The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin

This novella shows the end of an Earth colony on a planet called Forest, hence the title. Terrans call this planet New Tahiti, and the natives consist of furred, little, green humans. Because Earth lacks trees for lumber, the Terrans cut trees down on this oceanic planet, where every island grows shore-to-shore trees, and ship them back to Earth, lightyears distant. This is not my favorite Le Guin story, though it also contains traits that I appreciate.

I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven’t seen that. But I know they don’t spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death.

Le Guin generally excels at character building, but not here. Of the three main characters, one native and two Terrans, two seem caricatures, and though the third has more depth, he is shallowly three-dimensional.
—Le Guin introduces the Terran Davidson first, and that initial chapter plays out from his point of view—as do two later chapters out of the eight total. This is the only time he is shown as anything other than brutish, though his actions quickly gain that pallor through the readers’ growing understanding. So, after bait-and-switching the reader from thinking he is the hero to realizing he is the villain, Le Guin then dissolves him into a caricature of an unrepentant, racist, violent, mass-murderer. At the end, he feels two-dimensional: loyal to the army structure, yet serving another purpose in his life.
—The Terran Lyubov narrates two chapters as an anthropological member of the colonizing force from Earth. He is sympathetic to the plight of the natives, but caught up in the system he is a part of, powerless. This is another two-dimensional character: he loves the culture of the natives, but cannot convince other Terrans to.
—Selver, the native who narrates the other three chapters, has more going on than either Terran. His culture doesn’t know violence—adults replace the childish feats of wrestling and strength with skill at singing. So his eventual embrace of violence makes him the avatar of a god in their culture. Yet, his reasons for embracing violence are sympathetic: systemic racism, violent oppression, the consistent murder and rape of his people and his wife. Yet he struggles with his decision to adopt violence, and has a hard time using it. He becomes a shell, a symbol for his culture, the resistance leader whose effectiveness comes at great psychological cost and alienation, though this isn't adequately explored. So, though Selver has more than two dimensions, even he feels shallow.
—Le Guin allows each character space on the pages, interior monologue, actions, and plenty of dialogue—even with each other. But they all still seem fairly shallow. I think this shallowness comes from Le Guin’s interest in showing how mass violence is distasteful. The characters all serve this one theme. Davidson loves mass violence, serves it, but is insane. Lyubov resists it from the start and ends up dead by accident. Selver uses it as an answer to the violence of the Terrans, but ends up torn. The characters are not given enough of their own stories outside of this question of violence to really shine, to gain depth and interest outside of the central theme. So, instead of writing characters, Le Guin here uses characters as avatars viewing the theme from different perspectives, to help build the world and conclusions, forgetting the characters in the midst of her theme. Though she starts out wanting to explore the villain and treat all three sides of the argument around violence, she quickly loses interest and each character ends up being a shell, existing solely to make an argument. Yet that initial impulse seems strong. And I read hoping for reconciliation within Selver, for Davidson to see the error of his ways, for Lyubov’s work to gain traction—which did happen after his death—yet Le Guin wanted simply to take aim at war and tear it down, so she forgot to finish writing her characters. It comes off more polemical than interesting, and it is a weak book. Maybe this would have been better suited as a short story than a novella.

For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.

But that world she wastes her characters to build is built well. The locals’ alternative living situations use local materials, while working around and within the present landscape instead of scooping it out to a design. Their partially submerged, forest houses are hidden from Terran eyes in the endless jungle. The human camp is a backwater of slow communication, misunderstanding, and too few people doing too many jobs. Le Guin does a great job of giving me a few specific descriptors, and a couple of general descriptors, and then letting my own mind run with it. For instance, on the night of the main uprising, she shows a woman’s throat getting slit open in detail, but uses the horror of that to let the generalities of her descriptions of the rest of the violence be driven home by the reader—a later victim being “pulled down” seems much more serious than just being pulled off their feet because of this earlier violent example.

"Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another."

So, while I like the impulse to make the villain a well-rounded character with his own narrative, she gives it up and he becomes a punching bag caricature, and insane. While I feel like Selver shows some real promise as a character—using violence to fight violence but being torn apart because of it—not enough context is given for the other natives to fully flush out Selver. While the world is built well, it comes at the expense of the characters in a way that makes the book feel more polemical against, and allegorical of, the Vietnam War—jungle, napalm, short humans of a different color—than interested in exploring the theme of mass violence. In terms of Vietnam War science fiction tales, I have now read three, and I like both Starship Troopers and The Forever War better. This one is too direct, too based on what Le Guin is against, not abstracted enough to allow the science fictional retelling to have power outside of the known context of the war itself.

City of Illusions by Ursula K Le Guin

Oh, okay. I get it. This is the book where Le Guin becomes Le Guin. Earlier she has touched on some ideas about politics, gender, the role of science or creativity, and interesting characters. But never to the depth I know she achieves later in her career. Here, in this novel, she finally does. Though it’s not shown all the way through the novel. And it’s not quite brilliant yet. But hey, it’s the switch I was waiting for.

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.

And this change occurs over a single page within this novel. It might be halfway through, three-quarters through, two-thirds through—somewhere around there—where the novel flips a switch and later Le Guin writing suddenly appears. No slow growth leads to it. She starts with a fantasy/science fiction quest storyline by now familiar from the two prior novels. Here, Falk, a forgotten man who has forgotten everything, resurrects in the forest, learns to be human, and then returns to the only place from where he could have come to find answers about his past, including whether he came from there. The book focuses on Falk’s journey. And that journey allows the only hint at Le Guin’s later complexity: Falk explores the world, showing states of humanity—small kingdoms, cowboy cults, forest houses filled with inbred families. These heights of human culture exist so far fallen from us in their post-apocalyptic American midwest. Their variety of natures fascinate while tending towards primitive, a variety that hints at Le Guin’s later writing. She’s known for depth of discussion from multiple viewpoints, and here we start to get multiple viewpoints on primitivization, though it takes most of the book in the slow telling.

Fish and visitors stink after three days.

And then Falk gets to the city he seeks, and he gets jumped by a bunch of goons. This is where Le Guin starts: writing character, delving deeper into themes, exploring them from different points of view at the same time instead of slowly over two thirds of the novel. At one point, her main character simultaneously has four minds within his own, so she kind of has to include multiple viewpoints. But boy does she run with it! Even before Falk inhabits minds with three other characters, he’s introspective and moody and allowed to ruminate deeply. Where I had begun contemplating whether I bored of Falk and his journey, suddenly everything happens all at once. And it’s a bit of a mess. She’s not the best at writing complex things right off the bat here. But it feels like the other shoe dropping: it’s a relief as a reader who started on later Le Guin novels. What great heights really start to be forged here. Emphasis on start to be. It’s a touch confused and confusing, but it’s passionate and breathtaking and it reads more like The Dispossessed than Rocannon’s World.

I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud.

The biggest problem with the novel should be apparent from what I said above: this novel reads like two novellas shoved together. The awakening and journey, and the rest. And this shift is awkward. To me, it felt like the other shoe dropping only because I started with later Le Guin books, but I would not have enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t.

Was he leaving home, or going home?

The themes are sanctity of life, lying, the Tao Te Ching, and the earth being over run by humanoid aliens that keep humans primitive for no apparent gain. Le Guin states that lying is bad, and shows some examples. The aliens are clear monsters, and the main liars in the tale, and she uses a few examples of them and views about them. The Tao not only acts as a talisman in the novel, but informs much of the words with this constant light-dark interplay, the consistent illusion-reality discussion. For instance, the bomb bird looks like a bird, but is a bomb, putting Falk onto the ground instead of his air-transportation. Also, the walls of the city are clear but not, projections and windows being indistinguishable. And of course, the illusion of a lie and the reality of a truth.

Seen rightly, any situation, even a chaos or a trap would come clear and lead of itself to its one proper outcome: for there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye.

But she also uses the lying aliens’ lionization of the sanctity of life to question their reasons for illusion, which she blames on anxiety over the biological necessity of death. This strong critique sounds contemporary today, almost fifty years later, as it is trendy to do anything that could result in a longer life, even at the expense of enjoying the moment and the life you have now. But her earlier critique of the sanctity of life—through having Falk murder somebody right in front of the alien representative sent to bring him in—seems at odds with this later, more interesting critique. Like I said, she somewhat confuses the theme. But when she looks at the themes from different viewpoints, by using different characters, she wrinkles the theme instead of confusing it. So, Falk’s ruminations on the origin of alien obsession with life, and his sudden murder of another human are at odds with each other. While her later discussion of the sanctity of life through multiple viewpoints seems more even handed, the former murder acts to counterpoint this even handedness. And by placing the whole on her reader’s same earth, she runs the risk of sounding mean spirited instead of interested.

Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do.

The other main problem is lack of explanation. What do the aliens get out of keeping humans down? Jollies? Self-worth? Are they proselytizing? Where in later books Le Guin seems to know which questions need to be answered, here she slides over things that she has built up too much and they seem more like plot holes. Why so much talk about primitivization with no real conclusion? This is a dropped ball. Likewise, Estrel goes away as suddenly as she appeared, despite spending so much time on-screen and being so influential to Falk. This shows a missed opportunity more than a necessary focusing of the novel—especially as it happens after Le Guin has so widely expanded the scope of the novel. Falk stays alive, yet forgets about the house in the forest as much as Le Guin does.

"Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I'll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!"

So, this is a good book, and the one where Le Guin really starts to flex her writing. And after she does start to flex, boy does this book become engrossing. Yet, issues remain within both the book and that second half that hold it back from achieving the greatness that Le Guin will become known for. This is the first time her writing can be great, but she wasn’t able to match story structure to that greatness quite yet. Six novels later, the structure of The Dispossessed—where every other chapter works either towards or away from the first chapter—explores a similarly split narrative with but solves the structural issues I have with this book. Two novels later, The Left Hand of Darkness includes a slow journey but puts it at the end of the novel where I already care about the characters. It shows that Le Guin learned from this admittedly enjoyable book, and wrote even better later. She also translated the Tao Te Ching and used it extensively throughout this work, which should probably be noted.

Planet of Exile by Ursula K Le Guin

Ursula K Le Guin splits her focus very well: in this second-published novel, on a different world than the earlier Rocannon’s World, she continues the technique of telling a story focused on the planet and characters. But not totally focused. In Rocannon, we see the noblewoman retrieving her necklace from a museum lightyears away, which takes only a couple of pages, and the rest of the story takes place on-scene, boots on the ground, in situ. And Le Guin ensures that even when the outside context intrudes again, at the end, Rocannon’s destroying the rebels’ interstellar base happens on the world that would come to take his name. This focusing of the story allows so much.
—First, don’t show the monster—the one writing “rule” I have ever been accused of advocating for. In other words, allow space for the reader’s imagination to fill in, but give enough hints that you can guide their imagination towards horrifying or beautiful or whatever you want them to think of. Le Guin does this with her wider Hainish Universe. She drops hints and statements about the wider universe, and lets the reader wonder. I appreciate not being spoonfed.
—Yet it ultimately allows her to focus on the story she is interested in writing, the one here discussing preparations for hibernation over a fifteen year long winter. In other words, instead of building characters, the world, and the wider universe, she focuses her writing on building the first two, and barely mentions the third in order to keep the story moving and allow depth of exploration. This focus clearly keeps me engaged in her story.
—Though she does “split her focus”, the slight split merely allows wonder and depth, while helping the reader focus on what’s important to the story at hand. She doesn’t bite off more than her talent or story can chew, but she also doesn't ignore the wider context.

What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don't belong to.

Again, like the earlier book, Le Guin shows and doesn’t tell. She didn’t tell me that Rocannon is compassionate, and here she doesn’t tell me that Umaksuman is a pragmatist. But I see it over and over again through Umaksuman’s actions. And because he never acts to contradict that aspect of his personality, it is clear to the reader. The one time he seems to contradict this, it is later explained as a misunderstanding on the part of a character in great pain who couldn’t quite tell what was going on.

Wold felt sorry for him, as he often did for young men, who have not seen how passion and plan over and over are wasted, how their lives and acts are wasted between desire and fear.

The themes here focus on the ubi sunt motif of English literature. The colony of “farborn”, or people from another planet, remember little of life before the six hundred earth-years they have been on-planet. The begin to doubt even their own records. Their abandonment has left them essentially native, but differences in genetic code mean that they are unable to breed and integrate with the main populace of the planet, though politics, myth, and custom also interfere. Set against the invasion of migrating northern tribes, the Gaal, this ubi sunt motif doesn’t drive the story so much as the characters themselves.
—But this book also starts to show Le Guin’s tendency to allow multiple themes comfortable room in her book. Racial issues, custom, politics, love, death, Wold as Hrothgar, an aged king in a warrior culture who hasn’t been usurped yet.

She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.

The writing here improves over her earlier novel, simply by being more readable. There are less awkward phrases to pause over, as Le Guin starts to find her voice. But the book is largely another pulp fiction adventure tale about a besieged city populated by two slightly antagonistic tribes, filled with relics of the past, and being attacked by both winter and the united Gaal tribes.

Neither grief nor pride had so much truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky and sea, bright and brief as fire.

One other strength here is Le Guin’s consistent worldbuilding. This world has an orbit of 60 earth years, meaning that each season is 15 years long. Le Guin allows this to influence the story and characters in believable, consistent ways. Instead of translating everything to earth years, she points out the difference a couple of times, then stops, letting the reader fill in the translation or get drawn into the world built by starting to think like these people. Yet it’s not an unfamiliar thinking—these are nomadic farmers preparing for winter, just a 15 year winter. It’s known to us, how to prepare for winter when your resource gathering area is as far as you can walk, but it’s multiplied by the length of the winter. So, instead of taking something from far out of human conception and forcing it down her reader’s throat, she merely multiplies a known historical process, and this lends the whole legibility.

In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife.

It’s a good book. I really enjoyed reading it. But, again, it’s not as strong as Le Guin’s later mastery. It shows her steadily improving, especially in storytelling as this isn’t a split narrative but one whole narrative from start to finish. This book even begins to show her later strengths as a writer more than her first novel did. I’m impressed, even if it still isn’t deep enough for me in the themes it discusses, or broad enough in the viewpoints on those themes.

Rocannon's World by Ursula K Le Guin

The fact that Le Guin goes from this pulp fiction, science fiction, adventure tale on a fantasy planet to The Left Hand of Darkness in three years of publishing staggers me. The amount of work put into her writing impresses. But, come on, let’s talk about this book alone before the context.

Here, in her first published novel, Le Guin writes a science fiction adventure tale on a fantasy planet. The plot is simple: a beautiful native woman receives the curiosity of a lightyears distant scientist (Rocannon) when she shows up demanding an artifact from his museum as her cultural heritage, he then finds the research on her planet and people woefully under-cooked, he travels there to research with a team, then they’re ambushed by an interstellar rebellion and he has to hero’s quest his way through legends and myths of the world to find his unsuspecting enemy and get revenge, acceptance, a place in the world. Look, the plot rests on the tired standard of heroes questing, but she doesn’t muddle her language the way CJ Cherryh did with her slightly similar first-novel, Gate of Ivrel. Le Guin’s writing is clear and effective, but never anything spectacular.

"What I feel..." Rocannon began.
"Well?" Ketho inquired hoarsely, after a long pause.
"What I feel sometimes is that I ... meeting these people from worlds we know so little of, you know, sometimes ... that I have as it were blundered through the corner of a legend, of a tragic myth, maybe, which I do not understand."

Structurally, the book takes a turn after that initial noblewoman goes crazy and runs off into the woods from the lightyear time dilation. This shift is followed by Rocannon’s arrival, the revolutionaries' ambush, and the hero’s quest storyline. This shift almost works, because that noblewoman’s quest for the necklace was also a hero’s quest of a sort, and because Rocannon’s companions are all descendants of that woman, but the split in the narratives is still somewhat jarring. From research after I finished reading, it seems that first part was initially published as a short story, so I guess this is a bit of a fixup novel. But Le Guin takes pains to tie the two parts together through similar characters and themes, so it almost works.

Not all roads that lead down lead up as well.

On its own, the book is an entertaining page turner. Two moments stand out as unexpectedly saving the hero without being foreshadowed—deus ex machina in the escape from the flying people’s city and in gaining telepathy; though the latter is somewhat foreshadowed, sort of, I guess. But it’s a good adventure tale despite these two moments. Except that the pacing is slower and I like adventure tales with faster pacing, I would put this up there with other pulp fiction I like. If you’re feeling like pulp fiction, you can do much worse than this book.

"Take cover!" but could not move himself. The helicopter nosed in unsteadily, rags of cloud catching in its whirring vanes. Even as he watched it approach, Rocannon watched from inside it, not knowing what he looked for, seeing two small figures on the mountainside, afraid, afraid—a flash of light, a hot shock of pain, pain in his own flesh, intolerable. The mind-contact was broken, blown clean away. He was himself, standing on the ledge pressing his right hand against his chest and gasping, seeing the helicopter creep still closer, its vanes whirring with a dry loud rattle, its laser-mounted nose pointing at him.

But I know Le Guin’s strengths later in life are character development, deep exploration of themes without losing the book’s entertainment level, and solid wordbuilding that leaves the reader wanting more. So let me examine those strengths now. First, character development. Rocannon himself is well-realized, as is Mogien, though the latter is more a foil that helps her explain her world. This companion-character-as-worldbuilder technique functions well within this novel, but the focus is clearly on Rocannon. So, what can I remember about Rocannon? He’s compassionate, intelligent, and determined. He tirelessly works to help those around him, even when they don’t realize he is helping them. He isn’t looking for reward, but the self-satisfaction of helping others. Le Guin shows this through Rocannon’s actions, words, and interior monologues, helping cement him in the reader’s mind as a guy to be friends with, both when he is powerful and after the ambush leaves him dependent. It's Le Guin showing, not telling. The only critique that I have here is that she took a while to build his character. Instead of changing Rocannon constantly through the novel, he doesn’t change much, just the reader’s understanding of him changes. Some of his terrible experiences, like being burned alive at the stake for three days and surviving, are forgotten as they alter him not at all, while he seems to have come to this world with everything he needed to save it already present in his personality. This unfortunate writing choice is something Le Guin improves on later, but at least here she has a well-founded, complex character to start from here, even if it takes her the whole book to build that character.

He had intended to add, "Give me a couple of hours to get clear," but did not. If he were caught as he left, the Faradayans would be warned and might move out the FTLs.

Second, the depth of exploration and variety of viewpoints of Le Guin’s themes are legendary in her later writing and storytelling. Here the themes touch on death, cultures, races, and working together. There are few deeper themes or philosophical ideas, and little in the way of exploration, but Le Guin points out some questions that are fascinating. One is lightyears. As the time dilation allows the initial noblewoman to outlive her husband, and is completely out of her conception, this realization drives her crazy. This isn’t so much explored as noticed and brought up. It’s an interesting take on time dilation, but not terribly so. The second is communication: instantaneous communication across lightyears is possible, so is telepathy. But she really just brings these ideas up without delving into them deeply. So, in terms of her later tendency to explore themes deeply from different angles, here she just mentions themes from one or two angles, and doesn’t really explore their implications or how those themes would change characters. But they’re interesting themes examined from an interesting angle, even if it isn’t explored deeply and that angle is really just one angle. It’s a good start, yet not up to the par of her later works.

"How far a journey, Lord?"
His lips drew back and back. "A very far journey, Lady. Yet it will last only one long night."

Third, Le Guin’s strong worldbuilding shows up here through her tactic of involving off-scene developments, or an unexplored broader context, that influences the characters and story. For example, there is an explosion (the ambush), and Rocannon’s response (after mourning his friends) plays out in interior monologue, where he reflects that the revolution that had been brewing when he left civilization for this backwater world must have begun.
—This hint, this taste of a broader context can do two things. First, if it’s not followed up, it can easily feel like post-action explanation (ex post facto), which tends to feel cheap to the reader. You know, you spend a hundred pages reading the murder mystery, you get to the end, and it turns out the killer was really off-screen the whole time and there was no way you could have guessed who it was. It’s a let down. Second, if it’s followed up on well, this reflection can help build the world, and help the initial event achieve more surprise. Le Guin accomplishes this here: tracking down these rebels and destroying their presence on this world becomes the hero’s quest, the rest of the book. In other words, rather than explaining the event afterwards and then dropping it, Le Guin explains the event afterwards and then builds on it. Even helpful Rocannon becomes revenge oriented.
—One thing Le Guin consistently does in her later books and here in her first book, is to build the world—by which I mean her universe—through these aspects, through these glimpses that change people’s lives, that are built off of, that could so easily be asides but end up being key to the story and the characters. This is solid worldbuilding for Le Guin, and it was exciting for me to see her already good at that in her first novel. Not great at it, but good at it already.

They can send death at once, but life is slower.

In all, this is a fine first novel. I’m impressed with how somebody who wrote this could later write something as great as The Dispossessed, and my conclusion is that in order to break the rules, you need to first show you understand the rules. Now, I’m not one for rules of writing, but Le Guin here shows that she can write a page-turning novel comfortably, then later allows herself to experiment and try new things while still being based on that strong foundation. It’s a good trajectory that encourages me as a young author. In all, this novel is a good read, but I probably will not go back to it due to the shallowness of the themes, the lack of change in the main character, and, frankly, the quality difference between this and her later works.

The prisoner is the jailer's jailer.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

I knew nothing about this novel before opening it. This novel follows Shevek as he grows up, goes on sabbatical, and invents faster-than-light physics. The structure of the novel interlaces the chapters with ones leading up to and from the first chapter. In the first chapter, Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras, chapter two begins way back at the beginning of his life, chapter three starts from the end of chapter one, chapter four starts from the end of chapter two, and so on until the end of the novel. This structure provides a slow start to the second chapter, but things quickly build up to tensions that take hold and drive the book forward.

The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.

While reading this, I found aspects of it reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Similarities in the balance between science, character development, drama, and action first tipped me off—hey, this mix is familiar from a later-published but earlier read book. As Rhodes delves deep into Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer, he includes biographical sketches that expand and contract based on their importance to the Manhattan Project or character. Yet he never loses sight of the scientific development, political drama, and action around the Manhattan Project.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

Le Guin’s novel here predates this mix which favors biography but incorporates science, drama, and action. As Shevek works through the famine years, he is assigned to write up death lists, to decide which people will die and live—the post-bombing reaction of many of the Manhattan Project scientists is echoed in Shevek’s responses to questions surrounding this job posting. Of course, after I finished the novel and started looking around at information about it, I learned that Le Guin consciously modeled Shevek after parts of Oppenheimer. But this conscious modeling should never be an excuse, so was Shevek a believable character, or did Le Guin use Oppenheimer to get out of having to build all of Shevek’s character?

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”

Shevek’s introverted nature is deep and wide. His lack of attention paid during his formative years handicaps Shevek later on in life—he wins some and loses some, but never really knows why he wins or loses. Shevek is just Shevek, and he expects others to react to him, rather than changing how he acts to better influence others. Yet he eventually begins to realize and appreciate the influence and insights of others in his life. I see it like this: Shevek unthinkingly accepts Odonian communal truisms as a boy, ignores everything to focus on physics as a teen and twenty-something, then gains understanding into Odo’s thoughts and meanings through discovering people. As this surface-level understanding of Odonism stretches and frays, as Shevek realizes that truth exists behind the truisms, he starts to understand that other perspectives are beneficial to his own thinking and problems. At first he forgets the people in the usefulness of their perspectives, but after he loses the people and feels their lack in his life, he realizes that he has to put energy and effort in to get energy and effort out, and finally he starts to value people for themselves rather than what they can do for him or the culture. To be clear, every other character in the novel is Shevek’s foil. Shevek faces down the world. And Shevek is a complex, changing character who is fully realized within the novel. His consistent tendencies are not dropped because of deus ex machina moments, but they are modified by things like his being posted to be a death lister, his realization of subtextual human intentions, and love.

Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.

And the novel is about that change in Shevek, about the journey from lonely scientific genius, to integrated member of a group. From not understanding his religious ideals, but holding them rigidly, to understanding the truth in them, and accepting his place in the world. The journey of enlightenment, in a sense. And that’s what makes this novel so keen. From a nominal anarchist to a real one. From a nominal Odonian to a real one. From a driven scientist who is on the brink of the great understanding of his life, to a scientist who has gotten that understanding and realizes what he has missed in the process.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

As noted above, the book—and Shevek’s changing—is about death, love, and the nastiness of humans. Though these themes are strong, Le Guin touches on many other themes and some of them are quite unique and well developed: anarchism and politics, collectivisation and personal property, gender relationships and the other, individuality versus and in support of the culture as a whole, interpersonal relationships, suffering and plenty, the creative process and overcoming barriers to it, introversion and hidden intentions, the effect of physical environments on personality and culture—this book covers a lot of territory.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

But where other novels cover a lot of themes without satisfying depth to any, Le Guin tends towards depth, exploring concepts from multiple angles through including actions and changes in characters that wrinkle those concepts. Instead of pulp fictional writing which often hammers a single theme home and merely mentions other themes, Le Guin designs each scene to allow themes to expand. Yet she doesn’t lose sight of what her characters believe, and this is where this novel attains greatness: these character and theme changes throughout the novel do not diverge massively, it’s not a clean break from introverted Shevek to partnered Shevek. Rather, Shevek goes through stages of introversion and reliance upon others, finally finding a balance in the latter chapters. This tendency of Le Guin’s to modify instead of discard earlier aspects of characters, to allow space for the transition to breathe, reflects the brilliance of her storytelling.

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

And her writing similarly rewards the reader. Instead of focusing on short, declarative sentences, she uses what declarative sentences there are as powerful transition points, as short summaries of understanding to both build towards and build from. Instead, Le Guin spends most of her words exploring topics and leading the reader to and from these transition points, these understandings. For instance, two sentences like, “I’m thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian.” leads from a series of unanticipated realizations by Shevek about the nature of hidden intentions in those around him, and leads directly to the next few sentences which start to wrinkle and expand the realization of those two short sentences: “As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!” This immediate expansion shows how these transition points work in Le Guin’s writing, and she builds from them further to deeper exploration of their effects on Shevek and the world around him.

It’ll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists.

Another strength of her writing rests on her ability to make characters feel alien. Though the aliens in the book are all humans from different planets, their views and personalities feel more alien than other science fiction books with exotic, non-human aliens. The nature of the Urrasti is significantly different than the nature of the Annaresti, and Le Guin never loses sight of that. She allows that difference to modify her characterisation of each individual. Though secondary characters are secondary, less focused on and less fully developed than Shevek, they feel different in their interactions with him and statements to him. Instead of changing both her writing of and the philosophies of aliens like Iain M Banks does in Matter, Le Guin changes only their philosophies, and it works. It kind of surprises me that it works as well as it does, but it’s a testament to her developed skill that the aliens feel so alien while sounding similar to Shevek.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

So, yes, this is a great book and I already look forward to rereading it. On one hand, it’s just a tale of a pretty cush scientist discussing suffering, but there is so much more to it than that surface level story. The story is fascinating because of the support it receives from the depth of the themes, exploration, character building, world building, structure, and writing. It lacks incessant action, so the book isn’t for fans of pulp fiction, but it gains so much more by exploring interesting themes to a satisfying depth. I love this book.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

1. This novel wonderfully mixes mysticism, science, and adventure saga in an engaging way that reflects the ideas Le Guin discusses: paradoxical politics, mythic mysticism, human evolution, and interacting with people different than oneself. I think the main theme here is the latter: living with different people and cultures. Much of the storyline and many of the monologues and conversations support this idea of differences complementing rather than separating. And the structure of the story as well—especially in the chapters that switch between Ai and Estraven's perspectives from chapter to chapter. Their adventure on the ice directly supports this theme because they have to complement each other simply to survive. They must also understand each other's differences for psychological survival. This is an interesting book that embraces mystic paradoxes, but is also driven by a well paced, exciting narrative adventure.

2. The interspersed chapters of myth storytelling really work: adding to the sense of place and the understanding of the culture. They even influence the plot in appropriate, natural ways: elements of the myths are directly quoted and indirectly discussed by Ai and Estraven in the narrative chapters. But these chapters of myth could endanger the reader's engagement with the story by breaking the narrative flow—they could come off as tangential time wasters. But they do not. Through their short length they lessen the danger of losing the reader; through their focus and tight construction they remain important to the reader's understanding of this culture; and through their echoes in the overarching story they stick to the thrust of the plot and theme of the novel, keeping these interludes integral to the whole. They help break up the longer introspections, conversations, and chapters to stave off potential reader fatigue. This novel experiments structurally, and Le Guin pulls it off.

3. One of the ways that she pulls it off is the writing quality and variety. Her writing techniques differ from Ai's chapters to Estraven's, and the myth chapters differ from both. But beyond that, one chapter is composed of journal entries, another is half taken up by a flashback, and she changes her writing techniques for these too. Her writing is incredibly varied throughout. That it remains legible, and that all of these various techniques are done well, shows the incredible breadth of her skill as a writer.

4. At times though, she tells more than she shows. This probably in part reflects the attempted alieness of the culture Ai is exploring: it would be impossible to show everything in here from the start when Estraven's reactions are so foreign to the reader. But by the end of the novel she trusts her readers to have understood her telling, so she shows more. Her showing is stronger than her telling, but I cannot fault her too much because her telling leads to more showing.

5. She translates some terms for the reader automatically instead of giving the reader another made-up word, then translating it in a dictionary excerpt. What I mean is that she describes temperature in Fahrenheit degrees instead of whatever the local word and scale might be. The alieness of the culture and world is already so well established that she doesn't need to browbeat the reader with another invented word to communicate temperature. This works wonderfully: it simply communicates with the reader while avoiding unnecessary complications in world building, and unnecessary explanations outside of the narrative thrust of the story.

6. Though she often translates terms, the made-up names are almost too much. Almost. Often, speculative fiction names every street, house, and boat with a ridiculous, made-up word, name, or title. It may be intended to give a sense of history to the place described, but provides too much detail for the reader to follow, obscures the location and blocking of characters, and is invented history that the reader cannot actually relate to. This bad habit typically does more to overwhelm the reader than inform them. Here, Le Guin almost does that, but holds back just enough to not drown the reader by trying to impart objects with unrelatable pseudo-historical import. She does this by simply using generic terms where possible. For example, she mentions that this snowy world has quite a few names for different types of falling snow, many names for snows on the ground, and still more names for ices. But rather than listing a hundred made up words and defining each of them, she simply mentions that they exist, and then translates those words as "snow" throughout. Or at least she usually uses the human words familiar to mountaineers and glacier lovers, not new alien ones.

7. Every idea she touches on early in the novel is explored in more depth later. There are some early ideas that I wanted more of after I first read them: mystic politics, androgynous culture, Ekumenical worlds, the winter weather and technology on Winter, et cetera. In chapter 11, the mystic politics are explored in greater depth. Throughout the novel, the androgynous culture is slowly explained more and more. The chapters where they cross the ice allow weather and technology to be discussed naturally. And at the end, some ways the Ekumenical worlds work are mentioned. This book deeply explores a few ideas—even going so far as to courageously criticize blind patriotism during the heart of the cold war. Instead of the usual science fiction trick of pushing a single idea to a logical extreme before examining it, this is more of an exploration of a few ideas—she calls it a "thought experiment" in her 1976 intro—and it's a great tactic for a speculative fiction novel. She pulls it off here by hanging philosophical exploration on the plot hooks of an exciting adventure tale.

8. The characters are well-realized. They're not terribly complex, but their alieness from each other helps what complexity they do have to become important. Argaven is somewhat complex, and his characteristics become important to the plot itself because of his position of power. Estraven and Ai are interesting, though Ai is somewhat passive as a person and both are reserved. They are well understood by the end, and they make sense—they don't do something that doesn't seem like them.

9. In all, what I'm trying to say is that this is good writing with a variety of experimental techniques, good storytelling with a variety of experimental structures, and a deep examination of some interesting ideas. It's unusual in all the good ways, and she pulls it off. This was a good read. Not magnificent, but solid with quality. I think the first three or four chapters were a little rough in how the world was introduced, but it all pays off by the end. And O how happy am I that she didn't start the novel with the murder. Of the last four speculative fiction novels I bought, three start with a murder. This is annoying because I want variety as a reader. Le Guin gives that to me here.