#LoveHain wrap-up

NASA image of Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672 from Hubble

At the urging of a few bloggers (particularly Lory and Hilary – thank you!) I was prevailed upon to initiate all through 2023 #LoveHain, a year-long readalong of all the works associated with Ursula K Le Guin’s so-called Hainish Cycle or Ekumen series – although participants could opt in and out as they wished.

I found that if I included The Eye of the Heron (which Le Guin was ambivalent about identifying as a Hainish novel) then eight novels and four story collections with relevant pieces would, at the rate of one a month, take readers through a whole year, starting five years after her  death, aged 88, on 22nd January 2018.

So here we are, a year later, looking back at the journey, imagining we’ve travelled at almost light speed in a NAFAL ship or even a Churten vessel among the many planets of the Ekumen,¹ communicating instantly across light years by means of the device called the ansible. What have we experienced and what, if anything, have we learnt?

The fiery arc: #LoveHain

© C A Lovegrove

The Birthday of the World
by Ursula K Le Guin.
Orion Publishing Group, 2004 (2002).

“Create difference—establish strangeness—then let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap.” — Ursula K Le Guin on writing SF, from the Foreword.

Difference, strangeness, humanity – they’re all here. For example: Gethen, Seggri, O, Eleven-Soro, Werel – a catalogue of names, but to what do they refer? What is meant by a world having a birthday? And what and where are the paradises that are lost?

Le Guin’s collection The Birthday of the World consists of eight pieces of speculative fiction, six of which fit within her Hainish universe. The two which don’t consist of a short story portraying the effects of outside pressures on an otherwise stable theocracy, and a novella-length narrative concerning a troubled multi-generational starship.

Mostly written in the last decade of the 20th century, these tales run counter to the stereotypical space operas familiar then from many SF novels, films and comics: deeply psychological, profoundly disturbing, for all that they mostly concern aliens Le Guin’s offerings explore what it means to be human and how individuals might struggle to fit into widely differing societies.

All knowledge is local: #Love Hain

Nebula in the Orion constellation

Four Ways to Forgiveness
by Ursula K Le Guin.
Vista, 1997 (1995).

“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.” — ‘A Man of the People.’

Four interlinked novellas – to which are added detailed, almost encyclopaedic, notes indicating the degree of worldbuilding that went into the background of these stories – make up this contribution to Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle of speculative narratives.

Focusing on the neighbouring planets of Werel and Yeowe, both about to be newly accepted into the Ekumen family of inhabited worlds, this collection draws our attention not to broad brush strokes of the planets’ history but to the impact tumultuous movements and events have on the lives, relationships and imaginations of certain individuals caught up in social change.

As always, and for all that her stories are set in future times and distant worlds, her alien characters are faced with the same dilemmas, challenges and decisions as humans on our world have always faced, the same kinds which we’re facing now and which we’ll continue to face in the foreseeable years to come.

Tales within tales: #LoveHain

Enhanced-colour view of Mercury from images taken by the Messenger spacecraft (NASA photo)

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories by Ursula K Le Guin.
Harper Perennial, 2005 (1994).

Ursula Le Guin is best known for her fantasy and her science fiction writings; the short stories in this 1994 collection, while firmly in the SF genre, also demonstrate her ability to compose in various tones, from light to dark, from gentle humour to philosophical musings.

Originally published in various periodicals between 1983 and 1994, the narratives are clearly placed in context by an excellent introduction in which she not only discusses the tales but also mounts a spirited defence of SF as a genre, a defence which a score and more years on may be less urgent though no less valid or effective.

She explains that she experiments with SF by using the form to explore character and human relationships, rather than exploring the ‘scientism’ and elitist technocracies that much traditional ‘hard’ SF was associated with and which put off the unconverted. She also denies that SF (and by extension, I suspect, fantasy) is necessarily escapist; instead, by exploring human characteristics, even or especially in alien humanoids, she throws light on our own humanity, humaneness, human-ness; she focuses on the potential strengths of SF, most particularly on a quality that is not always attached to this genre: beauty.

Quantity *and* quality: #LoveHain

A compendium edition of two short story collections by Ursula Le Guin

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
by Ursula K Le Guin,
in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters & The Compass Rose,
Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2010.  

“Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.

Obviously my interest is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all that. We all have forests in the mind.”

— from Le Guin’s introduction to ‘Vaster than empires and more slow’

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is a collection of seventeen stories first published around half a century ago. Many formed the springboard to later novels: for example ‘The Word of Unbinding’ and ‘The Rule of Names’ led to the creation of Earthsea.

‘Semley’s Necklace’ – originally ‘The Dowry of the Angyar’ – in 1964 became the Prologue for the Hainish novel Rocannon’s World, and ‘Winter’s King’ relates to The Left Hand of Darkness, while ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is set on the planet Urras in The Dispossessed.

Rather than a detailed catalogue of all seventeen pieces this review’s focus will be on a few outstanding items and themes, ending with a closer look at the four Hainish works – namely ‘Semley’s Necklace’, ‘Winter’s King’, ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’, and ‘The Day Before the Revolution’. I hope this will give a flavour of not only Le Guin’s breadth in writing genre pieces but also her imagination, in terms both of quantity as well as quality.

Footsteps on the air: #LoveHain

Mount Hood reflected in Mirror Lake, Oregon.

The Telling by Ursula K Le Guin.
Harcourt, Inc., 2000.

Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.

The Telling

So many of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, describing life on far-flung planets in our far distant future, concern journeys; often they are physical journeys, but concomitant with these there are the personal journeys taken by the protagonist.

So it is with her last novel in the series: our interstellar voyager Sutty first travels across a future Earth largely under the sway of a monolithic regime dedicated to Unism, a religious belief which brooks no dissent, political or otherwise.

After losing her lover she becomes a Hainish-trained Ekumen observer based on a distant planet called Aka, but even there she has to voyage some more in order to find a disappearing culture, and maybe in the process discover herself.

#LoveHain: The Telling

The bookmark is a postcard of Portland, Oregon, with Mt Hood in the background

It’s the last Friday of this month and time again for the discussion post for the latest (and indeed the last) of Ursula Le Guin‘s Hainish novels in our #LoveHain thread.

The Telling was a late entry in the series of long fictions about what started as the League of All Worlds and then became the Ekumen. Published in 2000 a quarter of a century after the previous ‘Hainish’ novel (The Dispossessed in 1974) it signified both a departure from and a return to certain themes examined in its predecessors.

As ever your comments are invited, if and when you want to add them. Feel free to respond to or ignore the questions – they’re only there as stimuli, should you need them! My own review will then be appearing sometime early in September.

A boundless self: #LoveHain

Giambattista Piranesi, Carcere XIV (‘The Gothic Arch’)

The Eye of the Heron
by Ursula K Le Guin.
Starscape Books / Tom Doherty Associates, 2003 (1978).

‘Lev felt the strength of his friends and the whole community, supporting and upholding. It was as if he were not Lev alone, but Lev times a thousand—himself, but himself immensely increased, enlarged, a boundless self mingled with all the other selves, set free, as no man alone could ever be free.’ — Chapter 8.

Some years in the future the inhabitants of a planet circling another sun have legends about their predecessors’ time on an Earth where they were no longer wanted. In Victoria’s only city the population is largely descended from Hispanic criminals, shipped on a one-way trip to this designated prison colony to manage themselves as best they can. In this urban environment they have established a strict hierarcharchical system, in contrast to the other group sent to Victoria.

These others are descendants of pacifist anarchists, some of Earth’s People of Peace whose numbers had swollen in size during their Long March from Moskva to Lisboa and across the sea to Canamerica where, seen as a disturbing societal influence, certain key figures were also sent offworld as permanent exiles. Retaining their non-hierachical beliefs the enforced settlers have settled in a loose community centred on Shantih Town, where they farm the land near the City.

It’s just a matter of time before the two groups’ diametric philosophies – pacifist anarchism versus despotic oligarchy – threaten to come into open conflict; it only requires a flashpoint.

#LoveHain: The Eye of the Heron

Coriolis space station, Elite video game for BBC Micro 1984

(By a slip of the thumb I seem to have scheduled this to be published a day earlier than intended, the last Friday of the month. Blame some kind of brainfog, but I hope it won’t spoil the fun…)

Because Ursula Le Guin wrote that her 1978 speculative short novel The Eye of the Heron “may or may not be set in the Hainish universe; it really doesn’t matter,” I feel some faint justification in erring on the side of the yea-sayers by assuming that it really is in that universe, even if there’s no mention of Hain, the Ekumen or any other obvious marker!

In any case, the novella’s themes easily slot in with many of the themes Le Guin explored in some of her designated Hainish novels.

As before during this #LoveHain readalong I shall pose three general questions to stimulate discussion, if imdeed such stimulation is needed! Then I shall be reminding readers of the next title to be considered towards the end of next month.

Unbuilding walls: #LoveHain

Mercury in true colour, photographed by Messenger in 2008.

The Dispossessed.
An ambiguous utopia
by Ursula Le Guin.
SF Masterworks,
Gollancz, 1999 (1974).

“To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.” — Laia Asieo Odo

Circling the star Tau Ceti are two worlds, Urras and Anarres, the latter apparently the satellite of the former, unless the pair form a double planet system, are indeed binary planets. In any case, each appears as a moon in the other’s sky.

Le Guin’s novel opens on Anarres as a man enters within the encircling wall of a compound, a 60-acre site called the Port of Anarres. ‘Like all walls,’ we’re told, ‘it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.’ The man, Shevek, enters within the enclosing wall in order to escape his world by travelling by spaceship to Urras. Will he be leaving his home planet forever, or will he eventually return? Why is he departing from his place of birth, and what reasons might he have for coming home?

As we learn about Shevek and his associates, moving between worlds and backwards and forwards in time, we are also learning about ideas and systems, about ambiguity and ambivalence, about utopias and dystopias.

#Love Hain: The Dispossessed

The far side of the moon (NASA photo)

It’s the last Friday of the month and time for another discussion post in our readalong of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels in my wittily entitled #LoveHain event.

This month we consider The Dispossessed, Le Guin’s magnificent 1974 exploration of contrasting political systems on two planets in the tau Ceti system, Annares and Urras.

But of course there’s more to The Dispossessed than polemic. The following three questions are designed to stimulate a conversation but feel free to expound on whatever aspects that struck you when reading it.

Paradise lost: #LoveHain

Repost of a review from 2017

The Word for World is Forest
by Ursula K Le Guin.
Introduction by Ken MacLeod.
SF Masterworks: Gollancz 2014, (1972/6)

A novella I’ve had on my shelves for a couple of years, The Word for World is Forest is one that I was reluctant to begin, having understood that it was regarded as too polemical to be pure fiction. Completed in the aftermath of the terrible Vietnam war, it was an expression of controlled rage against wanton killing, defoliation, poisoning and waste by a triumphalist aggressor against a supposedly inferior culture; Le Guin’s motivation was commendable but I’d had doubts sown over whether there was any edification to be had.

Having read it I can see the critical reservations all too clearly, but I can also appreciate its merits: a forward-moving narrative, a handful of clearly observed characters whose thought processes we observe, a sense of hope in amongst the more pessimistic aspects, imaginative touches that characterise both the genre and the universe that Le Guin has created in her Hainish Cycle. I can say that, yes, I was edified by the storyline, despite the darkness at its heart.

And here I must reference Joseph Conrad’s 1899 book Heart of Darkness, which later went on to inspire Coppola’s 1979 anti-war film Apocalypse Now. Similar themes run through both novellas — subjugation, maverick officers, exploitation — which I feel may be more than a coincidence. And, as the author makes clear in her own 1976 introduction, her London sojourn in the late 60s and involvement in protest demonstrations reflected (amongst other things) her own environmental concerns, concerns which I think Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ also encapsulated: “They took all the trees | And put them in a tree museum,” she sang, and “you don’t know what you’ve got | Till it’s gone,” adding “They paved paradise | And they put up a parking lot.”

So, is this a Garden of Eden story as the foregoing implies?

#LoveHain: The Word for World is Forest

© C A Lovegrove

The last Friday of the month means it’s time to think about the latest title in the #LoveHain readalong. This is The Word for World is Forest, a novella length Hainish story with definite moral intent.

Published in an anthology in 1972 and only later in book form in 1976, the novella is set on the planet Athshe where logging companies from Terra are devastating the environment and violently disrupting the lives and culture of the forest people.

Below you’ll find the usual three general questions to get the discussion started, and after that there’ll be a reminder of the next Hainish novel up for consideration at the end of June.

A family quarrel: #LoveHain

‘Das Eismeer’ (1823-4) by Caspar David Friedrich

The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula Le Guin.
Orbit Books, 1992 (1969).

Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel. Early on in Le Guin’s famous speculative novel Estraven characterises his home nation as a place of potentially internecine conflict, but it proves to be universally applicable on the planet Gethen as Genly Ai, the Envoy from the Ekumen, discovers, to his cost.

Genly’s task as Envoy is to encourage first the rulers of Karhide, and then of Orgoreyn, to consider joining the Ekumen – a kind of United Nations of many worlds – for mutual benefit; but he has to contend with in-fighting, with claims that it’s all a hoax, even with his own imprisonment.

And then there’s the question of trust: he tries to be as open as possible, to persuade the powers that be of his own peaceable intentions, but as time goes on he doesn’t know who to put his faith in. On a chilly planet justifiably known as Winter he has, paradoxically, to judge whether he’s going from a frying pan into a fire.

#LoveHain: The Left Hand of Darkness

Photo by Dylan Thompson on Pexels.com

It’s the last Friday of the month and time for a consideration of the next title in our read of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish fiction, #LoveHain. We now come to one of her more famous – or possibly more notorious – titles, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

Below will appear the customary three prompts to encourage you to discuss your response to this novel, just in case you don’t know where to start; but the chances are you will have no need of them, this being a very thought-provoking narrative!

Afterwards I’ll remind you of the next novel up for conversation and the date the next three prompts will appear.