What Makes This Book So Great (40 page)

The book’s attitude towards work, scholarship and creative work, is almost religious. I said “nuns” just now, and that applies here too—it is as if the nun’s religious sacrifice of sexuality and family and personal love, on the altar of God’s worship, is replaced by an expectation of that on the altar of scholarship. This is very weird because of the inclusion of sex. Even if you leave that out, these days nobody expects that level of dedication. These days people frame work entirely in terms of money and not at all in terms of vocation. Annie, of course, sees it financially, it’s all about (a man) earning a living to support a family. Work can be either, or any mixture. And of course, coming back to sex, there is the conversation with Miss de Vine in which she says that marriage can be a job for some women, that you can dedicate yourself to a partner the way you would to a fine passage of prose. We do not see any men doing this for their wives in the novel, the best we see is men not expecting their wives to do this for them.

The emotional heart of the book is Harriet’s re-examination of her life and her work. For five years (and two novels) she has been refusing Lord Peter’s proposals of marriage. Now she begins to consider them, and at last comes to see that they could have a marriage that would be a partnership, not a job. Before that she has to regain her self-respect, to have a place to stand and go on from. Harriet’s conclusion is by no means assured, and the emotional trajectory of the book is extremely well done. The arguments for a marriage of equals, as opposed to the social expectation, have never been done better—we even see the disadvantage from the man’s point of view: “someone who would try to manage me.” Manipulation was the woman’s trick, when the man had all the power, but having all the power and being manipulated wasn’t much fun either.

There used to be a question of “what are women good for” and
Gaudy Night
would seem to give the answer that they are good for any number of things, Mrs. Goodwin and Phoebe Tucker as well as Miss Lydgate or Miss Hillyard—and that they are bad for them too, Annie and Miss Hillyard and Miss de Vine’s lack of compassion. Harriet’s choice is her own, and the best thing about it is that it pleases her. (Incidentally, who did Sayers imagine was the audience for this erudite detective story, that could read Latin subjunctives and know all about Religio Medici? It’s about Oxford dons, did she think they were the audience too? Or did she think, quite rightly, that the audience could look things up or let them go over their heads?)

MARCH 30, 2010

102.
Three short Hainish novels: Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile
and
City of Illusions

Rocannon’s World
and
Planet of Exile
were published in 1966, and
City of Illusions
in 1967. They’re all available in one volume as
Worlds of Exile and Illusion
and I wish I owned it because the cover on my ratty old copy of
City of Illusions
was getting me some odd looks on the metro.

These books are all early works, all very short, and all set in the same universe—this is also the universe of
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Four Ways to Forgiveness
and some other stories. Even when I was younger and had a passion for re-reading things in internal chronological order, I realised that reading the Hainish books this way wasn’t very productive. What all the books have in common is some past history and some technology, there isn’t an evolving arc of events the way there is, for instance, in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe. Later books contradict earlier ones, late stories have people from planets that were contacted centuries apart working together and so on. The chronology between books written decades apart is best left unexamined. These three books, however, go together very well.

Rocannon’s World
is a story of an anthropologist stranded on a primitive planet.
Planet of Exile
is about a human colony abandoned on an alien planet.
City of Illusions
is about an alien lost on a far-future Earth. They are all about isolation and culture, and the different things people can choose to do when cut off from their own culture and immersed in another. They’re all about exile and identity and coping with being cut off. It’s possible to see them all as dry runs for
The Left Hand of Darkness
.

Planet of Exile
is far and away my favourite of these three, I read it all the time and know it well. I hadn’t read either of the other two for ages. I found them coming back to me as I read them. It’s a fundamentally different experience of re-reading.

Rocannon’s World
begins with the short story “Semley’s Necklace,” a story that is science fiction and fantasy at the same time. Semley is a beautiful princess questing for a necklace made by and stolen by the dwarves. She goes into their underground kingdom, they take her to a strange place, she returns with the necklace to find that many years have passed, the baby she left is a grown woman, and the husband she hoped to please is dead. At the same time, she’s an alien, the dwarves are another race of aliens, the strange place is on another planet and she lost the years by traveling at light speed. The story gains its power because we can see all this simultaneously as true. It’s amazing and resonant.

The rest of the novel can’t maintain this double level at the same pitch. We do see Rocannon both as an alien anthropologist and as an Odin figure, but it feels more forced. It’s also hard to like Rocannon, he’s too typical of the SF anthropologist hero, well equipped and resourceful, but too questioning of himself and the world to get away with that. I get the feeling that the story was pushing in the “what these people need is a honky” direction, in which Rocannon becomes a better alien than the aliens while saving their world and his, but Le Guin already right at the beginning of her career was pushing uphill against the weight of story.

One notably neat thing here is the overt notice of the colonialism of the human colonisers, collecting taxes from the aliens and raising their tech level without trying to understand them. This isn’t the way we see the League of Worlds behaving later, but that Rocannon sees something wrong in it and stops it while he does his survey is something. Talking about not the way we see it later, there are more outright aliens here on Fomalhaut II than in all the rest of Hainish space put together. I seem to remember a mention later that the aliens are actually all genetically engineered humans like the rest of the Hainish variants, but they really don’t feel like it.

The reason I like
Planet of Exile
so much is because it gives us the human and the alien points of view, and they’re both given dignity and neither of them is privileged. Like
Rocannon’s World
it has flashes of mythic resonance, unlike
Rocannon’s World
they are myths in their own context and not in ours. It’s also the Greenland colony in space—and in all of SF, which has done so many colonial worlds, I can’t think of another example of this. Space colonies in SF are always America, except for
Planet of Exile,
which is the Vikings in Greenland, waiting for another ship to come from home and slowly losing their tech. The other reason I like it is because I love the long year. The planet has a sixty-year-long year, with children born in cohorts in spring and autumn. I love the society of nomads who build a winter city and the Alterrans clinging to the remnants of their civilization. I like the love story. It’s a stark simple story, beautifully told, barely long enough to be a novel in 1966, hardly a couple of hours’ read. I’d be quite happy if
Planet of Exile
were a modern novel and four hundred pages long, because while this is the story, the essence, the important bit, I’d love to know more.

The adaptation of the humans to the alien norm so that they might be able to interbreed may not be biologically realistic, but it’s done very well, and I don’t care anyway. It doesn’t have the problem Butler thought she had with
Survivor
on intermarriage, because for one thing it took hundreds of years, and for another at the time Le Guin was writing that’s what they thought did happen to the Greenland colony. Also, while it’s potentially a happy ending for Rolery, it isn’t unambiguously positive. Le Guin does have some of the humans horrified at the thought of assimilation—“Jacob Agat’s grandchildren will be banging two rocks together.”

I had forgotten, before this re-read of
City of Illusions,
that Falk, the lost alien wandering about on Earth generations after the conquest by the Shing, came from the planet of Exile and was a descendant of Jacob and Rolery. I’d also forgotten that it was called Werel, as that name isn’t used there, and therefore horrified to realise that this is also one of the planets in
Four Ways to Forgiveness
. I don’t want it to be! Banging rocks together would have been better.
*

City of Illusions
is the story of a man questing for himself and his context. Falk is left mindless, without memory, and alone in the forest because the Shing don’t like outright killing people. He comes to a peaceful human settlement where he is cared for and becomes a person, a different person from who he was before. He travels west across what we recognise as a far-future America to come to the alien city of Es Toch and get back his memory and lose his self. Most of the book is about his journey, and is like the journey in
Rocannon’s World,
one picaresque encounter after another. When he gets his mind back it becomes a much more interesting book, because then he has a dilemma rather than a quest. But it also becomes odd, because when Falk becomes Romarran he isn’t the character you’ve been following across the continent for ages, he’s someone different with Falk at the back of his head. I didn’t like
City of Illusions
as a teenager—and yet I kept reading it, because I liked the rest of Le Guin so much, I kept thinking there was something I wasn’t getting. Either I’m still not old enough for it, or it’s mistimed somehow.

With the Shing, with their mindlying and hypocritical reverence for the outward forms of life, we have another take on colonialism. In
Rocannon’s World
we have a coloniser noticing some problems with the system. In
Planet of Exile
we have the Greenland colony paradigm. Here we have Earth colonised and ruled for its own good and by arbitrary and alien moral standards and not liking it at all. We also potentially have a colony coming back to free the mother world. These three books are the books of the Enemy. In
Rocannon’s World,
the League is preparing for the Enemy to arrive, and Rocannon thinks that the preparation itself is shaping the League badly. He also wonders whether the FTL bombers and ansible communications might be as useless as the swords of Hallan against the Enemy when they come. The enemy he faces and defeats are human rebels. But the League is being formed as a League of defence against this nameless, faceless, powerful and inevitable Enemy. In
Planet of Exile
the Enemy may or may not be the reason why communication has been cut off. The few humans have no idea what is happening in the wider universe. In
City of Illusions
the Enemy Shing have taken Earth, and possibly the rest of the universe, but we don’t know about that. Romarran/Falk plans to get home before they know where his planet is and organise a force to free Earth.

In the later books set in this universe, we don’t hear much about the Enemy.
The Dispossessed
is set much earlier, when very few worlds have been contacted and the ansible that allows them to be a League is only just being invented. (In a nifty connection, which must have been done backwards, in these books we hear every so often about Cetian mathematics, so much more advanced than Earth mathematics.)
The Left Hand of Darkness
and most of the other stories are set much later, when the Age of the Enemy is history, and history we don’t hear anything about. I suspect Le Guin thought better of the Enemy and the Cold War mind-set they engender, or perhaps when she thought more about interstellar war she just didn’t want to go there.

These are very early books—are they worth reading? They’re not where I’d suggest starting with Le Guin—
The Left Hand of Darkness
and
The Dispossessed
and
A Wizard of Earthsea
are deservedly classics, up there with the best the field has ever produced. But if you already like Le Guin, then yes. She’s always worth reading. I love
Planet of Exile
and always have, and the other two are travelogues across alien landscapes lit with flashes of brilliance.

APRIL 1, 2010

103.
On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison’s
The Last Dangerous Visions

I suppose everyone knows the history of this volume. Harlan Ellison edited two brilliant anthologies,
Dangerous Visions
(1967) and
Again, Dangerous Visions
(1972).
The Last Dangerous Visions
was announced, and came out over budget and ten years late, and only then because Roger Elwood got on board to help Ellison with the heavy lifting. I’m not going to touch the question of whether Elwood’s name should have appeared in the same size print as Ellison’s on the cover—though it’s a question that can still get fans buzzing whenever there’s a new edition.

The important thing is the stories.

The first time I read the book I was disappointed. I don’t think this was avoidable. After all the buildup and all the controversy, after the amazing success of the earlier books, I was expecting something that no book could possibly have fulfilled. “Visionary” proclaimed the cover, and even more provocatively, “We have seen the future!” Well, it wasn’t visionary and they certainly hadn’t seen the future. But we don’t condemn science fiction for not being prediction—and it’s just as well.