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3.62 AVERAGE
3.62 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Well before the Long Night and the White Walkers appeared in A Song of Ice and Fire, there was winter and the Gaal in Planet of Exile...
The slow orbit of the planet Werel around its star Eltanin means that each of the seasons lasts twenty years. In the spring through to the autumn, the native people are nomadic hunters, whilst in winter, they retreat to walled cities to protect them from the cold, and the savage northern people, the Gaal, who move southward to raid and pillage as the frost sets in. Normally the Gaal are disparate and disorganised, ignoring the great walled cities, but this winter they have united and are successfully laying siege. Thrown into the mix are a lost Terran colony, a former outpost of the League of All Worlds, who urge the nations to band together to repel the northern aggressors - herein lies an exciting novel, filled with politics, war, and a romance across a divide.
Ursula Le Guin's second book was a surprisingly good read; I enjoyed it significantly more than her first Hainish Cycle novel, Rocannon's World. The world-building is absolutely brilliant here, and has been some of my favourite in Le Guin's work; in particular, the native people with which we spend the majority of the novel, the Tevar, are wonderfully imagined and fully fleshed-out. The attention to detail is marvellous - examples include the Tevar shrugging their shoulders to mean 'yes', and the idea that staring someone directly in the eyes is rude.
I was also delighted by the relationship to Le Guin's other novels; here, mindspeech (telepathy) is practiced amongst the Terran colony, which places this book firmly after Rocannon's World in terms of chronology, and the Terran colony mention the loss of their ansible (the faster-than-light communication device introduced in Rocannon's World, invented in The Dispossessed, and used frequently in The Left Hand of Darkness) nearly 600 years ago, leaving them out of contact with the rest of the universe. It's fun to see all these little connections in her Hainish universe!
The slow orbit of the planet Werel around its star Eltanin means that each of the seasons lasts twenty years. In the spring through to the autumn, the native people are nomadic hunters, whilst in winter, they retreat to walled cities to protect them from the cold, and the savage northern people, the Gaal, who move southward to raid and pillage as the frost sets in. Normally the Gaal are disparate and disorganised, ignoring the great walled cities, but this winter they have united and are successfully laying siege. Thrown into the mix are a lost Terran colony, a former outpost of the League of All Worlds, who urge the nations to band together to repel the northern aggressors - herein lies an exciting novel, filled with politics, war, and a romance across a divide.
Ursula Le Guin's second book was a surprisingly good read; I enjoyed it significantly more than her first Hainish Cycle novel, Rocannon's World. The world-building is absolutely brilliant here, and has been some of my favourite in Le Guin's work; in particular, the native people with which we spend the majority of the novel, the Tevar, are wonderfully imagined and fully fleshed-out. The attention to detail is marvellous - examples include the Tevar shrugging their shoulders to mean 'yes', and the idea that staring someone directly in the eyes is rude.
I was also delighted by the relationship to Le Guin's other novels; here, mindspeech (telepathy) is practiced amongst the Terran colony, which places this book firmly after Rocannon's World in terms of chronology, and the Terran colony mention the loss of their ansible (the faster-than-light communication device introduced in Rocannon's World, invented in The Dispossessed, and used frequently in The Left Hand of Darkness) nearly 600 years ago, leaving them out of contact with the rest of the universe. It's fun to see all these little connections in her Hainish universe!
adventurous
fast-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Liked Rocannon's World better but still solid. The more I read, especially into the past, the more I start to sense the web of influence authors have had through time. This trilogy from LeGuin appears to me now in Card and Martin's later work. Rather than suffering the Seinfeld effect, it feels each time like uncovering some shocking genealogical discovery.
hopeful
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Such a quick and fun read! My only complaint is that I wish it were longer. I'd like even more character development (only so much can be done with 126 pages) and I'd love if events were more detailed. But it's still incredible and probably the fastest Ive gotten through a Le Guin novel.
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle
Read for the #LoveHain readalong in 2023. This was essentially a Bronze Age culture-clash-slash-battle story transposed to a different planet. I wonder why Le Guin was not drawn to writing historical fiction? Anyway, it's not a bad tale. There are two components to the SciFi premise. One is that of a planet that takes 60 years to orbit its sun, and thus each season is 15 years long. The story begins at the time of preparing for winter, which is no joke. The other idea is that colonizers from the League of All Worlds (See Rocannon's World) have been left behind when their compatriots left to fight the big Enemy. They insist they immune to bacteria of this world, and that they can't mate with the native inhabitants, but is that true? Things seem to be changing, over 600 years of evolution.
So, it's interesting to play around with natural-scientific facts in this way, and imagine different possibilities. Based on current understanding it seems impossible that the colonists could sterilize themselves to the point of bearing no foreign bacteria into the new world, and not be affected by the bacteria found there; we can't function without our microbiota and we're in constant interplay with our environment on a microbial level. But this was not known at the time of writing.
The siege in the city was a bit boring, with a faceless barbarian enemy and alien snow monsters, meh. More interesting was the tensions between colonists and natives, which were touched on but not very much developed in an inter-species romance. In her introcution written years later, Le Guin acknowledges that she was just getting to understand that her field of science fiction was about the social sciences, and that would be strengthened in later books.
Read for the #LoveHain readalong in 2023. This was essentially a Bronze Age culture-clash-slash-battle story transposed to a different planet. I wonder why Le Guin was not drawn to writing historical fiction? Anyway, it's not a bad tale. There are two components to the SciFi premise. One is that of a planet that takes 60 years to orbit its sun, and thus each season is 15 years long. The story begins at the time of preparing for winter, which is no joke. The other idea is that colonizers from the League of All Worlds (See Rocannon's World) have been left behind when their compatriots left to fight the big Enemy. They insist they immune to bacteria of this world, and that they can't mate with the native inhabitants, but is that true? Things seem to be changing, over 600 years of evolution.
So, it's interesting to play around with natural-scientific facts in this way, and imagine different possibilities. Based on current understanding it seems impossible that the colonists could sterilize themselves to the point of bearing no foreign bacteria into the new world, and not be affected by the bacteria found there; we can't function without our microbiota and we're in constant interplay with our environment on a microbial level. But this was not known at the time of writing.
The siege in the city was a bit boring, with a faceless barbarian enemy and alien snow monsters, meh. More interesting was the tensions between colonists and natives, which were touched on but not very much developed in an inter-species romance. In her introcution written years later, Le Guin acknowledges that she was just getting to understand that her field of science fiction was about the social sciences, and that would be strengthened in later books.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A tiny bite of the early Hainish cycle. It's easy to see why it was eclipsed by The Left Hand of Darkness, but it's still an interesting read.
Like the first in the series, nothing in this stuck out to me as particularly memorable, and honestly I found myself a bit bored through most of it. If you really love sci fi, read it, but if not, skip it.