Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
One of the biggest problems with republishing older novels is their length. In the 1960's, when Ursula K. Le Guin's first three novels were published, it was completely unremarkable to publish a novel of 50-60,000 words as a standalone book. However, as the economics of the publishing industry has shifted toward ever-longer volumes, with 120,000 words increasingly being considered the minimum (other than YA and light novels), the classics of science fiction and fantasy have increasingly become harder sells to reprint. One solution for introducing them to a new generation of readers has been to combine two or more of an author's shorter novels into a single volume.
This particular approach has proved particularly apt for these three novels. They are Le Guin's first three published novels, and while they are generally considered to be part of her Hainish Ekumen cycle, they are materially different from the works that follow. Although we see mentions of familiar elements such as the ansible and the Cetian numerals, the polity is referred to as the League of All Worlds rather than the Ekumen. As a result, some critics have suggested that they should be regarded as being set earlier in the internal chronology of the 'verse. However, given some of the internal evidence of the various books, this is a debatable conclusion.
Rocannon's World, the first novel in this collection, was also the very first novel that Ursula K. Le Guin published. It is an expansion of her short story "Dowry of the Angyar," which was first published in Amazing Stories in 1964. That story was a science-fictional take on the story found in folklore throughout the world, of an ordinary mortal who has what seems to be an brief encounter with mysterious beings, and returns home to find that decades or centuries have passed, and no one recognizes him. Time dilation due to Lorentz contraction at speeds approaching that of light was an obvious SFnal explanation for the weird distortion of time that is often associated with encounters with the realms of faerie.
In Le Guin's story, Semly, a high lady of the human-like Liuar, set forth to retrieve a heirloom necklace of her people, believing it would restore their luck. She traveled to the underground dwellings of the Gdemiar, who in many ways fill the role of dwarves rather than elves, and is transported to a distant world where it is on display as a museum piece. She reclaims it and returns, but the Gdemiar failed to warn her that the journey she perceived as only a few day's travel would take nine years, because they would be traveling at relativistic speeds and spend much of the journey in cryo-suspension. As a result, she comes home to discover her husband dead and her maid an old woman.
However, the real story of this novel starts with a momentary encounter in the museum, when the Hainish scientist Rocannon encounters Semly and becomes curious about her world and her people. So curious that he decides to investigate.
The rest of the story is Rocannon's adventures on the second planet of Fomalhaut (Alpha Piscis Austrinus), which is now known to be a blue giant and surrounded by a debris disk that makes it unlikely to have any planets with a shirtsleeve environment. However, at the time the novel was written, it was generally common to set extrasolar science fiction stories on planets of stars that would be recognized by name, to help ground readers in the story.
In many ways it reads very much like heroic fantasy recast on another world with a scientific rationale based in the Ancient Astronaut theory. The various humanoid peoples are all the descendants of Hainish settlers, and the "magic" is either incompletely understood technology or psionic abilities. In addition to the two species of humanoids, each divided into two subspecies (the "fairies" by habitat into "elves" and "dwarves," and the human-analogs into lords and midmen), there are also several other species that Rocannon discovers in the course of his quest. The Winged Ones are particularly disturbing, since they are so beautiful that they are reminiscent of angels, yet their power of flight has come at the expense of intelligence -- or they are not of Hainish stock and never were truly sapient, but instead are profound mimics of humanity.
The object of Rocannon's quest turns out to be spaceships hidden on this backwater world by the renegade world of Faraday. They are built upon the same principle as the ansible that enables instantaneous communications between star systems, but they have one very interesting twist -- the processes by which they fly between stars is incompatible with life. As a result, their pilots are fundamentally kamikazes, albeit highly trained in mathematics.
In this novel we see the seeds of the next two novels, in the reference to an enemy that the League of All Worlds fears and is preparing to defend against. However, it appears that the Faradayans had more ambitious plans than mere defense for their spaceships, which is why it is so essential that they be destroyed before they can be used.
However, this destruction comes at a very personal cost to the protagonist, and it's not his life. In fact, one can make a good argument that the latter sort of ending is in some ways too easy, perhaps because many beginning authors end their stories with their characters dying heroically to save their worlds. However, from an older and wiser perspective, one can make a very good argument that it can actually be harder to lose something dear to oneself and then have to go on living one's natural lifespan within the diminished horizons that result from that sacrifice.
The second novel in this omnibus, Planet of Exile, was one I found in the school library, not long after I'd read Left Hand of Darkness. I recognized the concept of the Cultural Embargo from that novel, but noticed that it was being implemented in a very different manner. There, the protagonist brought only an ansible and his own biological strangeness as First Envoy as evidence that he was indeed from another world, and only after the people of Gethen accepted his overture could more technology be revealed. In this novel, the Cultural Embargo is more like the Prime Directive in the Star Trek 'verse: the indigenous people of this world are not to be exposed to technologies or cultural elements outside their normal lives in order to avoid disrupting their cultural development.
In addition to the non-interference principle, there's a certain issue of secrecy: the people of the Alterra came to this world fleeing a mysterious conqueror who shattered the League of All Worlds, crushing resistance with almost casual ease. For these people, this world is a bolthole, some place to preserve a saving remnant of the culture of the League of All Worlds and the ideals it represents. As a result, it stands to reason that they would want to alter the culture of the indigenous peoples of this world as little as possible.
However, we learn this only gradually, and at first through the eyes of Rolery, one of the indigenous people. Like so many of Le Guin's characters, she's the odd one out. Her world has an unusually long year, so long that it equals sixty terrestrial years (perhaps an inspiration for Westeros?). As a result, it is normal for her people to reproduce only during spring and fall: spring so that its children will come to adulthood during summer and be able to prepare for winter, and fall so that its children will grow up during the long winter and come of age in time to start the cycle anew. Rolery was conceived out of season, in the midst of summer, which means that she was too young to have fall children, but will be too old when it comes time to have spring children.
Her people are aware of the aliens who have settled on their world, but view them with suspicion, unsurprising for a tribal people on a world where existence is precarious, where deviations from tradition could easily condemn an entire tribe to starvation. For the most part, her people mind their own business and avoid the offworlders, but this year will be different.
From time immemorial, it was simply understood that war was not made among the tribes as they were preparing their Winter Cities for the long period of immurement within their walls. However, this year one tribe, the Gaal, are breaking that tradition and attacking the other tribes in wars of extermination.
Re-reading this novel with several decades of experience studying history and the art of narration, I'm realizing that this element is one of the weakest parts of the book. There is no clear reason for the Gaal to suddenly break tradition and start attacking their neighbors. Are they afraid that the next spring may be a scant one, and they decide to thin the competition for resources? Have they suddenly been taken over by a charismatic and ambitious leader, a Caesar or a Shaka Zulu? Are they perhaps being incited to attack by some outside force, even agents of the mysterious aliens whom the people of Alterra fled? Only the sheer ferocity of the Gaal attacks and the urgency they create serve to paper over the lack of any comprehensible motivation on their part.
One thing is certain: their menace is what drives Rolery's people and the Alterrans together to form a united front against the threat that would otherwise defeat them in detail. For the first time Rolery's people are exposed to various Galactic technologies, even things as basic as wheels, which they had never used previously (perhaps since, being nomadic, they had no roads on which to use them, and perhaps not even any beasts sufficiently large to pull carts). And then comes the greatest revelation: over the generations since they came here, the Alterrans have been slowly adapting to the biochemistry of this world, no longer needing the supplementary enzymes to digest native foods, but at the same time no longer invulnerable to native disease germs. Furthermore, it may well be possible for Alteran and indigene to have children together, for the two peoples to become one, united in the face of the real enemy on this world, the brutal winter that lasts fifteen terrestrial years.
The third and final novel of this omnibus, City of Illusions, is in many ways a direct sequel to World of Exile, dealing as it does with the mysterious enemy that the people of Alterra fled. This is a novel that I read during a very dark period of my life, and there was something about the story of a character who's having to pull himself back together from a complete mind-wipe that inspired me to keep going at a time when it seemed that everything was stacked against me.
It begins with a man whose mind is an utter blank, to whom light is a tantalizing reminder of something that he has lost. He is discovered in the garden of a house in the woods, where a number of people live their quiet lives.
However, those lives are also precarious ones, as we see in their reactions to the peculiarity of his eyes. Is this a sign that he is one of the mysterious Shing, the Enemy who leveled the old cities of a world now lost save in memory, and who will use their weapons again any time Earthlings become too ambitious and create too large a community? Or is he one of their victims, mind-wiped and dumped because the Shing do not kill?
In the end, the people of Zove's House decide to take this man in and nurse him back to health and functionality. They name him Falk, which in their language means "sallow," for his pale skin and yellow eyes. He relearns speech and the other skills of a human being, including the knowledge of the Old Canon, which is clearly the Tao Te Ching, the central philosophical text of Taoism. He also learns about the Shing and their ability to lie mind to mind, something that had previously been thought impossible, by which they infiltrated and destroyed the League of All Worlds. Although Falk finds love, or at least companionship, with Parth, he finds that he cannot quell the restlessness, the need to know the truth about his background.
After a sad parting, Falk sets out to find the city of Es Toch, where the Shing are supposed to be based. After his pleasant experiences at Zove's House, he is quite unprepared for the place he comes to call the House of Pain, from which he escapes without several of the things he was given for the journey, including his precious book of the Old Canon. However, he then encounters the Listener, who gives him advice and a skimmer, a one-person vehicle which allows him to travel more quickly across the ruined landscape, filled with hints and echoes of the civilization that once occupied a land that we the readers slowly come to recognize as North America. Some of the names are obvious, such as the King of Kansas, who gives him another copy of the Old Canon of Man, but others are worn down enough that only our present-day knowledge allows us to recognize them as once having been Illinois and Missouri.
Falk comes very close to death when he is captured by a people who have reverted to a way of life very similar to that of the Sioux and other Plains peoples. Although they are hunting herds of feral cattle rather than American bison, their way of life is easily recognized by anyone who grew up on Westerns, which were far more popular in the 1960's, but continue to be part of the American lengendarium, the romanticized Story of the Frontier.
Falk is rescued by a woman who was earlier taken captive, and who was able to win herself a place among these harsh people through her medical skills. She convinces them that Falk's eyes are injured and require time to heal, and thus buys both of them time to devise some way to escape, However, as they come to Es Toch, she is revealed to be one of their agents, sent to retrieve him.
It seems there's a problem: he was on a spaceship from a distant world, and the only crew member they have can't tell them the planet from which they came from. Young Orry hasn't been initiated into certain secrets, and knows his homeworld only as Werel, "the world." And he knows Falk as Agad Ramarren, the ship's navigator, a skilled mathematician. The Shing need Falk restored to his old self so that he can tell them the way back to their world.
And by the way, the Shing were never the Enemy. Rather, humanity was its own worst enemy, tearing apart the former civilization in a madness of civil war. The people of Es Toch were their saviors, putting a stop to the senseless destruction and stabilizing things so that humanity can find its way back up to civilization.
Or so they tell Falk. He has plenty of reason to be suspicious of Ken Kenyek and Abundibot (was this character's name meant to be parsed as "abundance robot"?) and the various other leaders, whom he first sees through a sort of videoconferencing system. For starters, their speaking voices sound as if they're not accustomed to speaking aloud, which suggests they speak mostly mind to mind. And there's the way that Abundibot keeps telling him far-fetched things, like how the entire city of Es Toch can be disassembled and relocated somewhere else on Earth, as if he enjoys telling whoppers for the fun of it.
But there's no definite piece of evidence Falk can point at to tell himself that they are indeed lying, that if he agrees to having his old memories restored at the loss of the last six years of his life, he will not be putting his old home in danger of conquest, of the loss of free humanity's last bolthole, the last defense against the ultimate tyranny. But he has one hope -- that he may somehow be able to retain Falk while becoming Ramarren once again. In order to do so, he give Orry one command: when he returns, to tell him to read the first page of the book. By that he means the first page of the book of the Old Canon of Man, the Tao Te Ching, the paradox of "The Way that can be walked is not the True Way. The Way that can be named is not the True Way."
Even when he succeeds in this, becoming a man of two minds, Falk and Ramarren, he still is assailed with doubts about these people who style themselves the Lords of the Earth, but are called the Shing elsewhere. What is truth, and what is lie? Even their principle of Respect for Life: is it a true moral bedrock that keeps them from fighting among themselves, or is it just a convenient justification for using non-lethal methods to subjugate humanity, to spare the body while killing the spirit?
And then our protagonist is taken to the promised spaceship, with which he is to return to the world of his birth, and discovers that its controls use a numbering system and mathematics completely alien to the Cetian mathematics that had become universal in the League of All Worlds, in which he had been trained in navigation. It is the single most compelling evidence that these Lords of the Earth are indeed the mysterious Enemy from a distant part of the galaxy, beyond the Hyades, who alone can lie in mindspeech and conquered the League of All Worlds by the power of the Lie.
In the end he decides to take Orry and Ken Kenyek home with him, and let his own people judge their three points of view and determine who is the most trustworthy, the most believable. It's an ending that fairly begs for a sequel, but Ursula K. Le Guin never wrote anything more about the Shing and humanity's efforts to recover their freedom. Her next Hainish novel was The Left Hand of Darkness, which contains some vague references to the "Age of the Enemy," which have been interpreted to refer to the Shing by some critics. However, some subsequent Hainish novels, particularly The Telling, are clearly set in the Ekumen rather than the League of All Worlds, but describe Terran society in a way that is clearly close to the present, rather than something that developed from the Earth we see in City of Illusion, with half-remembered and much elided place-names. So it's also possible that City of Illusion is in fact the last of the novels in terms of internal chronology, and the Ekumen became the League of All Wolds, or both terms were used at various, and possibly overlapping, times.
However, Ursula K. Le Guin was never a world-builder in the style of JRR Tolkien or CJ Cherryh, constructing precise chronologies into which everything fits neatly (and in the case of Tolkien, extensive etymologies of the development of all the personal and place names in multiple languages). Ms. Le Guin was first and foremost a teller of stories, and while she made each story internally consistent, she was quite content to permit contradictions between novels if something she'd established in one of her earlier works would prove a detriment to a subsequent one. And in some ways, it may be just as well. I've seen all too many fictional 'verses in which efforts to tie everything together too perfectly actually ended up diminishing the power of the story being told, and even making the fictional world seem smaller and more flimsy. Sometimes it's good to leave room for fans to debate and develop their own theories about the gaps.
Table of Contents
- Rocannon's World
- World of Exile
- City of Illusion
Buy Worlds of Exile and illusion from Amazon.com
Review posted April 12, 2012.
