Review: Library of America Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two by Ursula K. Le Guin

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1972-2000
Acquired: January 2019
Read: August 2020

Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two: The Word for World Is Forest / Stories / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This volume collects the last of Le Guin's "second phase" Hainish works (1969-74) and then the bulk of it is taken up by the works of her third phase, when she returned to Hain after a fifteen-year absence and with a somewhat different approach (1990-2000). As with volume one, all the novels were rereads, whereas all the short fiction was new to me.

The Word for World Is Forest
I remember liking this novella enough to do a project on it in college (I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do remember it involved me writing documents and such from the world of the novella; it was for an English education class), but on reread, it's definitely the weakest of the phase two and three Hainish books. And even though it's better from a technical standpoint than any of her phase one works, I find it hard to get into. Unusually for Le Guin, there's been no real effort to create sympathetic characters. There's no attempt to make Davidson anything other than a monster even when you're in his head. He's a monster that feels real, sure, but it's exhaustive reading. But Lyubov, who I feel like should have our sympathy, is a largely pathetic figure. Davidson despises him, he despises himself, and, I would argue, the narrative itself despises him. The sections told from the perspective of the Athsheans are hard to glom onto, too. The overall effect is something that seems like it ought to be powerful, but is actually quite clinical; it always feels like you're experiencing events at a remove because no one in the book has feelings congruent to your own.

I know the book came out of a very 1970s sense of anger over Vietnam and the environment, but I think 1990s Le Guin could have done this same material much more powerfully. (And I agree with Harlan Ellison over Le Guin: The Word for World Is Forest is a much better title than Little Green Men!)

Stories
Le Guin returned to the Hainish world in 1990, but didn't write an actual novel until 2000, easing back into the universe. This volume collects all of her third-phase short fiction except for "Coming of Age in Karhide" (collected in volume one). Three of the stories make a little sequence about "churtening," a form of FTL travel being tested by the Ekumen where spaceships, objects, and people can "move" instantaneously across rooms or star systems. (It's technically not movement, the Cetians point out, because movement takes time, and churtening does not.) I liked the idea of "The Shobies' Story" and "Dancing to Ganam" more than the actuality; the premise is that churtening disrupts our experience of reality and stories help us reclaim it. In "The Shobies' Story," the characters rebuild a mutual experience through storytelling, while in "Dancing to Ganam," one character's belief in stories warps the reality he finds. But I feel like the description of the stories I've just given you works better than the actual stories Le Guin wrote. I did like "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," which revisits an old Le Guin theme (the person who returns home after a long relativisitc journey, as seen in Rocannon's World and "Winter's King"), but from a more upbeat angle.

A couple of the other stories are what we might call anthropological stories, where the Ekumen explicate other societies: "The Matter of Seggri" and "Solitude." This made me realize that so many Le Guin stories are told this way-- we don't learn about another society from the inside, but the outside, through the eyes of an external interlocutor (e.g., Rocannon's World, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World Is Forest, the present-day chapters of The Dispossessed, some sections of Five Ways to Forgiveness, The Telling). It might be easy to dismiss this as laziness, or (more charitably) convenience: far easier to have an Ekumenical Observer use exposition to reveal a society than have it unspooled through incluing from the inside. But I don't think that's it. I think Le Guin gets that there's no such thing as a "pure" culture: all cultures are defined by their relationships with other cultures, as she highlights in The Dispossessed, when contact with offworlders gives Urras and Anarres the identity of "Cetian" for the first time. That we can discover another society from the inside is an illusion: the Ekumenical Observers stand in for us the readers,* and it would kind of be a lie to not have them. All this is to say that I enjoyed both stories, though "Matter of Seggri" was pretty tough going at times.

Finally, there are a few stories exploring gender dynamics on O, where people marry in groups of four: "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways," and "Another Story" also fits into this group. They're neat-- I think like a lot of sf, you get that doubling effect. You explore a weird world, but you are also reading a metaphor for your own. I particularly liked how Le Guin explores the way in which the system doesn't work for everyone in "Unchosen Love" and (especially) "Mountain Ways." What system does?

Story Suite: Five Ways to Forgiveness
When I read this before, there were only four ways to forgiveness. The original four stories were published individually 1994-5, and then as a single volume in September 1995. Le Guin published a fifth installment in 1999, but the Library of America publication is the first time it appears with the others. I remembered really liking this book, and thinking it underrated. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness cast a long shadow, and justly so, but they do mean that people don't really discuss the other Hainish novels a whole lot, and Five Ways to Forgiveness is the best of the others. It offers five different stories about the decolonization of the planet Yeowe. Three of them are excellent on their own ("Forgiveness Day," "A Woman's Liberation," and "Old Music and the Slave Women"), and I think "A Man of the People" is pretty good too (I do admit "Betrayals" leaves me a little cold). But like many "story suites," the whole is greater than the parts, giving us a variety of intersecting and complementing perspectives on slavery and colonization. I think a particular strength is the exploration of the "slave mentality," that many of the former slaves cannot get rid of, and also how slavery shapes the enslaver. There is some really hard reading here, especially in "A Man of the People."

"Forgiveness Day" is my favorite; Teyeo is such an excellent character, a man whose rigidity saves him and destroys him at the same time. I also really like the perspective we get on Hain itself in "A Man of the People": most of the Hainish don't care about space anymore, and spend their time leading traditional lives in small communities. The ones who do look outward are "historians": their purpose in connecting to other planets is to chronicle history, of which Hain has so much. It's an interesting way of thinking about interactions with other societies.

Women are the (co-)protagonists of three of the five stories here; I find it fascinating that it took Le Guin almost thirty years to write a Hainish book where a woman's voice dominated. What an example of internalized patriarchy!

The Telling
I know I've read this before, but I had literally no memory of it going in. And I never had a memory of it: not a single passage or incident sparked a memory of having read the book before. I don't know why, because it's quite good. It's a pretty typical late-period Le Guin Hainish story: it's very quiet and mostly about explicating a different society. But it's also tough going in her depiction of religious fundamentalism. Sutty's past life and present day collide at the end, and it's a very devastating ending after what has been a pretty gentle book. Definitely a "lesser" Hainish work... but a lesser Le Guin still towers above the work of many others! I can't believe I forgot it.

I did find it interesting the way this lined up with "Forgiveness Day": both stories feature young woman as Ekumenical Observers who are naive but don't realize how much they don't know, and their arrogance gets themselves and others into trouble; they end up in relationships with rigid men from an oppressive society. There's something vaguely misogynistic about it, actually, which I find quite weird; if it just happened once, you'd think it was just an individual, but twice feels like a commentary.

Also both The Telling and Five Ways depict situations where the oppressive society explored by the Ekumen was actually indirectly caused by the Ekumen. The Werelians in Five Ways developed spaceflight and colonized Yeowe in response to Ekumenical contact; the dictatorship in The Telling is inspired by hearing from Terra on the ansible. It's an interesting critique of a set-up that was fairly benign in Left Hand: even a well-intentioned contact between cultures will change both sides in ways we can't imagine. The Ekumen does not always make things better. (Though, both stories argue, in the long run, things will come out all right.)

* * *

Something else that stuck out to me while reading volume two is that a lot of Le Guin's phase-three Hainish work is very bildungsromanish. The Dispossessed in volume one was arguably the start of this trend, but many of the stories in phase three start in someone's childhood and track them all the way up through adulthood: "Coming of Age in Karhide" (duh!), "Another Story," "Solitude," and three of the stories in Five Ways. Probably others I'm not thinking of. This isn't true of any of the phase-one stories, I don't think. I'm not sure what to think of it, but the bildungsroman is arguably about learning how to fit into society, which has interesting correspondence with how Le Guin's sf is about discovering societies, from without and from within.

The arrangement of these volumes is largely in publication order, except that the short fiction is grouped together in a way that reads well. But I don't get why The Dispossessed (1974) was in volume one while The Word for World Is Forest (1972) is in volume two. Especially as 1) switching the 300-page Dispossessed with the 100-page Word for World would give more even page counts (volume one is over 1,000 pages, and volume two under 800), and 2) putting them the other way around would distribute the two most famous Hainish novels across two different volumes, which is surely good from a sales standpoint.

That said, the arrangement is largely academic to me, because I read the stories in pretty strict publication order, rather than the given order. I think the order here would be fine, but I did really enjoy the publication order. For example, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" makes sense to read in proximity to The Word for World Is Forest, as both are about ecology and colonialism, and "Coming of Age in Karhide" feels very much of a piece with the anthropological coming-of-age stories collected in volume two.

If you want to know the publication order of the Hainish cycle, I've published a page on it here.

Because I'm me, I also spent my time making notes about the internal chronology of the stories-- no easy task, because Le Guin often didn't care! But I think she cared more than she claimed to, and a coherent timeline isn't too hard to work up with a couple exceptions. When I first read the Hainish books back in 2005-7, I did it in chronological order, but extra clues from reading the short fiction (and not just the books) led me to discover that I made an error. Contra whatever timeline I consulted at the time, I think The Telling almost certainly precedes Five Ways to Forgiveness (though this is one of the areas where the details are contradictory). Anyway, full details are at the same link above if you are interested. I think there is merit in a chronological read-through for a first-time reader, in that it front-loads The Dispossessed, one of the best Hainish novels, instead of causing you to lead off with the three original novels, which are the weakest and most generic in my opinion. But the books are all so lightly linked that order rarely matters.

* Some have criticized Left Hand, for example, for the fact that Genly sexual/gender biases are so much like those of a contemporary reader, but that's the point. To an extent, Le Guin isn't really trying to imagine someone coming from a cosmopolitan future society going to a different planet, but someone from 1970s America doing so.