nearly 10 Euros! Similar to Four Ways to Forgiveness, the underlying theme of most of these tales is love, relationships - and in this case, also, sex.
Coming of Age in Karhide: Exactly what the packaging says! Karhide is the capital of the Viking-like culture on Gethen, and indeed this tale makes some references to Winter's King from The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Now for that whole gender-switching thing!
Boy, I think this is like the culmination of Le Guin's sexual writings. Quite raunchy, and also often very funny. Wonderful story.
The Matter of Seggri: A pretty weird tale made up of multiple documents, including on in-universe (!) short story which is basically pure porn!!! Seggri is a really weird world where males and females are extremely segregated. The males live in fabulous castles, spending their lives being pampered and playing dominance games to decide who is allowed outside to breed with the females in what are essentially whorehouses where the males are the prostitutes. The women live outside and have a rather normal way of life, all in all, except that, of course, things like marriages are completely unknown - and lesbianism is rampant (though it is situational, almost every woman would pounce on a chance to get laid by a guy). Less good.
Unchosen Love: The first of two stories on O, dealing with the four-way sedoretu marriages known from A Fisherman of the Inland Sea or Another Story. Here, a young man traveling the world gets ensnared by another guy who lives in a formerly rich great house near the sea (formerly rich as the nearby river has created a delta, and now the house is miles from the sea). Ensnared in the sense that while he does love his boyfriend, he feels very much alone in the house, especially since it does not seem possible to create a sedoretu. His boyfriend has a potential mate, but her girlfriend seems to be a hardcore lesbian man-hater! And then there's the wonderful woman he sometimes meets deep in the night on the roof, but who he never sees during daytime...
Mountain Ways: Arranging sedoretus is a national pastime on O, but it becomes really hard when you are a farmer woman way up high in the mountains. A female scholar from the lowlands visits, and they fall in love, and while there are two more candidates for a sedoretu, only one of them is a man! What to do? Both stories were good and quite cute.
Solitude: A quite weird world where everyone lives in almost-solitude. The women form spread-out villages where each house is just barely in sight of the next. The men just live as hermits in the desert. It's pretty damned messed up. The Ekumen sends observers, a woman and her son and daughter, who grow up in this culture. Personally felt it was one of the weaker stories.
Old Music and the Slave Women: A return to Werel/Yeowe, the fifth Way to Forgiveness. Several stories of FWtF featured an Ekumen envoy named Esdardon Aya (which means Old Music) as a background character. Now he becomes the protagonist. Embroiled in the Werelian revolution, he is kidnapped by government forces and kept prisoner in an ancient palace. It's kind of a mix of Forgiveness Day (rather plot-driven tale with lots of violence and action) and A Woman's Liberation (full of really gruesome inhuman shit). Good story, but again, not for the weak of stomach.
The Birthday of the World: The titular story could take place in the Ekumen, but if so, it is without the external influence of the Ekumen - an undiscovered planet, in a sense. In a Maya-like culture, the ruler is also God. Once a year, when everyone, including the world, has their birthday, God is granted visions. This time around, they are horrible and foretell the destruction of all!! Then God dies, a False God takes up arms, and finally, a burning house falls out of the sky as prophesied... More on the weaker side.
Paradises Lost: Definitely not a story of the Ekumen, while at the same time hard SF, set in, as UKLG labels it, "the generic future", the SF world that is an extrapolation of our own, using the known laws of physics (though I have to say UKLG is not very firm when it comes to those...). This is both a coming-of-age, and a Generation Ship story. Roughly half a century from arrival, the members of the Sixth Generation are now growing up, and preparations for arrival slowly begin. But the Angels - which are, to put it bluntly, a religious cult - who claim that the trip is the destination ("we are already in heaven, we are all angels"), become ever more powerful, and begin a campaign of sabotage to ensure the trip is eternal. When a weird navigational "error" strongly accelerates the ship, turning 50 years to 5, things come to a head. This was a STUNNING story!!! For me personally, it dethrones Another Story as the best by UKLG, and it alone (by far the longest, more of a short novel) made this collection worthwhile!
Wow, that was... long!