Rocannon's World was Ursula K. LeGuin's first published novel and is the first of her novels I have read. I've always thought that if I read Le Guin I would read The Left Hand of Darkness, since it was the big prize winner and the one everyone read back in the 1970's, during the years after it first appeared and Le Guin's reputation was on the rise. But I was not reading SF at that time, so I had only minimal interest, and, even worse, the novel always came with the dreaded recommendation, "No, even if you don't like science fiction you are going to love this book." So I never read anything and only now, with both a renewed interest in SF and a self-directed tour through those writers who have earned Grand Master Status from the Science Fiction Writers of America, am I discovering the pleasures of her prose and storytelling.Having decided to dive in, I headed straight for Left Hand but saw that it was the fifth novel in something called The Hainish Cycle. I like to start at the beginning, and in the Le Guin omnibus edition I got from the library, Rocannon's World was a tempting ninety pages long. I didn't know until after I finished and enjoyed it that in fact there are two chronologies to the Hainish Cycle, the order written and the order in which the stories are occur. I could have started anywhere, since in some cases a millennium passes between narratives, but I still like the idea to seeing how Le Guin's writing and sense of her future world develops in the real time of her composition.Ninety pages, but since I was reading a bargain omnibus edition they were longish pages. Rocannon is still a short novel, only 144 pages in its PB editions. But in those few pages, and in her first novel, Le Guin creates an small-scale epic, both a classic quest tale and a story that spans several generations. On the planet Formalhaut II, as the advanced space lords refer to the novel's local, the culture is medieval and, unusual for all the inhabited worlds they investigate, there are multiple HILF's, HIghly Intelligent Life Forms. In the prologue, Semley, child of an ancient family wedded to the Lord of Hallam, endures the fallen estate of her family -- good name but short of wealth. In a culture where display of wealth assures rank she sets out to retrieve a magnificent jewel that has somehow left the family treasure and been traded back to the Clay People who mined it. Within the first dozen pages, Semley has left her home, recruited the aid of the charming Kirien people and journeyed to the altogether less engaging caves of the Clay People. That this journey is made on large flying cats is likely to be the first narrative hurdle for readers who like their SF harder than softer. The hints of hard SF occur when the Clay People enter the action. Grungy and unappealing as they are, they live in underground cavern's equipped with electric light and railways. When Star Lords investigate new planets with multiple HILF's they chose a species most likely to accept the technological head starts that will prepare them to join the League of all Planets. The Clay People have won out on Formalhaut II. They even have a space ship, into which they bundle Semley for transport to the planet where her jewel now rests in a museum of interplanetary artifacts. There she catches the eye of Rocannon, an anthropologist employed by the League, and he easily arranges for the return of the jewel. (This was written in 1966, and I wonder when the controversies over the return of imperialist plunder from European museums began to take shape.)Upon return to Formalhaut II, Semley understands the consequences of her journey. In Le Guin's universe, FTL travel is only possible in unmanned spacecraft. Although Semley feels her trip has taken no more than a year, she returns to a home where her husband and mother-in-law have been dead for a decade and her children are grown. Her courageous and adventurous journey has secured her nothing more than a long, solitary life.That took me almost as long to tell as it does Le Guin, but it sets up the story of Rocannon's establishment decades later of a base of Formalhaut II. We learn of this base only as it is destroyed, along with Rocannon's survey team and all the work they have done. The universe is in a constant state of war preparedness, but this attack seems to have been sabotage, the first signs of divisions within The League of All Planets. Rocannon, unable to communicate with his own people, learns from satellite surveys that the enemy has established a base in the still unexplored Southern Continent. He puts together his own plucky crew of various species and it is back onto the flying cats. This is a quest adventure, that without Rocannon's, or more properly, Le Guin's eye for anthropological detail and interesting world building, would slide into adventure fantasy of a most ordinary sort. But the swiftness of her writing, the predicaments she creates for her believable multi-species characters, and also her willingness to kill off so many protagonists kept me wrapped up in a narrative that seemed much larger than its ninety pages. Before his departure, an aging Semley gives Rocannon her precious jewel, should he need it along the way. And so this absurd, medieval artifact remains as crucial to the story as the special body suit Rocannon has on hand that although it makes him appear naked allows him to survive fire and torture. When men like Rocannon join the star service, they know they are abandoning anything resembling a normal life of family or human contact. They may age slowly and inexorably as they poke about the universe, but centuries will pass on earth. Although contacts with home can be accomplished with a device capable of instantaneous communication across 120 light years, they have volunteered to become exiles in the name of science. It's the respect Le Guin feels for their choices and the fundamental loneliness of their existence that give the novel its emotional depth. And I liked the flying cats.
This is the edition I own; and, unaccountably, I have two copies of this edition.If I didn't know this was LeGuin, I wouldn't have figured it. The descriptions of the societies are not very good. For example, you'd think someone like LeGuin would see past the traditional authoritarian stereotypes of pirates and outlaws, and recognize that archaeological research shows that many pirate societies were quite egalitarian, and not particularly violent, especially for their times. The presentation of the outlaw 'castle' is simply a repetition of the worst stereotypes of feudal and imperialist societies.I flatly refuse to believe in the supposed winged, human-sized (or larger) colonial insect types. It's just not on. I'm not saying that there's no such thing as reversion to simpler forms. Just not on that level.The viewpoint character, who becomes what amounts to an avenging angel, is not likable. WHY would he devote himself obsessively to revenge against people he can't even identify? One would like to hope that an emissary from a League of Worlds would be at least a LITTLE capable of recognizing the destructive elements of vengefulness: not only for the 'enemies', but also for the 'avenger': and for the friends and societies on the land. But come to that, why would the attackers have come? They're separated from their own societies by light-years and land-years. What would make such a journey worthwhile? Or what if they were in fact NOT from offworld?I don't remember how this book ends. I'll have to finish it to see if any of the questions are answered. But there's no doubt it's disappointing so far. No, no improvement. If anything, it gets worse. I don't believe the motives of the 'invaders'. Indeed, though it's stated that Rocannon can sense the motives (emotions more than thoughts) of the invasion force, only once are the 'invaders' identified AS A PEOPLE, but not as persons. Two of them are playing chess: but they're not named, or even their faces seen. Over a thousand people (it's argued) murdered ruthlessly in revenge for fewer than a hundred, in a case of 'collective punishment' if I've ever seen one. Disproportionate? Most surely. If there were any other victims of the 'invaders', nobody identifies them. But worse, Rocannon is depicted as being in empathic contact with the victims when they die...and can feel no grief or guilt for the emptiness. after the first shock. The killers of the 'invaders' themselves have no contact WHATEVER with their victims--they're light years away, and until they're advised, they literally don't even know where their victims are. And what means was used to kill a thousand people at one blow? It's not said, but it most likely was nuclear. If so, 'Rocannon's' World is not only the site of a mass murder. It must also be contaminated, at least in that location. This is 'wonderful' in the older sense: that is, appalling. Exactly what was so urgent that dealing with the rebels couldn't wait another eight years? What was the reason behind the original rebellion? Who came on a journey that was essentially permanent, because they couldn't get home for at least 16 years? At one point the pilots of ships whose operation invariably kills everybody aboard are described as 'fanatics'. Even leaving aside the question of how they became so (and that shouldn't be left aside), this clearly does NOT make them inhuman. So what caused them to decide that they had to abandon home and family to come to a world they knew nothing about and pointlessly kill people? There's no indication that they gain anything thereby. But Rocannon's own behavior is equally pointless. If what he was looking for was rescue (and he evidently has no hope of it), why not just infiltrate the base and send a message? If not, what DID he want? To increase the number of dead? For what? My basic problem with this book was that there was no need whatever to introduce the invaders. If the book had been nothing more than a description of a complex and interesting world, it would have been worthwhile, although the meddling by the League has already upset old balances by the time Rocannon arrives. Again, I have to object to the term 'Bronze Age' as applied to (many of) the natives of Rocannon's World. They're not. Very little is known about Bronze Age peoples on Earth. But these societies are not consistent with what is known about any of them. One of the hazards of catchall categories, probably.
What do You think about Rocannon's World (1984)?
Talal Achi (Editorial Intern, Tin House Books): I’ve just finished reading Ursula LeGuin’s first published novel, Rocannon’s World. Like the other novels of LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, this one is set in a universe where countless worlds are populated by countless humanoid species. Some of these worlds—those technologically and ethically advanced enough—belong to “the League,” an interstellar coalition of which one distant purpose is to resist the return of an ancient galactic evil called simply, “the Enemy;” others, like Rocannon’s world, formerly (before the end of the novel) known as Formalhaut II, are yet too primitive to be admitted into the League, and are instead monitored by such agents as Rocannon, a League ethnologist. Formalhaut II is a world peopled by several distinct humanoid species (tall black men and women with blond hair, the Angyar, who ride windsteeds—flying cats—live lordly, Beowulf style, and are served by a smaller race—white, with dark hair, the quiet Olgyar; the telepathic Fian, slight kindhearted elf-like dwellers of the wood; their sturdy dwarf-like cousin race, the Gdemiar, also telepathic but much more dour; the tall, strange Winged Ones, who look like angels but behave like hive insects; and the minuscule Kiemhir, who resemble rodents), and, when the rest of his ethnological survey team is obliterated by an army come from a mutinous League planet to take over this world and subdue it so as to use it as a base of operations, Rocannon interacts with all of them in his (epic) quest to make contact with the League. Although Rocannon’s World is not quite as clean a work as some of the others of the Hainish Cycle (like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed—the first set on an ice-planet on which everyone is androgynous, the second set on a barren desert moon on which an amazing society has managed to make anarchy work viably and gracefully), it is nevertheless a very well written, very enjoyable book.
—TinHouseBooks
Rocannon’s World, published in 1966, is Ursula Le Guin’s debut novel and the first in her HAINISH CYCLE. The story describes how Rocannon, an ethnographer, became stranded on the planet he was charting when a spaceship from Faraday, a rogue planet that is an enemy to the League of All Worlds, blew up his spaceship and the rest of his crew. Rocannon thinks he’s trapped forever until he sees a helicopter and realizes that Faraday must have a secret base on the planet. If he can find it, he can use its ansible to communicate with the League, not only letting them know that he lives, but also the location of the secret enemy base. (Fun Fact: This is the book that one of Orson Scott Card’s characters in Ender’s Game refers to when he mentions that the word “ansible” came out of an old book. Card enjoys playing this little game with SFF fans. I read Rocannon’s World after I read Ender’s Game, so this was an “ah-ha!” moment for me.)The rest of this Review is at FantasyLiterature.comhttp://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
—Fantasy Literature
Originally posted at FanLit. http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...Rocannon’s World, published in 1966, is Ursula Le Guin’s debut novel and the first in her HAINISH CYCLE. The story describes how Rocannon, an ethnographer, became stranded on the planet he was charting when a spaceship from Faraday, a rogue planet that is an enemy to the League of All Worlds, blew up his spaceship and the rest of his crew. Rocannon thinks he’s trapped forever until he sees a helicopter and realizes that Faraday must have a secret base on the planet. If he can find it, he can use its ansible to communicate with the League, not only letting them know that he lives, but also the location of the secret enemy base. (Fun Fact: This is the book that one of Orson Scott Card’s characters in Ender’s Game refers to when he mentions that the word “ansible” came out of an old book. Card enjoys playing this little game with SFF fans. I read Rocannon’s World after I read Ender’s Game, so this was an “ah-ha!” moment for me.)So Rocannon collects a small group of companions and sets out across the planet on a quest to find the enemy base. Along the way he meets a few different cultures, some who are typical residents of high fantasy literature — castle-dwelling lords of a feudal society; the Fiia, who are like elves; the underground Clay People, who are like dwarves, etc. He tries to document information about these species and cultures as he goes (as usual, Le Guin’s anthropological interests are clear), but the difficulty of his quest interferes. He suffers much loss and tragedy along the way. Will he find the enemy base? Will he be rescued, or will he live on this planet forever? What Rocannon gets out of his mission is not something he expected.Rocannon’s World has elements of both science fiction and fantasy — a technologically advanced star-traveler visits and charts the unknown species on a backward planet. The episodic plot, which sort of jumps from one cultural experience to the next, is entertaining, but not always compelling or believable. All these different HILFs (Highly Intelligent Life Forms) on one small planet, isolated from each other with no apparent cooperation or competition? Hard to believe.Le Guin’s signature epigrammatic style is on display in Rocannon’s World, but her creativity and deep character development isn’t up to the level we’ll see later in her career. For example, I was disappointed to discover that this unknown planet was inhabited mostly by races who are recognizable from Earth’s history or mythology.The prologue to Rocannon’s World is the short story “Semley’s Necklace,” which was published in 1964 in Amazing Stories. It tells of a young queen named Semley who met Rocannon when she went to the Clay People to ask them to help her claim a sapphire necklace that was her inheritance. They take her on a spaceship to retrieve the jewels and when she returns home with the necklace she gets an unpleasant lesson in space-time relativity. I liked this story, especially the intermingling of science fiction and fantasy, and I liked how this carried over to Rocannon’s story — he was also personally affected by the effects of space-time relativity.Rocannon’s World is not up to Le Guin’s later level, but it’s enjoyable enough and a worthy read just because of its historical value as Le Guin’s debut novel. I listened to Stefan Rudnicki narrate Blackstone Audio’s version which is five hours long. Rudnicki was very good, as always.Rocannon’s World (The Hainish Cycle) — (1966) A world shared by three native humanoid races — the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, elvish Fiia, and warrior clan, Liuar — is suddenly invaded and conquered by a fleet of ships from the stars. Earth scientist Rocannon is on that world, and he sees his friends murdered and his spaceship destroyed. Marooned among alien peoples, he leads the battle to free this new world — and finds that legends grow around him even as he fights.
—Kat Hooper
