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language: English
country: USA
year: 1967
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 23.7.22-24.7.22
having now finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s City of Illusions, I’ve now read all of the Hainish Cycle novels except The Telling and, depending how you count it, Four Ways to Forgiveness. that said, The Left Hand of Darkness was more than a decade ago at this point; I’m looking forward to rereading it soon when the Le Guin reading group I’m in gets to it.
I’m obsessed with the first three — Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions — because they’re a fascinating mix of planetary romance, my problematic fave sci-fi subgenre, and the anthropological and Daoist-anarchist themes that predominate in Earthsea and The Dispossessed, getting progressively stronger through each of these first three books. City of Illusions is striking because the dividing line is really at the halfway point: the first half of the novel is a planetary romance, the second half an exploration of a post-economic and ecological collapse society, the nature of lying, and how domination works and sustains itself.
good things: the attention, as always, to cultural and linguistic diversity, even if it’s done mostly without conlangs. the refusal to hold up even the “good guys” as utopian models (Werel is in some ways as fucked up as Terra). the balance of Falk and Ramarren in the second half of the novel was fascinating — just the kind of weird mind and memory stuff I like to see. thinking about this as kind of a sequel to Planet of Exile the parallelism of the Shing and the Alterrans raises really interesting questions.
bad things: “Thurro-dowist” was just way too obvious imo. the temptation with far-future sci-fi is always to throw in some present references, twisted wildly almost beyond recognition, and I think this temptation always needs to be resisted. at the very least, it could have been indulged without the explicit evocation of “Walden Pond”. the continued sense of low-technology societies as “primitive” (even from Falk in the first half of the novel). the weird transphobia in Falk’s confusion about genders in Es Toch. I think the final conclusion about the Shing was kind of a cop-out and the lie was much more conceptually interesting.
I liked this a lot overall (I gave it four stars), but not as much as Rocannon’s World (by far my favorite of the early three), and certainly not as much as The Dispossessed or The Word for World Is Forest.
moods: adventurous, challenging, tense