Le Guin has fun here inventing multiple species of HILF and various societies within the species, the world-building is as complex and evocative as those subsequent texts.
scottmanleyhadley at Triumph Of The Now via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FSB Tgram https://t.me/thefreeonline/2131
Boasting the worst title of any book in Ursula K. Le Guin’s entire oeuvre, Rocannon’s World was her briliant debut novel and published in 1966.
Arguably less complex than some of the other Hainish Cycle stories, this novel has a pretty simple quest-type narrative, though the contexts and settings of it offer the impressive and evocative world-building you’d (I’d) expect from Le Guin – this may be a debut, but it isn’t juvenilia…
The eponymous Rocannon is a scientist who’s part of a exploratory expedition (working on behalf of a massive galactic empire) sent to the planet Fomalhaut II to study and survey the world and the [potential] High Intelligence Life Forms (“HILFs”) living upon it.
Unfortunately – right at the start of the novel proper (there’s a scene-setting Prologue, which is also included as a short story in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters) – everyone else Rocannon is working with dies, as their spaceship is bombed after they’ve gathered to prepare for a final meeting before heading back to the administrative centre of the universe.
This shock bombing on this undeveloped planet means only one thing: that there is a rebel base and a rebel army somewhere on the planet!
Enlisting the help of the local HILFs he’s befriended during his research, Rocannon goes on a long quest/journey to the rumoured location of what could be the rebel base, as he certain they”ll have an ansible (faster than light speed messaging equipment) which he could use to contact the people on his side in the war, and alert them to the location of this base so they could destroy it and/or rescue him.
Although messages can be sent instantaneously across the universe using this special machine, and there are weapons that may be deployed through the same wormhole-like channels, too, physical matter cannot be transported at great speed, so Rocannon is a minimum of seven full years away from any other physical presence from his society.
Continue reading “Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. le Guin”
The Free 