There!! Finally finished off the last of these 2/11/25.
Same spoiler warning as last time.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975)
Semley's Necklace.
It's the first chapter of "Rocannon's World".
UKL put it out as a short story first before she sprouted it into "Rocannon".
If you've read "Rocannon" there's northing new here for you. Except the intro by UKL.
...which basically says what I just said.
Winter's King.
This inspired "The Left Hand Of Darkness" but on the timeline, I think it's a sequel.
Time-dilation is a big factor, so it kind of mirrors "Semley" except Semley doesn't know she's about to time warp, and Argaven does.
Vaster Than Empires And More Slow.
In the time period just after "Rocannon's World" a crew of zany misfits who'd be at home in "Farscape" take a NAFAL (nearly as fast as light) ship out farther than they've ever gone.
Spoiler.
They proceed to find the only alien-alien in the Hainish-verse.
See, all the humanoid races of The Hainish Descent (the correct term, according to UKL) are human lineage. Or, genetically tinkered with by the ancient Hain, like the Gethens and the Athshe.
Anyway! Here they find a planet with flora but no fauna, and every tree, flower, and blade of grass is a braincell in a giant brain.
The giant plant-brain is scared of them, and transmitting its fear, and driving them insane.
A giant group plant consciousness; that's pretty much The Green from Swamp Thing.
UKL invented The Green. Alan Moore invented nothing. I fucking love it. 😎
A favorite of the whole series. I could read it again and again. 😁
Loved it even more in context with "Revolution".
The second time with UKL's intro made it so much better.
I gotta say, it changed my fucking life.
As much as "The Dispossessed".
So yeah, "Vaster" and "Revolution" alone make this whole book a winner.
But we're not done yet...
Then we've got two Earthsea stories.
-The Word of Unbinding.
-The Rule of Names.
I'm deeply confident they'll repeat in the Earthsea collection, so I'll review them there when the time comes.
I will say this. After a 36 year pause, I'm an Earthsea fan again. 😁
It's like that part of me NAFAL-ed here right from 1989, and didn't miss a beat. 😎👍
Then there were ten self-contained ones.
Of those, my top faves were..
1. April in Paris
2. Direction of the Road
3. Darkness Box
4. Nine Lives
They were cute. Like decent Twilight Zone episodes.
Altogether, this book is high on the list. You'll see at the very end.
Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two (2017)
The Word For World Is Forest (1972)
Skip!
Well...
Le Guin mentions in the intro its resemblance to Avatar. She dances around actually saying "Avatar" but she makes it pretty damned clear what movie she means. I've got the interview on hard copy! It's canon in the collection!!
Yus!! Rawk!! 😎🎸
A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea (1994)
The Shobies’ Story.
From here on out, we're post-LHOD on the timeline.
This and its two sequels are about development of churten tech.
Basically, upgrading the ansible (FTL transmitter) into a matter teleporter, which in turn becomes a starship drive.
Churten is the Cetian word.
The Cetians being the race that develop the ansible in "The Dispossessed".
The test ship is the Shoby. The crew call themselves Shobies.
They're going to be the first humanoids churtening.
Among the crew are Gveter, an Anneresi, the anarchist sub-culture of the Cetians from "The Dispossessed".
And, a family of Gethens from LHOD.
Gveter finds the ship's luxurious accommodations "excremental".
Oh, Anneresi, how I missed you. 😍😁🥰
Conversely, Earth/Terra still has a fucking money economy. 🙄
Le Guin; less optimistic than Gene Roddenberry, but still more optimistic than Frank Herbert. 😏
They talk about crews on long 500 year NAFAL missions (back in "the League days") who were picked for their madness.
So, backhand reference to "Vaster".
So, everything Hainish up to now is Easter-egg-ed in.
Anyway!! The observer effect fucks up their churten, and reality splits, and it's like an anomaly episode of ST:Voyager.
But Le Guin, so way better. 😁👍
Hey! Maybe George Orr was churtened.
😎
Dancing to Ganam.
It picks right up right after "Shobies’ Story".
One character from "Shobies" carries over into the new crew.
Their new captain is Dalzul, and the ship is the Galba.
The Galba crew sings a song together as a test of "entrainment".
Syncing themselves to a common task to not have "a chaos experience" as it's called now.
Things seem to go okay, but Dalzul is received as a God, and has a princess throw herself at him, and it's like a little boy's adventure fantasy, and the rest of the crew wonders if Dalzul's mind didn't create this with the churtening.
I won't spoil the end.
But, it occurs to me; Dalzul's power fantasy (or is it?) resembles Rocannon's experience.
Not perfectly mirrors, but certain tropes are definitely there.
You could see this as UKL looking back on and snarking at Rocannon.
Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.
Our protagonist/narrator: Tiokunan'n Hideo from planet O.
He's telling the whole story to the churten scientists on Ve.
O is UKL's big kinky sex planet she further explores in "Birthday Of The World".
They have four to seven way marriages that get more complicated than those of Denobulans.
And they get bisexual and homosexual.
All combos possible.
We hear the fable of the fisherman of the inland sea.
It's basically Rip Van Winkle meets Little Mermaid.
The Rip Van Winkle part makes it like a time dilation story.
Hideo joins the Ekumen, then gets involved with developing Churten physics.
We see it as a platform beamer before it becomes a starship drive, and rise up through all its phases like the Iron Man suit.
Hideo goes back home to planet O to set up equipment to beam back to planet Ve to test long-range human beaming
"Shobies" and "Ganam" happen in the background along the way.
Hideo beams to Ve, and it works.
He beams back to O, and accidentally goes back in time to when he left for the Ekumen academy.
I won't spoil what happens next.
Each one of these gets better than the last.
Le Guin shook the Hainish Descent cobwebs off, then found her groove.
Added up, the "Fisherman" trilogy is exactly 100 pages.
Exactly as long as "Planet Of Exile" and one page more than "Rocannon's World".
The Birthday Of The World (2002)
Unchosen Love.
One of two sequels to "Fisherman".
Well, "sequels" insofar that they're on planet O.
The events of "Fisherman" never come up.
We start with a bigger more detailed description of the four way marriages, or sedoretu, from a letter from some planet O official.
What follows is a story with a fairy tale twist.
Sedoretu Cinderella. 😉😏
Eh...cute.
Well, "cute" to my progressive ass, but fucking radical by the standards of MAGA book-burner morons.
I could picture this as a somber anime short in an anthology film.
Mountain Ways.
Second of two "sequels" to "Fisherman".
Planet O again.
A lesbian couple wants to get married, but on O you HAVE to have the boy-girl-boy-girl soderetu to marry at all.
What results is like a Tenchi Muyo or Ranma style sex/romance farce.
UKL does anime romance comedy!!
I would watch the shit out of an anime sitcom of "Mountain Ways". 😁
That being said, neither of these was as good as "Fisherman".
Book or story.
Only connection was planet O.
UKL just wanted to play around with the soderetu some more.
I get the sense she had as much fun with soderetu as the ansible or the churten. 😆
The Matter of Seggri.
A series of stories and diaries across a couple centuries on planet Seggri.
Seggri is a female dominated planet where not enough men are born.
16-1 in women's favor.
Men are sent off to training centers that look like castles where they get buff, or die.
Then they compete in these games that are a cross between NFL and soccer with war reenactment sized teams.
Champions of the games get put out to stud in breeding brothels called fuckeries.
Champions are expensive, so there's tiers going down to fat old guys who are way past their prime, but still have good sperm.
Store brand fuckery. 😏
Anyway! The sub-stories are...
-An ancient pre-NAFAL Hainish ship goes to Seggri, and reports on the basics of their society.
-A female Ekumen agent passes among the Seggri, and reports on the finer details.
The Seggri women are very earthy and openly sexual. Especially at the games. I think UKL's point here is the whole "ladylike" bit of jazz actually comes from patriarchy.
-A Seggri woman tells of growing up with a brother, and how he was taken away to the castles, and never seen again. Very heartbreaking.
-A cheesy bodice-ripper romance written by a Seggri woman fantasizing about stealing a guy from a fuckery to live with her. It's fuckery Twilight. 😆
-A diary of a Seggri man who lived to see men liberated. He ends up joining the Ekumen.
He's been through 200 years of time-dilation, and wants to go back to Seggri to see how its changed. We never find out.
Lotta black comedy to this one.
The message is dead serious, but it's simultaneously funny, like Robocop, or Starship Troopers.
Definitely my favorite of this bunch.
Solitude.
An Ekumen woman with kids takes her family down to planet Eleven-Soro to fit in with the natives and study them.
The daughter, Serenity, as an adult is narrating.
Serenity ("Ren" to her friends) and her brother, Borny, are getting so immersed in the culture, they're getting absorbed.
Ren speaks the native language so much, she's forgetting Hainish, and has trouble understanding her mother.
It gradually becomes apparent the Sorovians are radical individualists.
What the Ayn Randers and Sovereign Citizens wish they were.
Persuasion and authority are viewed as "working magic" and magic is to be avoided.
Boys learn to be men, and to be a man is to be a total hermit.
Men "work magic" for mating, and the women play the game.
Building technology is magic, because it's working your will on the world, and when you get up to ships and guns, projecting your will onto others.
Like fucking America.
So!! It's like if every libertarian enema bag you know put their money where their mouths are, and went to Colorado; then the Sorovians would be their aeon later descendants.
But libertarian asswipes are frauds with fat yaps full of hot air.
So this is UKL going "IF!! The Randroids got their shit together...".
Heheh!! So the kids getting sucked in is the CHUD pipeline.
😏
Leaf finally decides "enough of this shit" and calls down the ship, and gets them the fuck out of there. They go back to Hain, and the son snaps out of it, but Ren doesn't.
From Ren- "Nothing is right that puts me in your power! 😡😭".
Fuuuuuck!! That's the internet Randroid's whole fucking shtick, and fuck is it irritating, like it is here.
Ask Ren about trans people, Leaf.
😏😈
Ope, Ren met a Gethen, named Arrem, and called them "heshe" for pronoun, and accepted heshe.
Good luck getting that out of a fucking internet libertarian. 🙄
Finally, they have to give in, and drop Ren off on Soro or she'll fucking kill herself.
We see the rest of her life lived out on Soro.
At one point, she's goes wandering, and another girl (a pregnant one) moves into her house while she was away, but she doesn't care, because Sorovians aren't attached to things.
LOL!!
Randroids are hopelessly attached to things. They'll gut you for so much as putting a greasy fingerprint on their stereo. 😆
Le Guin really is totally telling Ayn Rand to fuck off and die here.
This is me and my friends telling Internet Libertarian Douche to put up or shut up in long-form.
I loved the shit out of this. 😁
Yeah, even if UKL was momentarily fascinated/enticed by "radical individualism" her version of it absolutely does not and will never exist.
At least fucking Anarchism exists!
That "rugged individualist" shit's been screaming howling bullshit since "Little House On The Prairie".
But I've got a whole separate post brewing about that. 😉😏
Definitely has to be taken as a satire of Randism.
This is a fave.
Its just behind "Seggri" by this > < much.
Coming of Age in Karhide.
This doesn't come in the collection book, but it did originally come in the separate edition of "The Birthday Of The World" so I tracked it down on PDF so I will have read every scrap of the Hainish-verse with no pesky remainders kicking around.
Okay, so this picks up after "Winter's King" in TWTQ.
But not enough that it's vital, it's just a nice little shout out.
TLDR; this is like a middle-school puberty movie for kemmer (the Gethenian gender-selection mating cycle).
We see the protagonist/narrator's first kemmer party, and it's not just a cake party; they're gonna get de-flowered at the kemmerhouse.
Basically a fuckery.
A fuckery by any other name....
Yeah, I revise that, it's a health film that turns porno.
We didn't need it. Kemmerhouses were best left to the imagination in LHOD.
IMHO.
For once, I agree with the critics; this story wasn't necessary.
I can live without this in the collection, or in hard copy at all just fine.
I'm happy with what I've got.
Yeah, the planet O ones were cute, "Karhide" is "meh" but Seggri and Solitude are the real gold nuggets.
My head-canon is to mash "Fisherman" and "Birthday" together as one book, and it all makes a nice even third trilogy.
Five Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
"Four Ways To Forgiveness" came out in 1995.
"Old Music and the Slave Women" came out in "Birthday Of The World" in 2002.
"Four Ways" was re-released as "Five Ways" with "Slave Women" added in 2017.
Same year as this collection.
"Five Ways" is what's in this collection.
I use the original "Four Ways" release date, cuz that's the majority of the book.
Oh, and Werel is also the planet in "Planet Of Exile" but it's not the same planet.
UKL admits she fucked up, and to pay it no mind.
So, this novel is broken up into five interconnected stories.
Those stories are.....
-Betrayals.
A former slave woman and a disgraced former revolutionary on Yeowe (a former slave colony of Werel) find peace, acceptance, and perhaps, love.
-Forgiveness Day.
An Ekuman ambassador and a former soldier on Werel get kidnapped, and find peace, acceptance, and perhaps, love. These first two deliberately mirror each other.
-A Man of the People.
An Ekumen ambassador from Hain covertly helps a feminist uprising on Yeowe.
-A Woman’s Liberation.
A former slave woman tells of her trials and tribulations, and joins the movement from "A Man Of The People" and also finds love with its protagonist.
-Old Music and the Slave Women.
Another Ekumen Hain ambassador gets kidnapped; first by defenders of slavery, then by revolutionaries. Learning the hard way that all social movements corrupt.
Trivia and observations.
Right out of the gate, we get Easter eggs for Gethen and O.
I'm gonna take a wild guess, and say Gethen and O were UKL's favorite planets. 😏
A Hainishman, Old Music, pops up in "Forgiveness Day" "A Woman’s Liberation" and "Old Music and the Slave Women".
Abberkam from "Betrayals" fought for the right cause, but fucked everything up.
Teyeo from "Forgiveness Day" did everything absolutely right, and yet realized he fought on the wrong side.
"A Man Of The People" gives us our best view of planet Hain we get in the whole series.
Hain has weird puberty rituals like O and Gethen.
Cuz UKL apparently became obsessed with puberty rituals in the latter half of these.
😏
The Ekumen means "the household".
Shout out to Ve (Fisherman trilogy world!).
Solly from "Forgiveness Day" pops up in "Man Of The People".
Her and Teyou are also mentioned in "Old Music and the Slave Women".
Hainish-verse from the 90's on has "the neareal net" which is VR.
Heh. Near-real.
The character Yeron says "no matter how few there are of us, the men will complain, and spread rumors of castrating dykes who kill boy children. And the nearreals will make us 5000 women with guns. So, let's have 5000 women then! Let's lay on the tracks, and stop the trains!".
Heh. The history of Suffragettes and misogynist propagnda all in that paragrah.
Right up to now with the pee-pee fear bullshit.
Micro-peened assholes.
Doctor Yeron and Zhiva from "Man Of The People" pop up in "A Woman's Liberation".
Final observation-
I think this one would have registered for me better if I hadn't already read Eric Hoffer.
This is Eric Hoffer in novel form.
And now there's no doubt in my mind Le Guin was Margaret Bonanno's Yoda.
The Telling (2000)
"A pure storyteller at the height of her powers"
-Peter S. Beagle (on the original cover for "The Telling").
UKL's very last comment in the intro is about the chilling way fundamentalism in America has been creeping up.
This in 2016.
So "The Telling" predicts Trumpism.
It's her "The Dead Zone".
So, the story.
An Ekumen ambassador, Sutty, takes off from Earth to planet Aka to get away from a violent religious fundie censorship movement.
But!! During the time-dilation there, Earth gets better, but planet Aka falls under a violent secularist censorship movement.
Wah-wah!! Talk about dogshit luck!
Heh, me of 10 years ago would have winced at the thought of an atheist/technocracy cult as bad as religion, but look who Dawkins/Harris/Coyne totally suck up to now.
Eric Hoffer nailed that shit like Nostradamus.
The government is called The Corporate State, and looks like the world Elon Musk wants to inflict on us; robocabs and all.
Malfunctioning shitty robocabs with fucktarded AIs.
Just like now!!!
This kind of parallels "The Dispossessed".
Except instead of an exceptional person from a utopia in shitfuck-America disguised as an alien planet, it's a slightly-above-average person thrown into a Trumpian/Muskian dystopic hellscape.
Anyhoo, Sutty has to go on a "Lord Of The Rings" sized quest to find old storytellers.
Along the way, she unravels how the Corporate State rose to power.
One little hint, the old religion hated usury.
Well, if you're a corporatist sack of shit, that just has to go!
Tidbits-
Dalzul from "Dancing To Ganam" pops up again.
In a flashback, Sutty lists all the planets she wants to go to, and they're all the big ones from the previous books/stories.
Hain, Ve, Chiffewar, Werel, Yeowe-Werel, Gethen, Urras-Annares, O.
Distinguishing Werel from Yeowe-Werel makes that whole thing canon! Yes! Fixed!
Sutty talks to one of the fanatics.
He's Federal Failure level childish and stupid.
"A true believer". Seems UKL has indeed read her Hoffer.
And yeah, Peter Beagle was right.
This was good stuff. Top form.
And, that's it for Hainish-verse, AKA The Hainish Descent.
I've read/collected the whole damned thing!
Final ranking!!
4. The Wind's Twelve Quarters
5. A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea/The Birthday Of The World
6. The Telling
10. Five Ways to Forgiveness
And that's that.
Hainish Descent keeps being my new favorite property ever.
But the Ursula Le Guin journey doesn't end there!
Next up, The Earthsea saga!!
But!! Up very next, because I couldn't squeeze it in:
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