Sandra J. Lindow: The Dance of Nonviolent Subversion in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle

Since the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin has been one of the most influential voices in science fiction. In her unflinching condemnation of binary thinking and the various prejudices that inform social culture and politics, she has changed how we read science fiction as well as how we see ourselves. Although the sf/f community has long recognized Le Guin’s genius through Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, recently she has been receiving considerable additional recognition across the mainstream. In 2014, Le Guin was named the 27th recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In February 2017, Le Guin was voted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society of the country’s 250 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Correspondingly, the canonization of her work has begun through high-quality, authoritative, clothbound editions published by the Library of America (LOA) as part of a series that celebrates America’s most influential writers. These editions are intended to last due to a painstaking print process that requires printing with the grain to keep the Smyth-sewn binding from cracking and allow the books to lie completely flat. Beginning with The Complete Orsinia (2016) and more recently a two-volume boxed set of her Hainish Novels and Stories (2017), the LOA invites readers to explore her rich, living legacy. Le Guin took an active hand in preparing the texts for these volumes. Brian Attebery, the editor, previously worked with Le Guin on the Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990 (1993).

Ursula K. Le Guin, date unknown.
Photo by Eileen Gunn.

Close examination of the Hainish cycle reveals considerable insight into Le Guin’s writing career and her evolving thought experiments regarding human moral responsibility.

Overview: Volumes One and Two

Volume One contains five early novels and a selection of short stories and introductions. Le Guin, who was born in 1929, began writing Rocannon’s World, her first novel, in 1963. From this redaction of Norse mythology, her Hainish universe unfolds as a thought experiment in human moral development, gender, and politics. The first volume concludes with “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995) a story so transgressively sexual and so morally courageous that she could not have written it in the ’60s, and yet the seeds of normative transgression are there from the beginning.

Volume Two begins with her 1972 Hugo Award–winning novella, “The Word for World is Forest,” which was originally published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions; it was written as a response to the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. The rest of the volume consists of stories and novellas that were written in the ’90s and continue her examination of gender and the relationship between culture and the unfortunately innate nature of human violence. The Telling (2000) concludes this study by responding to the Chinese revolution’s destruction of Taoism, providing an interstitial unification of fantastic and sf tropes by integrating mysticism without loss of the hardness Le Guin values. Both volumes include cover paper maps, a chronology, and editorial notes on the texts. The total number of pages is 1,884. My one criticism of the book’s construction is that the dates of original publication should be included at the beginning of each volume rather than only in the “Notes on the Texts” at the end.

World Building

To understand Le Guin’s three-million-year-old Hainish civilization, it is important to understand that Le Guin is not a proponent of top-down structures and their corresponding ideas of progress through conquest and cooptation; her work is defined by a postcolonial, postmodernist skepticism of grand narratives. In “Is Gender Necessary? Redux (1976/1987),” Le Guin is adamant that the idea of progress is a “myth” (1038). What she valorizes instead is a moral balancing of rights and resources where human behavior control is internal rather than external. She implies that this is the only way true cultural progress can occur.

The process of achieving cultural moral maturity can be seen through Hainish history. After the first million years of their written history, Hain developed a Nearly as Fast as Light (NAFAL) propulsion system and colonized the near portion of the galaxy. In doing this, they followed an experimental process and “seeded” the galaxy using methods such as genetic manipulation that may be viewed as unethical, particularly because they left their colonies to grow up willy-nilly on their own (944). Negligence can be considered an illegitimate form of parenting, but it is common aspect of the supposedly “objective” scientific mindset. According to “Winter’s King” (from 1969), there are one hundred Hainish worlds, which in academic research is indicative of an adequate sampling for comparing results (933). In “A Response, By Ansible, from Tau Ceti” (2005, revised 2016), her response to critical discussion regarding Hainish guilt, Le Guin remarks:

I would point out that Hainish guilt is not unmotivated or mysterious; in other stories, one finds that the Hainish, everybody’s ancestors, have a terribly long history which is, like all human histories, terrible. (1031)

Throughout the series, this guilt manifests itself as a sober, somewhat fatigued patience. In “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” Le Guin describes the Hainish as “tiresomely understanding parents,” from whom the comparatively teenaged Earth would like to escape (944). The Hain have achieved a level of cultural moral maturity through careful study of their history. They recognize that their colonies are repeating mistakes they themselves made earlier. Thus, they freely offer resources, attention, and a willingness to provide moral scaffolding in case their help is accepted. Since they have no army, they cannot force their colonies to be more humane, but they can begin a conversation where cultures may become more peaceful and egalitarian. (We follow this long-term process in “The Matter of Seggri.”) In this, their focus is the Taoist concept of wu wei, or doing without doing. It is likely that Le Guin, who published her own rendering of the Tao Te Ching in 1998, chose Tau Ceti as the location for her literary ansible response because of the similarity of “Tau” to “Tao.” Ceti refers to cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises, creatures who tend to abide with each other without warfare). Le Guin has described those from Tau Ceti as having an “inexhaustible curiosity; Cetians died eagerly curious as to what came next” (38).

Within the context of that “terrible” Hainish history, some moral values are made clear:

1. From fourteenth-century Icelandic mythology through the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, patterns of utopian tolerance and dystopian prejudice repeat in various cultures at various times, forming a woven tapestry of opportunity for positive change.

2. Human rights, although easily undermined, are worth personal sacrifice, especially if that sacrifice is based on well-considered passive resistance. (See Five Ways to Forgiveness.)

3. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ancient stories, values, and traditions should be cherished and privileged over anything that comes with royal, bureaucratic, or corporate packaging (cf. The Telling [2000]). This antiauthoritarian attitude is apparent throughout her work but is emphasized beginning with The Dispossessed (1974). Government is only as good as it is humane. Thus, government needs to be as localized and as flexible as possible; hierarchical structures are too easily subverted by individuals who learn to bully the system.

4. Patriotism, paternalism, militarism, sexual chauvinism, and fundamentalism are evils to be undermined and replaced. Captain Don Davidson, the villain of “The Word for World is Forest,” defines himself as a patriot. As Genly Ai suggests in The Left Hand of Darkness, “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on Earth, it would be a joy to serve it” (544). Furthermore, Genly explains that “the Ekumen is not essentially a government at all. It is an attempt to reunify the mystical with the political, and as such is of course mostly a failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than the successes of its predecessors” (487–88).

5. Although God is not part of Le Guin’s essentially Taoist universe, the mystical and unexplainable remain as essential components of human experience and must be accepted and respected.

Carrier Bags for Cognitive Wandering

In her Introduction to Volume One, Le Guin writes that “Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD” (xi). Her oeuvre is a series of thought experiments by a voracious, educated mind, each evolving from what she has read as well as the worldbuilding she has done in creating her previous stories. In each story, the premise is rigorously interrogated, but as a whole her stories do not fit together in any neat egg-shaped sort of way. It has been a messy process that Le Guin now valorizes:

I worked one world, one society, one history at a time. I did so each time with care for verisimilitude, coherence, and a plausible history. But there has never been any overarching plan to the whole. This lack of structure, I see now, allowed my ideas to change and develop. I wasn’t stuck in a universe full of notions I’d outgrown.... I was free to wander. (xii)

She describes her approach in a 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she describes the carrier bag as a place to put Baby Oo Oo so you can pick the oats with both hands: “A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container” (166). In other words, it is a very personal place, a kind of exterior womb in which to place whatever is of interest. The contents of the bag do not represent stasis or simple conflict resolution but “continuing process” (Dancing 169).

Indicting the Traditional Hero

Le Guin’s fiction also provides an evolving critique of the traditional hero. In “Carrier Bag,” she suggests that the mythic hero is a noble fantasy that does not fit in her democratized carrier. The hero’s “imperial nature” tends to be governed by an “uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it” (Dancing 168–69). Correspondingly, the sf plot structure from the early pulps presents itself as a phallic, “Techno-Heroic” “weapon of domination” that shoots off in one direction until it ends in a temporary kind of success without consideration for those innocent ones who have been damaged in the process (Dancing 168, 170). In her “Chronology” at the end of each volume, Le Guin, who was born in 1929, explains with typical wry humor that in 1942, her earliest stories were based on a troop of well-wrought toy soldiers she had inherited from her older brothers:

They went on adventures, exploring, fighting off enemies, going on diplomatic missions, etc. The captain was particularly gallant and handsome, with his sabre drawn, and his white horse reared up nobly. Unfortunately, when you took one of them off his horse, he was extremely bowlegged, and had a little nail sticking downward from his bottom, which fit into the saddle. (766)

Although her response is humorous, it is important to remember that 1942 was the middle of World War II and that children’s play is often an emotionally safe way to reprocess the troubles of the real world. The implication here is that the traditional view of the hero is essentially limited, and even as a thirteen-year-old, Le Guin had begun to see these limitations.

In “The Word for World is Forest,” Captain Don Davidson remarks, “The only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books, but it was true” (51). Statements like these are moral damnation of the shoot-em-up, cowboys-in-space of early pulp sf. Fortunately, Le Guin envisioned an sf broad enough to contain other kinds of stories, “room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things” (170). Thus, beginning in the ’60s, Le Guin’s fiction was informed by a yin-yang conflictive dynamic between messy, nature-based utopias-in-progress and the various evils of romanticized, progress-based colonialism.

Valorizing the Vulnerable Hero

In her 1986 essay, “Heroes,” Le Guin writes, “All I want to do is lose the hero myths so that I can find what is worth admiration” (Dancing 174). She suggests that the modern novel “is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story” (168). Throughout her Hainish series, Le Guin’s heroes become increasingly vulnerable, moving away from romantic fantasies of unrealistic strength and intelligence to a more realistic depiction of the emotionally complex, physically struggling antihero. Her intellectual assault on the romantic traditions of heroism can be traced back to her 1966 novel, Rocannon’s World. It is the first of three novels set in her League of All Worlds which will eventually evolve into the Ekumen.

The novel begins with the story of “Semley’s Necklace” (1964), a retelling of the fourteenth-century Icelandic tale of Freya’s necklace, which describes how a noble young woman sacrifices everything to reclaim a piece of jewelry. This tragic tale of ignorance and attachment sets the scene for Rocannon’s story of revenge. Gaverel Rocannon, an educated interplanetary researcher sent to Fomalhaut II, discovers a secret outpost of the League’s deadly enemy. His Galahad-like name evokes knightly deeds, and the novel is written in the elevated language of heroic Arthurian and Icelandic fantasy with lines like “Let the water not be spilled and the pact not be broken” (50) and “the lance cast across the wind finding its mark like the unerring lance of Hendin in the days of old” (52), but Rocannon’s original behavior lacks mature empathy (like the impermasuit he wears in the beginning of the story, he is initially separated from the consequences of his actions.) He temporarily falls to a Bronze-Age planet’s level of eye-for-an-eye justice seeking after his crew is unexpectedly killed by the interstellar rebels. In 1966, regular sf readers were likely thrilled by the Ace Doubles cover picture of a warrior mounted on a windsteed, one of the planet’s great flying cats, and they would have been comfortable with the bravado of the revenge pact that Rocannon makes with the hero Mogien, Semley’s grandson, the heir of Hallan: “May our enemy die without sons” (30). But even this early, Le Guin will not allow the satisfying old story of guiltless revenge for the good guys and won’t let Rocannon destroy his enemies without personal repercussions. As a Taoist, Le Guin firmly believes in wei wu wei, the wisdom of not doing. There is always a price for doing. As in traditional heroic quests, to achieve his goal, Rocannon earns a boon from a powerful stranger, in this case the ability to see into the minds of his enemies. By the end, Rocannon has a crippled arm, nearly all his companions have been killed, and his newly gained “far-seeing” telepathy has caused him to personally experience the horrible death of a thousand enemy soldiers, for the most part ordinary men who simply have the bad luck to be on the wrong side of an interplanetary conflict. In the end, Rocannon concludes that although he is now exiled on an alien world, his personal fate is not important, but then he asks “If it is not, what is?” (114), thus providing the question for Le Guin’s further thought experiments.

In her “Introduction” to Volume One of this series, Le Guin explains that she stopped using farseeing as a plot device “because of the incalculable effects mutual telepathy would have on a society” (xii). Here she implies that stories unroll more plausibly because her viewpoint characters’ limited understanding takes them on risky fact-finding journeys into themselves and the universe, which wouldn’t be necessary if they already had access to all knowledge through telepathic crowd-sourcing. The other thing that fell by the wayside is Rocannon’s impermasuit, which early in the novel allows him to fight without getting hurt. In a later “Introduction,” she calls the suit “pseudoscientific” and “a good example” of where fantasy and science fiction don’t shade gracefully into one another (1012). Nevertheless, in “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (1971), a mystery influenced by Agatha Christie and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Le Guin continues her paranormal exploration to describe the socially disruptive influence of an extreme form of autism caused by excessive empathy. The story focuses on the interpersonal interactions of the crew of a Survey ship, many of whom appear to be on the autism spectrum. The title comes from a line of the seventeenth century poet Andrew Marvell: “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow.” Here the yin-yang of love and hate is examined as well as the “electricity” of human touch, a concept which will be explored in later work (960). Part of the impact of the title is that in the scheme of all things, the vegetable world (which continually communicates in minute crowd-sourcing ways we’ve just begun to learn), is so much more important than any human empire.

Redefining Marriage and the Family

In her pioneering work, All Our Kin (1974), Carol Stack redefines family as “the smallest organized, durable network of kin and non-kin who interact daily, providing the domestic needs of children and assuring their survival” (31). In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1978 introduction to Planet of Exile (1966), she writes that the “central, constant theme” of her work is “Marriage” (1019). Speculative fiction, by definition, is a marriage of ideas, and like romance, it frequently describes the painful process by which individuals come to understand themselves and others. Le Guin, whose own marriage has been long-lasting, suggests that her fiction employs a classical structure that balances yin and yang, black and white, male and female (although, more often than not, this occurs in unexpected or unconventional ways). This balancing depends on intimacy and moral development.

Le Guin’s early novels all have unconventional marriages. In her Introduction to Volume One, Le Guin writes:

The Universe in the 1960s was a man’s world—a remarkably chaste one. Nobody got much sex, except possibly the alien on the magazine cover carrying off a nubile human female in its tentacles, but perhaps it only wanted the girl for dinner. Some anthropological sophistication was beginning to slip into descriptions of alien society, but domestic customs, kinship, child-rearing, etc., were nowhere. (xvii)

Two short novels written in the ’60s, Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967) depict what Le Guin describes as her “early ... unawakened, unconsciousness-raised way of handling male and female characters” (1016). Both are written in a simpler, less heroic style of prose than Rocannon’s World. In Planet of Exile, colonists from Earth who are stranded on the planet Werel must work with the planet’s indigenous peoples in order to prepare for and survive the oncoming fifteen-year winter. Just as Rocannon’s World was a response to Norse mythology, this novella can be seen as a response to the Poetic Edda Fimbulwinter, or more personally for Le Guin, the repeating pattern of ice ages and possibly nuclear winter, an issue that had been discussed in scientific circles since the 1950s although not named as such until the ’80s. Here, Le Guin still implies that men are the ones invested with the ability for heroism while women provide behind the lines support services as they did during World War II. Nevertheless, we do see the budding of Le Guin’s later heroic redefinition and gender transgression.

Systematic Subversion of the Vanilla Universe in Bed

From early on, Le Guin recognizes the “vanilla” nature of science fiction and sets out on a journey to “subvert it” (Introduction, Volume 2, xvii). Throughout her fiction, she consciously chooses “colored” as “the human norm” (xvii). Planet of Exile is a romance that depicts a truly interracial marriage since Jakob and Rolery come from two genetically separated lines of humans. Although it ends traditionally with a recreation of home, it is not a stereotypical romance. The only bodice ripping that occurs comes from Rolery’s hard work behind the lines in a battle for limited resources. In her Introduction to the 1978 edition of Planet of Exile, Le Guin explains, “the men aren’t lustful and the women aren’t gorgeous—and the sex itself is seen as a relationship rather than an act” (1019). Although “young and inexperienced,” Rolery is a rebel “socially and sexually” reflecting the changing sexual values of the ’60s (1016). Here, we do see the remnants of mindspeech in paraverbal communication, but it is a limited act of intimacy between a man and a woman: “in his mind he heard her say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss” (185).

City of Illusions (1967) is set in the far future of a depopulated Earth which has lost contact with other planets. Here we see in Le Guin’s description of an aboriginal tribe, the Bee Keepers, as “beautiful sexless warriors,” the foreshadowing of her later interrogation of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness:

Their own women used male names and were addressed and referred to as men. Grave girls, with clear eyes and silent lips, they lived and worked as men among equally grave and sober youths and men. (289)

City of Illusions stands out because, although there are sexual relationships sans conventional marriage, the marriage that occurs at the end is between two parts of a man’s life. Falk, a descendent of Jakob and Rolery, loses the memories of his previous life after he is captured by rebels and his mind razed. He is a true tabula rasa when he wanders out of a forest on Earth where a good family finds and reeducates him. His new personality is based on Taoist values and the benefits of nurture in a healthy environment. He holds onto a passage from the Tao as a personal mantra “The way that can be gone/ is not the eternal Way. / The name that can be named/ is not the eternal Name” (349). Later, when he has a chance to regain his old self, a self that is purported to be Ramarren, a brilliant interstellar navigator, it is at the risk of his new memories. Fortunately during psychic surgery, Falk is able to remember his mantra, holding onto the new self and integrating both sets of memories. In the end, he is Falk-Ramarren, a marriage of true minds (Levy). (Holding fast to the noble thing is examined in more detail in the stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness, all written in the ’90s.) Correspondingly, by including the Falk identity first, Le Guin implies that this personality is primary, suggesting that the new Taoist values create a more stable base than those of his earlier, more hierarchical Werelian home world culture and a wider recognition that “There’s always more than one way towards the truth” (383). This will be further explored in later fiction.

In an Introduction to her collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Le Guin acknowledges Romantic influences in her early work but writes, “the progress of my style has been away from open Romanticism, slowly and steadily” to something “harder, stronger, and more complex” (1). From the beginning, it is essential to view these stories post-colonially in that they are a consistent critique of the colonial gaze and that willingness to see the universe as open season for cooptation and domination. By nature of her upbringing as a child of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, two of the finest anthropological thinkers of the twentieth century, and a childhood spent in close contact with indigenous peoples, rigorous discussion of the rights of others became an essential part of her mindset. (For more on this, see her 1991 Emeriti Lecture, “Indian Uncles” [Wave, 10–19]). This mindset allows her to create sophisticated depictions of indigenous peoples and interrogate the ignorant dichotomies of noble savages on the one hand and brutal, uncivilized beasts on the other, creating pioneering thought-paths that other writers such as Eleanor Arnason, Gwyneth Jones, and Kim Stanley Robinson were to follow.

Introducing Androgyny as a Subversion of Binary Structures

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) which has become an irrevocable part of the sf canon, continues Le Guin’s process of redefining the hero. It takes place on the planet Gethen, which in the far distant past has been colonized by the Hain as an experiment in androgyny. Le Guin structures the novel as an unrequited love affair between viewpoint characters, Genly, an Ekumen mobile ambassador, and Estraven, the Gethenian “king’s ear” or prime minister. In her Introduction to the 1976 paperback, Le Guin has written that “if you look at us at certain odd times of the day in certain weathers, we already are [androgynous]” (1026). Le Guin recognizes that gender has to do with performance and that actual gender is far more flexible than a simple binary. Her challenge has been to overthrow the restrictions of the binary in what Lewis Call names “anarchy of gender” (np). The Gethenians are sexual only when they are in kemmer and capable of reproduction. Genly Ai has been sent to the planet after it is rediscovered after years of isolation. It is in a process that has moved from a decentralized, anarchic form of localized control, which Le Guin considers “female” in principle, to a state of capitalism and centralized power, which she considers male (Redux, 1037). Already scholarly and pacifist, Genly is about to discover more about his own binary preconceptions. The name Genly reflects gender, genteel, and gentle, while Ai suggests affirmation (aye). Reflecting the prefeminist literary default of humanity and agency being synonymous with male, Genly sees Gethenians as male even though he knows differently. Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, however, is not what Genly expects. The name Estraven suggests the word “estrogen” and likely evolves from the word “oestrus,” or sexual heat (Webster, 426) while “Therem” indicates the prefix “therm” or warmth and Harth is an alternate spelling of “hearth.” Le Guin’s father, Alfred L. Kroeber, defined the hearth as “a vital or creative center (the central ~ of occidental civilization)” (Webster, 558). In “Winter’s King” (1969, revised 1975), Le Guin describes the dream of the Ekumen “to regather all the peoples of all worlds at one hearth” (933). For Gethenians, hearth means home, the emotional center of community. Essentially Genly represents the Hearth of the Ekumen while Estraven represents the Gethenian embodiment of Hearth. Despite differences in gender and culture, the two viewpoint characters discover that they are more alike than they originally expected. Like other Le Guin couples, together they form a yin-yang of metaphysical possibilities: dark and light, warm and cool, soft and hard. In her 1986 essay “Heroes,” Le Guin describes the novel as a book where “a Black man from Earth and an androgynous extraterrestrial pull Scott’s sledge through Shackleton’s blizzards across a planet called Winter” (Dancing 171). When Estraven loses the king’s favor after befriending Genly, he must flee the capital, only to be stranded with Genly on an arctic ice shelf during kemmer, their tent a hearth center of warmth within the cold. To their extreme discomfort, Estraven kemmers female in response to Genly’s male hormones. (For a well-developed description of kemmer, see her 1995 “Coming of Age in Karhide” [990–1008]). Here nearly thirty years after Left Hand was written, Le Guin feels the freedom to describe graphic sexual acts in a kemmerhouse grotto, including the homoerotic, although the emphasis remains on self-control, consent, and relationship.) The result of Estraven’s kemmer is a powerful, empathic connection between the two viewpoint characters but not a romantic sexual consummation. In the beauty of their loving restraint, Le Guin may redact Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel to which she refers in her Introduction (1023). Frankenstein also includes a desperate escape into the Arctic. In both novels, the isolation of bitter cold weather and barren landscape reduces behavior to the simplest terms of survival, a common denominator for revelation of morality and responsibility. Furthermore, gender and performance of gender are linked with possibilities of legitimate and illegitimate creation but with very different moral results.

In “Is Gender Necessary?” (1976) Le Guin writes that “it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physical form and function, truly differentiates men and women” (1036). Two other stories provide further analysis of gender. Le Guin’s “Winter’s King” goes more deeply into the cutthroat nature of Gethenian politics, revealing power struggles as neither male or female but an unfortunate aspect of the human condition. Originally written in 1969 with male pronouns, it was extensively rewritten in 1975 with female pronouns to reflect Gethenian androgyny. Both versions are included in this volume. In terms of her continuing thought experiment, “Winter’s King” responds to “Semley’s Necklace,” by depicting how time dilation and gaps in NAFAL trips can be used for political advantage. Both versions reflect a brilliant young leader’s desperate last-chance moral decision-making regarding abdication. The 1975 female pronoun change subtly evokes a more vulnerable king; a half-naked woman who has been kidnapped, drugged, mind-altered, half-drowned, and found on a city street can seem more vulnerable than a half-naked man, but in both versions of the story the word “porngrope” is used to describe the Guard’s initial objectifying thoughts regarding the “creature” he/she has found (925, 1046). Here the unpleasant word makes clear that this is a person who has been used, horrifying in either male or female context. Conversely, a mother who gives up an infant to save her country may seem to give up more than a father. In either case, our biases are showing. Reading both stories together is a matter of cognitive dissonance causing readers to rethink their unconscious opinions regarding gender, which is possibly why Le Guin chose to include both versions. In her Introduction to “Is Gender Necessary? Redux (1976/1987),” an essay which shows her thinking evolving over time, Le Guin writes, “minds that don’t change are like clams that don’t open” (1033).

Postmodern Politics in The Dispossessed

Although The Dispossessed (1974) functions chronologically as a prequel to The Left Hand of Darkness, it is also a continuing response to Le Guin’s examination of the rights of the individual versus the rights of society. It is structured as a Marxian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—an interrogation of the Marxist/anarchist values popularized on college campuses during the ’70s. Over the years, Marxist and Utopian critics have had a good deal to say about this novel; nevertheless, although subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, the substance of the novel is not so much about social constructs as it is about intimacy and the moral and intellectual development of Shevek, the view point character (which, of course, is Le Guin’s point). The original Odonian values of Shevek’s culture, explored in Le Guin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974), set in 2100 ad near the beginning of her chronology, are laudable in their egalitarian intent, but as even the elderly Odo recognizes, human needs are messy; values become too rigid, and human need for authority can become seductive. There are always ways for selfish individuals to erect barriers to others’ success. In other words, The Dispossessed speaks for intellectual freedom and against any stratified societal hierarchy that ignores the rights of individuals in favor of the privileges of the few. Shevek, a physicist, seeks a unified field theory of communication through space and time, a solution that is part Einsteinian physics and part mysticism, but to find it, he must learn to balance the demands of his work with caring for fellow human beings. This proves difficult because his resource-poor world undervalues the two things he needs most: long-term intimacy and intellectual freedom. Anarres is a struggling world founded on communist/anarchist principles where work is valued more than family bonds. Although nuclear families do exist, the system of job postings makes it difficult for couples to remain together long term, and parents are encouraged to let their offspring be raised in child-care “domiciles.” Yet it is through relationship that Shevek is able to make his breakthrough. Like Genly, Shevek is introspective and kind, not the stereotypical, assertive “Machoman” hero Le Guin so often ridicules (Dancing 116), but through grassroots collective social action, he eventually overcomes debilitating academic politics to create the ansible, an interstellar communication device: an essential element in Le Guin’s later stories. (The ansible has also become an sf trope for many other writers in the field such as Terry Bisson, Orson Scott Card, Elizabeth Moon, and Neil Gaiman.)

Volume Two: Alternatives to Violence

“The Word for World is Forest” was written in anger in 1968, responding to issues of combat atrocity, racism, bigotry, and out-of-control nationalism surrounding the Vietnam War, a political landscape that caused her to feel “useless, foolish, and obstinate” despite her active involvement in the protest movement (735). In her 1977 Introduction, Le Guin writes:

... it was becoming clear that the ethic that approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man.” (755)

Set in 2368 ad in the Hainish chronology (after The Dispossessed and before Rocannon’s World), this Hugo Award–winning novella places Athshea, a vulnerable utopian ecology, in the way of military/industrial progress, reflecting how a pervasive colonial mindset interconnects human and environmental abuse. In a continued critique of militarist pulp tradition, Le Guin enters the appallingly sexist and bigoted mindset of Captain Don Davidson as he rationalizes a stunning abuse of power:

it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that’s what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world tamer. He wasn’t a boastful man, but he knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it. And he always got it. (4)

Athshea is a utopian, nonviolent, matriarchal culture where there is no warfare partly because of a cultural belief that intellect is for men, politics for women, and ethics “the interaction of both” (61–62). It is unclear whether the native Athshean culture is due to genetic experiment or a natural evolution (7). Seeded by the Hain at a similar time as Earth, the ecology is also similar, making it ripe for exploitation. The Terran mercenary soldiers have enslaved the small, green-furred natives, calling them “creechies” and justifying their appropriation through the common colonial belief that indigenous peoples have low intelligence and do not feel normal pleasure and pain. (Their ship is called the Shackleton, referring to the 1914–1917 stranded Antarctic expedition.) In contrast to Davidson is Selver, an Athshean whose wife has been raped and murdered by Davidson, and Lyubov, an anthropologist who befriends Selver. For the Athsheans, dreams are considered important messages from the subconscious, and Selver is a lucid dreamer. Those who can translate and speak the messages of their dreams are highly valued. The Terrans, however, have destroyed their own healthy dreamtime through use of mood-altering and other hallucinogenic drugs. Their toxic culture brings evil and the potential for premeditated murder into Eden even before murder occurs. Selver’s powerful “long dreaming” in response to the evil the Terrans have wrought makes him a “new” god to be followed, “son of the forest fire, brother of the murdered, the one who is not reborn” after he leads a successful uprising against the military invaders who are destroying the Athshean’s world (30). The Athshean word for world is forest, but Terran clear-cutting is destroying the forest’s soil-binding fibreweed root system (45–46). The Athshean villages are built in the roots of trees, and their word for “dream” also means “root” (83). The connection is significant; the loggers’ deforestation for corporate gain is symbolic of colonial destruction of indigenous cultural roots; however, in response, the roots of Selver’s shared dreaming create an interconnected web for all Athsheans, mobilizing them so that they are willing to kill to get rid of his evil vision. (Forests are symbolically meaningful throughout Le Guin’s work, roots playing an important part in her poetry as well as novels such as The Telling. They represent stability, family connection, and peace.) In the end, Le Guin’s solution to neocolonial destruction is communication; the freely shared invention of Shevek’s ansible suddenly makes possible instantaneous interstellar communication where none was possible before, an essential step in creating universal ethics. Within Le Guin’s godless Taoist universe, the ansible is “machina ex machina” rather than deus ex machina (68). Now atrocity cannot occur without others finding out; however, righting wrong already done will take considerable effort, and it is not clear at the end that the ecological and utopian nature of the culture will ever be fully restored.

The Shobies, FTL, and the Central Hearth of Community

After “Word for World,” Le Guin does not return to her Hainish Universe until the ’90s when she publishes a series of stories that involve the theoretical physics of faster-than-light travel. By this time, her thoughts about communication, gender, and family have become more inclusive. The potency of shared stories is most clearly explicated in “The Shobies’ Story” (1990), where a diverse, interplanetary, intergenerational crew volunteer for a testing of faster-than-light travel using the churten apparatus, an engineering and navigational breakthrough the result of a revisioning of “Shevekian temporalism by the Intervalists” (108). “Shobies” is a primary example of the feminization of Le Guin’s writing, her new willingness to write as a woman. As in “Sur” (1982), Le Guin promotes older women as unsung heroes who hold the world together through competence and kindness. Lidi is seventy-two and has been navigating for fifty years. Sweet Today, an imposing Hainish woman in her late fifties, initiates the crew’s emotional bonding and later maintains a gestalt for the crew, all ten at once wherever they are in the ship. The plan is to go to a star system seventeen light-years away and then return. The apparatus is in itself surrounded by a mystical light/dark, soft/hard yin-yang. The diversity of the crew reflects Le Guin’s evolving experiments in gender, a dance of realities that Le Guin foreshadows before the trip:

Oreth, who was just coming out of kemmer ... watched Rig, whom she had fathered, dance with Asten, whom she had borne, and watched Karth watch them, and said in Karhidish, “Tomorrow....” The edge was very sweet. (116)

When the ship dissolves into energy and disappears for forty-two minutes, the crew, experiencing the effects of transilience, or disappearing reality, must recreate reality by sharing their own differing perceptions. Transilience implies passing through light and time through a kind of ghostly translucence while churten sounds like “chert,” which is a conglomerate, sedimentary rock; together the words create necessary stability through the yin-yang of light and heavy. During transilience when they are essentially in two places at once, each crew member’s reality is different, and for them to return, their stories must be told and integrated around a hearth that is created through shared memory. The theory is: “The psychic interbalance of a bonded social group is a margin of strength against disintegrative or incomprehensible experience,” reflecting Le Guin’s belief in the essential nature of community (114). In her Introduction to this story in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Le Guin explains that transilience is a metaphor for narration, “the chancy and unreliable but most effective means of constructing a shared reality” (9). In this story, the physical mass of the Shoby, like the mass of a book, is only a cognitive structure: E=mc². Human beings are mass and energy. Stories, like energy, have no mass, but the meaning that passes between human beings at light speed can sometimes make a difference.

“Dancing to Ganam” (1993) is set twenty years after “The Shobies’ Story,” and research on the churten apparatus has continued. Commander Dalzul enlists Shan, one of the Shoby crew members, to pilot his ship on another trial. It is a story that offers several gender surprises. Readers should be suspicious of Dalzul immediately (think dazzle) because he is a genuine hero and heroes are “phenomena of primitive cultures” (136). Dalzul is too charming, too successful, too confident, and also too white:

... he was as he should be, erect and lithe, the long, light hair going grey pulled back from a magnificent, vivid face, the eyes clear as water. Shan had not realized how white-skinned Dalzul was, but the deformity or atavism was minor ... (136)

The dangerously fundamentalist Unist fathers consider Dalzul to be God (135). That in itself is sufficient foreshadowing to indicate that Dalzul may not be able to control the messiness of the universe in the way he plans: the problem is in focusing on one’s own hero story at the expense of all others. In this cautionary tale, the crew’s voices blending in harmony successfully guide them to their destination in a kind of harmonic convergence, a mystical planetary alignment that reflects Aztec cosmology. Dalzul calls it dancing. But all does not go well after they land. Within the story, dance becomes not only a metaphor for handling transilience and the dissolution of reality at faster than light speed but also the importance of cognitively and emotionally dancing away from those charismatic individuals who would lure us into danger with grandiose, poorly researched interpretations of reality. In “Earthsea Revisioned,” Le Guin points out, “History is no longer about great men though it will be about great people working together” (13). Nevertheless, individual achievement remains essential, and when Shan thinks, “Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval,” he is conceptualizing a truth in line with previous stories.

ki’O: Marriage and Balance

Le Guin sets the next three stories on the planet ki’O, a sparsely settled planet where the dominant culture has two moieties, Morning and Evening, and to avoid inbreeding, an individual must marry a man and a woman from the other moiety and a person of the opposite sex from the same moiety. This is called a sedoretu and involves at least two heterosexual and two homosexual relationships. Since O is both hetero-normative and homo-normative, the planet appears to be without sexism. In atmospheres of gender acceptance and equality, no one starts out with an imbalance of power. Individual preferences and talents become community challenges for marriage brokers. The same-moiety, opposite-sex relationship must remain chaste, like brother and sister, but a sexless commitment is still a marriage as is explained in “Mountain Ways.” O is an example of the yin utopia Le Guin promotes in “A Non-Euclidean View of California” (1982). It resists progress and upholds cold, moist, earthy feminine principles to counteract the dangers of masculine, hot, dry, “big yang motorcycle” progressiveness (Dancing 90). There are no cities on O, only dispersed villages composed of farmholds and a community center (209). According to the culture, O gets its name from the first word of a poem from a religion that is “godless, argumentative, and mystical” (192). Of course, the circle also symbolizes the womb, the eternal feminine, and the first letter in “orgasm” (also reflecting sound effects in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy [Joyce, 768]). Although no orgasms are mentioned specifically in any of these stories, they are certainly part of the action that occurs behind the scenes. Physical pleasure is part of the glue that holds relationships together, and human attraction is complex. In her typical fashion, Le Guin sets up social mores for relationships and then describes exceptions that threaten the rules.

Beginning with a retelling of a Japanese folktale, “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994) continues Le Guin’s exploration of gender and returns to another literally star-crossed romance; as in The Dispossessed, the romance of scientific achievement versus the love of home and family provides the inciting action. In this tale told by Hideo, a young physicist, Story and Time are linked through the metaphor of a river: “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe” (168). As a student, Hideo is intellectually seduced by attempts to refine and control the FTL churten apparatus, but working on Hain separates him by four light-years from his soulmate, Isidri, and their large extended family, making his life incomplete. Eventually, he is able to overcome time dilation gaps and return to his true love through the churten’s river of unplanned mystical effect.

Le Guin is clear that there are many morally acceptable ways to create a marriage. In this story, Le Guin returns to the complications involved in creating a sedoretu. Acknowledging that complexity, “Unchosen Love” (1994) begins “Sex for everybody on every world is a complicated business, but no people have complicated marriage quite as much as my people have” (207). Here, Le Guin redacts ghostly possession. Hadri, a shy outsider, loves Suord, an excessively ardent man, think “sword,” but is uncomfortable with Suord’s possessiveness until he meets a mysterious, dark-haired woman on the roof. The story examines the feeling of being suffocated when one is the sole focus of desire and how creating the sedoretu provides an effective solution.

Also set on O, “Mountain Ways,” winner of the 1996 Tiptree Award for gender-bending fiction, is a cross-dressing story similar to a Shakespearean comedy of manners. The landscape resembles the Scottish highlands where life is not easy, involving much more hard physical work than Shakespeare ever depicts in his plays. Shahes and Enno are two rather androgynous young women who seek relationship. Neither has had much love or pleasure in her life. Shahes lost half her family in a landslide and has had to run a farmhold since she was fourteen. Enno, whose name in girlhood was Akal, ran away from home after being sexually abused. Le Guin recognizes that an effective way of gaining this understanding is through working together, and the two learn to love each other by sharing the hard work of sheep shearing. Complications arise when the two must bring two others into their relationship in order to complete the sedoretu and then decide to deceive others about Enno’s gender. At work here is the romantic idea that sometimes two people are meant for each other despite social constructs: “Akal had been born for Shahes and Shahes for Akal; that was all there was to it. Whatever made it possible for them to be together was right” (237). Fortunately, the others involved see this intuitively and are willing to play along with the deceit. The story never dissolves into Shakespearean foolery or lady’s-magazine fluff because too much is at stake here. Shahes has to learn to give up some power in order to have healthy relationships: “Everybody has to learn how to be married” (248). Throughout the story, Le Guin’s narrative deftly balances hard and soft, hot and cold, and demonstrates how courtship and marriage involve an interweaving of interpersonal knowledge.

What’s the Matter with Seggri?

Historically, a number of women writers have examined cultures where men and women live separately. For instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) continues to receive recognition. In the latter half of the twentieth century, in response to the second wave of the Women’s Movement, separating the sexes became a popular science-fictional subgenre. In 1974, Suzi McKee Charnas began her Motherlines tetralogy with A Walk to the End of the World. Joanna Russ’s The Female Man appeared in 1975; Pamela Sargent published The Shore of Women in 1986, and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country followed in 1988.

In response, Le Guin’s 1994 Tiptree Award–winning novella, “The Matter of Seggri,” explores a planet where men and women are segregated because a genetic defect causes a sixteen-to-one ratio of healthy female to male births. She makes it clear, however, that removing men from political leadership does not eliminate abuses of power. Because separation of the sexes upsets the natural balance, it cannot create the utopian world some authors have envisioned. As in earlier stories, the genetic defect may have been triggered by early Hainish genetic engineering gone awry. Yude, a Hainish mobile observer remarks, “My ancestors must have really had fun playing with these people’s chromosomes. I feel guilty even if it was a million years ago” (255). Throughout her fiction, Le Guin warns of the dangers of tampering with the balance of nature. In her Introduction to this story in The Birthday of the World, Le Guin remarks that Seggri was inspired by a report on worldwide gender imbalances “that persistent abortion and infanticide of female fetuses and babies are causing in some parts of the world” (ix). On Seggri, men are few and protected in castles while women are many and live in motherhouses. Men have fame and privilege; women have agency. Women do all the meaningful work and make all the political decisions while men are treated like prized breeding stock. Life in the motherhouses borders on utopian, but life in the castles is physically and emotionally dangerous: Sports brutality is encouraged; education is forbidden; men have few personal rights and no protection from bullying, hazing and sexual abuse, problems that remain issues in college fraternities today. In other words, Seggri is “a terrible place to be a man” (34). Day-to-day male and female interaction is taboo, and all heterosexual sex occurs in “fuckeries,” where it is initiated and paid for by women. Like Always Coming Home (1985), the story is structured in a series of anthropological first-person narratives set over a period of many generations as the genetic defect begins to be repaired, and the culture begins to move toward a healthier balancing of genders. Here, as in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1975), Le Guin returns to the question of whether the happiness of the many justifies the suffering of a few and how cultures maintain abusive secrets through no-talk norms. She concludes, “That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence” (287).

For Those Who Love “Solitude”

“Solitude” (1994), which won the Nebula Award in 1996, is set on Eleven-Soro, a post-disaster world, where the few survivors form a loose society of introverts, women and men living separately and rarely communicating except at a distance or for sex. Like other stories, this consists of the anthropological notes of an Ekumen mobile who brings her children to the newly rediscovered planet and succeeds in establishing a connection and understanding the culture in ways previous male observers could not, finding a matriarchal culture that centered on mindfulness or being aware. Here Le Guin may be referencing the effective techniques and patience of female primate researchers such as Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Le Guin’s fictional marriages sometimes work in unexpected ways. In “Solitude,” she looks at another marital possibility, suggesting that men and women living separately can still experience tender moments—if only moments—of sexual intimacy. To understand this story, it is valuable to consider that “Soro” can be heard as “sorrow” and “Eleven” reflects Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, which explores the relationship between emptiness and possibility: “We mould clay into a pot,/but it is the emptiness inside/that makes the vessel useful” (30). On Eleven-Soro, the emptiness of solitude is sometimes sorrow, but for those within the safety of matriarchal community, there is freedom, possibility, and time to watch the stars.

Five Ways to Forgiveness

In 1995, Le Guin won the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, a response to her collection of linked novellas, Four Ways to Forgiveness. It was followed in 1999 with a fifth linked novella, “Old Music and the Slave Women.” In the Library of America volume, the novellas are presented chronologically and are followed by a section of notes on the planets of Werel and Yeowe. Their focus is on the traumatic effects of war, concluding that the only way to end cultural violence is through the long and difficult process of achieving moral maturity. In 1995, Le Guin was 66; her writing had come a long way since Rocannon’s World. Her focal question here was, “How can humans, who make disastrous mistakes in judgement, use these mistakes to become better people and use this hard won wisdom to help others in the future?”

Betrayals: Yoss dealing with Loss

Thirty-one years after the publication of Rocannon’s World, romance still remains in Le Guin’s playbook, but now it is the romance of senior citizens, a complicated weaving of hard and soft, hot and cold in internal and external imagery. Le Guin’s novella “Betrayals” (1994) can be seen as a thought experiment regarding loss, forgiveness and redemption through nurture—an older woman who, through no fault of her own, has been deprived of the chance to nurture her daughter and her daughter’s children because they have left on a NAFAL flight for a planet 80 light-years away. She considers herself dead to them and them to her. She wonders how she can be dead to the people with whom she identifies without becoming dead to herself. Writer Natalie Angier describes women’s continued need to nurture as “mother hunger,” “a primal trait of womanness” (Angier 258). Yoss, whose name sounds like “loss,” is 60 and has a mother hunger that has moved into depression. Before her retirement, she was a teacher and administrator, a competent person. Note that “Betrayals” is plural. Although she thinks deeply and cares about others, Yoss has been betrayed a number of times—by her daughter, by the Agricultural Plantation Corporation that has destroyed good farmland by overfertilizing and cultivation, and by a neocolonial culture that does not value older individuals:

Growing old, the people of Werel and Yeowe might turn to silence, as their religion recommended them to do: when their children were grown, when they had done their work as householder and citizen, when as their body weakened their soul might make itself strong, they left their life behind and came empty-handed to lonely places. (7)

Yeowe, recently liberated from a slave system, has no cultural history of equal opportunities or rights, and isolates older citizens, essentially putting them out to pasture at a time when they need connection most. Furthermore, the culture loses the wisdom and expertise of those they have isolated. The predominant religion is one of convenient self-sacrifice. Yeowe sounds like Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God, “I Am that I Am” or “The Name that Cannot Be Spoken” although mythology of the warrior god Kamye and the goddess Tual as described in the Arkamye seems more Hindu or Persian than Hebrew. Le Guin discusses this in more detail in her “Notes on Werel and Yeowe” (577). It is a world informed by colonialism with corresponding masculinist values and religion. Although Yoss realizes the importance of finding personal peace within a world that is constantly at war, her persistent depression and negative self-talk interfere with the process. To get beyond her loss, she must rethink the erroneous cultural values that entrap her. Although her original intent was to memorize scriptures and purify her soul, the values represented in the scriptures do not make sense to her, and she finds herself increasingly drawn back into the world and into the lives of the villagers. As the story begins, she, unwilling to let a Romeo and Juliet story play out tragically, has already broken a local norm by giving two young lovers, the children of two feuding families, the sexual privacy of her house. Yoss’s neighbor, the emotionally and physically ailing Chief Abberkam, was previously a “hero of the Liberation, leader of the World Party” but now a dishonored politician who attempts a retreat similar to her own, externalizing his personal shame through loud heart-rending prayers to his swordsman god, Lord Kamye. In response to the conspicuous consumption of previous propertarian Owners, the new national culture tends toward an austere Marxist disavowal of personal property. Yoss, a feminist unawares, struggles with her various attachments to worldly comforts. Her resentment of “Owners” in general makes her like to see “any chief go down” (330). She initially thinks, “what do I care if he’s sick or not?” (326). Nevertheless, his need draws her into caring for him, where she cannot accept her increasing attraction for him. Essentially they have both been betrayed: they live in an emotionally cold, damaged world, so it is not surprising that they unconsciously seek a place of warmth between them. In seeking their own souls, they must forgive each other as well as themselves, and, in doing so, become soulmates, a much healthier choice than living alone in prayer and contemplation.

Solly Works through Folly and Forgiveness

“Forgiveness Day” continues Le Guin’s examination of power and powerlessness, via the Revolution on Yeowe—this time from the viewpoint of its sister planet Werel. At issue here is “Chapter 38” of the Tao and the differences between following the Way, doing good, and merely being obedient. Originally Yeowe was colonized by Werel, creating a planet of plantations with a four-fifths slave population until John Brown–like uprisings evolve into full-fledged civil war. Intermixing tropes from the American South, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the British Empire, Le Guin once again taps the despair she felt during the Vietnam War: “a war in which there was no justice, no reward, and never even an illusion of ultimate victory” (364). The viewpoint is through the eyes of another set of literally star-crossed lovers, Solly and Teyeo. Solly, who grew up a space brat, has come to the planet for her first job as an Ekumen mobile; smart, headstrong, and opinionated, she does not like to follow direction. Major Teyeo, her guard, has been brought up on Werel in a military family with strict discipline and essentialist chauvinism. Sexes are separated, and women are considered property. He values his military code of honor and the importance of right behavior. He is still grieving his wife who died of the same fever that nearly killed Abberkam. As is common in romance, Solly and Teyeo are attracted to each other, but their disparate viewpoints initially strike interpersonal sparks. When Solly begins an immodest affair with an actor, Teyeo’s straight-laced embarrassment allows for some of Le Guin’s sexiest writing.

Lacking a mature adult’s caution, Solly, whose name combines the words Silly and Folly, is kidnapped when, against the warnings of Old Music, her embassy’s director of intelligence, she participates in what appears to be a harmless Forgiveness Day bonfire. (It is important to note that the Tao considers rituals very low on its continuum of moral behavior. Like Dalzul in “Dancing to Ganam,” Solly’s vanity and curiosity seduce her away from her real work as a mobile.) Solly and Teyeo are captured by terrorists, beaten, starved, and nearly killed. Teyeo is a good man, but his upbringing and military experience have left him stuck in a moral place where he recognizes that his allegiance to his government is wasted, but he does not know any other way to be. In her rendering of the Tao, Le Guin describes obedience as “the dry husk of loyalty and good faith,” “a mind closed to fruitful perception and learning” (53). After Teyeo meets Old Music, his awareness of other possibilities expands. Solly is correspondingly stuck in the need to have her opinions vindicated and has not yet learned that predictions for the future will be faulty (folly) unless grounded in patience and long observation, reflecting the Taoist wisdom of “not doing.” Making assumptions is “the beginning of ignorance” (53). Others translate this as “folly”: “Knowledge of the future is only/ a flowery trapping of Tao. /It is the beginning of folly” (Feng). During their captivity, Solly’s interactions with Teyeo are emotionally fruitful and lead to raised consciousness and increased moral maturity for both of them. (For more on this, see my Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development [2012]).

“A Man of the People” Learns the Dance of Diplomacy

In “A Man of the People” (1995), Le Guin continues her examination of gender equality, attachment and power through the viewpoint of the Hainish, a people known for their modesty and self-discipline. Havzhiva grows up on Hain in a matrilineal, nearly utopian community on the island of Stse (which may be similar to the Scottish Isle of Sky—there are cairns although the villages are called pueblos). On Stse, women usually remain with their birth families after conception and uncles function as fathers. The religion is humanistic and naturalistic. The name for a local bird, the araha, is also the name for the human spirit:

Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one’s gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine. (409)

Le Guin creates a balance of air and earth elements by giving boys strong, earthy names such as Havzhiva (which means “ringed pebble”) or Granite (408). Girls are given bird names. Sexuality is closely linked to self-restraint, and all conception is planned. In order to solve the “First Heterosexual Problem” of unwanted pregnancy, beginning at age thirteen boys are taught to control their release of sperm (424). This technique is the result of genetic experimentation over twenty-five generations. Children are provided guidance in becoming sexual, and losing virginity is an event that is carefully planned and described as becoming “gods together” (411). This attachment, however, is so profound that loss of a partner can cause individuals to lose their araha and die of grief unless they can be pulled back with a staying chant. Unlike “Coming of Age in Karhide” where mature adults often provide a catalyst for blooming sexuality, the limitation of first sex to same age peers eliminates power differentials:

A grown man who made sexual advances to a virgin or either sex would forfeit his professional status, his religious offices, and his houseright. (412)

Havzhiva, who comes from a family where the men are weavers, leaves home to become a historian. Within the Ekumen, the study of history involves a cognitive weaving of ideas which is informed by self-knowledge, education, and recognition of multiple intelligences:

Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, and rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned. (423)

The “qualities, penalties, and rewards” mentioned above are characteristic of all of Le Guin’s cultures, even those that seem to be guided by utopian ideals. What is best for the ecological balance in the world may not be best for specific individuals.

When Havzhiva becomes an envoy, his first job is on Yeowe just after its thirty year War of Liberation has ended while fierce fighting continues between chiefs and warlords. Before he leaves, Old Music, the head of embassy intelligence, cautions him:

“If you want danger, it’s dangerous,” he said, “and if you like hope, it’s hopeful. Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe’s trying to make itself. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed. I tell you what, Yehedarhed Havzhiva: there are great gods loose on these worlds. (431)

The “great gods” mentioned above are dangerous ones similar to what was occurring in “The Word for World is Forest” after murder is loosed in Eden. Utopian society must be stable to endure. Dystopias depend on an externally mandated stability (the trains must run on time or heads will roll). But on Yeowe, values are up for grabs, and various forces are warring for control. In writing this story, Le Guin may well have been inspired by the aftermath of The Gulf War (2 August 1990—28 February 1991). Like Baghdad, Yeowe’s capital city remains dangerous, and Havzhiva makes a mistake in judgment that nearly kills him. Fortunately, he is helped by an experienced woman doctor, now relegated to nurse, and Solly, now a respected ambassador. The essential focus of these linked novellas is that those who make mistakes and learn from them are then prepared to help others. Havzhiva as Ekumenical Advisor to the Ministry of Social Justice is set to become an essential part of a movement to gain women’s equality and correspondingly rid the planet of barbarous coming of age rituals. Here his name, Havzhiva, which can be heard as Half Shiva, begins to have significance. In The Telling, Le Guin describes Shiva “the greatest dancer in the universe” who danced “worlds into being and out of being” (727). Correspondingly, successful political action for good is a very sophisticated diplomatic dance that requires nimble footwork, the press-forward and push-away of verbal tai chi, an effective use of diplomacy that is able to reconcile opposites and create change without violence. The basic assumption is that when the Tao is fully understood, violence is no longer an inevitable part of political change.

“A Woman’s Liberation,” the Aftermath of Slavery and Sexual Abuse

“A Woman’s Liberation” (1995) reflects Le Guin’s research regarding the difficult aftereffects of slavery and sexual abuse, examined through a Marxist lens. It is written as a memoir, resembling American nineteenth-century slave narratives like those of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs and their depictions of the demeaning aspects of human enslavement. As in the antebellum American South, pre-liberation plantations on Werel are composed of owners and assets. Controls are extrinsic, and roles are unquestioned. Le Guin presupposes that if the cognitive language for intrinsic self-control does not exist, then when slaves are freed without adequate education, chaos will occur. Slave “Bosses” will recreate power structures that may be even more abusive than before. (Orwell also depicts this pattern in Animal Farm [1945]). Freed slaves lack skills for governance within a community of equal rights. They must learn the language of equality as if they were infants. As a child, Rakam, the viewpoint character, is sexually used by her owner, Lady Tazeu, for pederasty and the moral equivalent of incest. Later she is repeatedly raped after her community of slaves is freed, abandoned, and then illegally reacquired. Eventually, she escapes to work as a free woman, gain education as a teacher and historian, and become part of the emerging nonviolent women’s liberation movement. Even though her abuse has ended, she hates her sexual self and struggles to develop an internalized right to say yes and no to touch and pleasure. Le Guin’s depiction is grounded in contemporary feminist research. The aftereffects of sexual abuse are well documented. Research cited in Blume’s Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and its Aftereffects in Women (1990) and Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) argues that rape and incest damage the basic structures of the self. Those who have been sexually abused lose the ability to trust themselves and others. The imbalance of power leads to emotional trauma that exists long after the abuse ends. When Rakam’s vocal role in the women’s movement endangers her, Old Music helps her escape to Yeowe where she eventually meets Havzhiva. Together they continue their human rights work. Her memoir, written at Havzhiva’s request, reveals a feminist Marxist with a high level of moral consciousness:

I can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power. (469)

She concludes that “It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery” (517).

Listening to Old Music

“Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999) continues Le Guin’s examination of war and nonviolent response. It takes place during the continuing war for liberation after Esdardon Aya (Old Music) has lived on Werel for 33 years, an interesting length of time which connects both with the sacrifice of Christ and with the length of Le Guin’s publication career. He is 62 years old. Since the breakdown of centralized government, various factions are competing for dominance. Although Old Music is known for his wisdom and caution, he is kidnapped by a group of intransigent owners, “The Legitimate Army of Voe Deo,” remnants of the Veot military caste, who want to force Ekumen permission to use a biological bomb that would end the war. Old Music is imprisoned and tortured on the burned and looted Yaramera plantation, a once great estate with the remains of an elegant three-hundred-room house. In describing Old Music’s experience of torture, Le Guin makes clear that no one is immune from the violence spawned by revolution: “During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire” (521). “In war everybody is a prisoner” (552). After he is released from torture in a crouch cage hung in a courtyard, he is able to use his significant interpersonal skills to connect with the bondswomen who still live in the wreckage. Old Music may be Le Guin’s wisest, most compassionate protagonist. He views the women with considerable insight:

deprived of education, options, any imagination of freedom.... He had forgotten the utter impenetrability of the person who has no private life, the intactness of the wholly vulnerable. (533)

Despite seeing the women’s limitations, he also sees their considerable strength. Correspondingly, he gains insight into himself and how he has had to function, putting aside his “pure idea of liberty” to be involved in the incredibly slow process of subverting erroneous ideas to creating real cultural change one person at a time (558):

To muddle the nobly simple structure of the hierarchy of caste by infecting it with the idea of justice. And then to confuse the nobly simple structure of the ideal of human equality by trying to make it real. (558)

Dancing the Tao in The Telling

The Telling (2000) won the 2001 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the 2001 Endeavour Award, which recognizes distinguished sf/f novels by writers who live in the Pacific Northwest. The somewhat slow pace and interstitial, carrier bag nature of this novel did not create the same amount of fan support as some of Le Guin’s earlier work; however, it stands as an elegant distillation of traditional wisdom regarding human health and well-being as well as the importance of creating meaning through stories. The novel follows Sutty, a young Terran of mixed British and Indian ancestry, who has been sent as an Ekumen Observer to recover the literature of the planet Aka. Her ancestry is important because Le Guin uses Indian imagery and symbolism to structure the novel including apparent references to Ayurveda, the ancient Hindu system of seeking good health through yoga, natural remedies, and food intake intended to match seasonal digestive needs. Sutty’s name sounds like sati or suttee, a Hindu custom where a widow commits suicide by throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, a practice occurring in the Sikh warrior aristocracy until the nineteenth century. Sutty was named for Sati, Shiva’s lover who died of grief because her father opposed her marriage, Shiva/Sati are seen as one, together forming an androgynous god: “Sati is Shiva and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance” (727). Like many viewpoint characters in Le Guin’s earlier fiction, Sutty is grieving a lost love, in this case the violent death of her lover, Pao, whom she had not been allowed to marry because of fundamentalist control of Terran government. The story follows Sutty’s grieving process as she reclaims health and purpose in her life. Le Guin’s name for Sutty’s lost love is important. In Chinese, “Pao” means “something of value” or “a little gift” and is featured in the Tao Te Ching, what Le Guin calls “the most lovable of all the great religious texts” (Tao, x). Sutty has lost the loving center of her life because as part of a “Holy War,” a splinter group of Unist Fundamentalists bombed the library where Pao was studying (734). These are the same folks who in the name of “educational action,” also bombed the Library of Congress with a squadron of planes called “the Host of God” (593). (Like the Peacemaker missiles of the Cold War, such euphemisms reflect Le Guin’s cynical condemnation of repurposing religious mythology to hide self-serving militarist action.)

In her preface to the original Harcourt publication, Le Guin writes that she based this book on her long-time love for the Tao as well as “the silent enormity” of the destruction of Taoism in China:

The seed of this novel lies, as often with my books, in Taoism, but this time not in ancient texts but in recent history. Chairman Mao drove Taoism as a religion outside China or underground destroying three millennia of spiritual tradition in a decade or two. Trying to grasp this silent enormity, my imagination began to displace it, to tell it as a story. And the telling of the story became the central image of the story itself. (n.p.)

Sutty carries the “silent enormity” of her own grief as she attempts to find and protect the last literature of an ancient culture that has for the most part been destroyed by the Corporation that colonized Aka. Sutty’s anger and grief have turned inward to become psychosomatic illness. She suffers from nightmares and flashbacks, and she sees herself being punished like the lovers in Dante’s Hell (591).

When Le Guin named her planet Aka, she may have been remembering akâs, the Hindu term for “the energy that flows through and unites creation” (Warner 196), but it is also important to recognize that the name Aka can be read as A.K.A. or “also known as.” Le Guin is clearly writing about issues she sees as endangering human survival here and now. The Akan capitol of Dovza, a Corporation-controlled society, is characterized by mass-produced items of often inferior quality where “everything breaks down on schedule” (18). When Sutty eats the readily available Corporation-approved processed foods, akin to our energy bars and coffee, she must take “akagests” to soothe her aching stomach (8). Furthermore, although Sutty, a linguist and a historian, was sent to Aka to study its literature, during the seventy-five Aka years her ship was in transit, corporate fundamentalists, under the influence of Unist missionaries from Earth, destroyed most of its literature, claiming it was “rotting corpse” superstition (8), pulping them to make insulating material for new buildings (20). Literature has been reduced to self-help books, heroic propaganda and the omnipresent, soap opera–like “neareals.” Similar to Athshea, the original Akan culture had been static, decentralized and spiritual, and it was initially powerless against the out-of-control corporate capitalism that accompanied the Unist Fathers.

In search of lost literature, Sutty makes a spiritual pilgrimage into the mountains where she meets her nemesis, Yara, a Monitor from the Central Ministry of Poetry whose job is to find books and burn them. Yara is living out his own story of betrayal and is more sympathetically portrayed than Le Guin’s earliest villains. The end of Sutty’s river journey is in Okzat-Ozkat, a small city in the foothills of the mountains. Rather than brutal, dangerous reactionary activity, Sutty finds the remnants of what was once a utopian culture. In her essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” (1976), Le Guin writes of “a dystopia which contains a hidden or implied utopia.” Unlike the constant physical discomfort she experienced in Dovza, the capital, Sutty discovers folkways to promote health and create emotional balance that have been honed to perfection by centuries of use. She realizes that she has come to this world to learn its tune “and dance its dance” (649). Away from Dovza’s “endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and learn how to move to it” (649). Like the reversed pattern of consonants in Okzat-Ozkat, this small mountain city offers a yin-yang of eating and exercise that promotes optimal health and well-being. The ancient wisdom, which is symbolized by a tree of life that unifies roots, mountain, and clouds, represents a cycle of stories called the Telling. The Telling is identified as being of similar importance to Hainish history—both being ways “of keeping things sacred” or “true” (710–11). Discovering and protecting this last cache of scrolls becomes Sutty’s sacred mission. To do this, she must thwart Yara’s efforts to destroy it, but she recognizes that any use of force would be self-defeating; she is limited to her training as Ekumen historian and observer. Like the Shobies, Old Music, and Havzhiva before her, Sutty uses the persuasive power of talk and story to create a shared reality that makes a difference.

Conclusion: Perception, Compassion, Hope

Essentially Le Guin’s Hainish series is informed by evolving thought experiments regarding conflicting energies of utopia and dystopia. Dystopian energies include greed, inequality, rigidity, might makes right, and bigotry. Utopian energies include acceptance of gender, support for healthy families, human equality, and a clean, unstressed natural environment. In her important essay, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” (1982), she defines the elements of a sustainable utopia as

a society with a modest standard of living, conservative of natural resources, with a low constant fertility rate and a political life based upon consent; a society that has made a successful adaptation to its environment and has learned to live without destroying itself or the people next door. (Dancing 96)

A culture such as this works against contemporary capitalist values regarding the necessity of a high level of personal wealth and technological progress. In “On Not Reading Science Fiction” (1994), Le Guin explains that a technological edge should not be mistaken for moral superiority: “The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance” (760). In The Telling, Le Guin defines utopia as “the sweetness of ordinary life lived mindfully” (689). It manifests by a sense of sacred community that honors living lightly and leaving no footprints in the dust. Although her Hain have advanced technology, it is shared technology. Living simply in community is far more important than cell phones and computers. Of course, maintaining this kind of modest utopia requires considerable cultural self-restraint, and it has taken three million years for the Hain to get there. Le Guin’s real-life experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries includes recognition of the selfish forces that work constantly against utopian balance. In reading these stories, it becomes apparent that Le Guin frequently writes out of a place of anger. When inhumanity infuriates her, a voice forms in her mind that responds to real-world injustices, and she builds a culture where these injustices can be isolated and examined. Although these stories provide solutions, they aren’t easy solutions. She is too aware of human history to allow the easy fix for happily ever after. Nevertheless, this series taken as a whole provides some of the most definitive literary thinking of the last century. In her 1972 National Book Award acceptance speech, Le Guin concluded, “As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is by imagination that we achieve perception, compassion and hope” (Language 58). Through imagination and perception, Le Guin created the Hain to embody these qualities, a culture with the power to see the human universe as it is and still regard it with compassion and hope. The Hainish gave us time travel and instant universal communication. Before the twentieth century, the Hainish did not exist, but now through the magic of both they do.

After a short illness, Le Guin died January 22, 2018. She was 88. Her most recent publication is a collection of short essays, No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters (2017), with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler. More will be forthcoming. Editor Brian Attebery reports that the Library of America next plans to publish a definitive edition of Le Guin’s most significant carrier bag, Always Coming Home (1985), her experiment in moving away from traditional plot structures to write “in the mother tongue” (Dancing 149). Upcoming will also be Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a documentary by Arwen Curry, and an authorized biography by Julie Philips. Stay tuned.

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Sandra Lindow lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

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