“The Telling” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Over the next few weeks, Mythgard is running a free online course on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I’m rereading Le Guin’s Hainish books in order to prepare. The Telling is the most recent book in the series, published in 2000.

In some ways, The Telling is a synthesis of Le Guin’s previous Hainish novels. It combines the political skepticism of The Dispossessed, the anti-imperialism of The Word for World is Forest, and the intimacy of The Left Hand of Darkness. Yet, Le Guin never simply rehashes previous work. The Telling has its own identity as an exploration of how cultures survive government attempts to homogenize them.

“The Word for World is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Over the next few weeks, Mythgard is running a free online course on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I’m rereading Le Guin’s Hainish books in order to prepare. 

The Word for World is Forest continues Ursula K. Le Guin’s exploration of injustice. This time, she focuses on cultural and environmental destruction. In the distant future, humans colonize the planet Athshe for its timber resources. Le Guin alternates between Davidson, a human military officer, and Selver, an Athshean native whose wife Davidson had raped and killed. This isn’t one of Le Guin’s subtler novels, but it is a well written parable about the dangers of first contact.

“The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Over the next few weeks, Mythgard is running a free online course on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I’m rereading Le Guin’s Hainish books in order to prepare. 

On its surface, The Dispossessed is a story about a physicist, Shevek, who struggles to conduct his research in the face of political and social opposition. Shevek flees his homeworld, Anarres, for the neighboring moon Urras. However, The Dispossessed is really Ursula K. Le Guin’s way of exploring the limits of “utopia.” Anarres society practices a non-Leninist form of communism, whereas Urras permits a thriving if unequal capitalist economy. Shevek finds that he cannot adjust to either society.

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Over the next few weeks, Mythgard is running a free online course on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I’m rereading Le Guin’s Hainish books in order to prepare. The Left Hand of Darkness isn’t the first book in the chronology, but it is the most famous…

What would society look like without gender? How would love and politics differ if we were neither male nor female? Gender is such a critical part of our identity that this thought exercise turns out to be incredibly difficult. Almost all human stories have some element of romance, or at gendered norms. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin asks readers to shed our cultural baggage and explore a humanity beyond gender.

BBC “Earthsea” radio dramatization!

BBC has released a radio dramatization of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea. A Wizard of Earthsea is one of my favorite novels and I hope to reread and review it later this year. You can listen to the whole thing for free here.