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paul_reef 's review for:
Rocannon's World
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Unless you are really into Le Guin or a big fan of classic adventurous science fiction, I would not advise you to read her first published book. However, it is not quite a run of the mill pulp sci fi novel and shows some glimpses of her future work.
Essentially this is a story with a typical golden age sci fi plot about an explorer sent to a planet by a galactic federation, but whose ship and crew are attacked by a rebel planet. The book subsequently revolves around the explorer's quest to reach the enemy's secret base and contact the federation, aided by warriors of the planet's different Tolkienesque and Viking like races and traveling across the world.
In other words: little else than an average sci fi novel from the 1960s mixing high fantasy, space opera, and a sense of male adventure. Not insignificantly, this book was Le Guin's first, after several yeats of publishin in sci fi magazines, published as an Ace double paperback for less than a dollar with a pulp looking cover.
Still, we see an author struggling with what the sci fi publishing market of the 1960s demanded, trying to find her own voice. The protagonist is of course a brave male, but he is an anthropologist - like Le Guin's father. Throughout the book, the anthropologist questions his task to find a suitable race to advance technologically as well as the underlying principles of development, even halting forced modernization schemes, albeit not always explicitly. Moreover, through the anthropologist's eyes, Le Guin teases out some tensions in the planet's supposed rigid hierarchic race system, illustrating hybridities and false self perceptions of purity. In this sense, it turns the space opera genre upside down: instead of war ships and empire building, we see races on the periphery and a person questioning the point of it all, even thougj he ultimately acts in the federation's interest.
In many ways, the novel borrows from high fantasy tropes, from metalworking dwarves to prophecies, but also from Icelandic sagas and Norse mythology. Something we do not see in either is the existence of a race which perceives language and names, e.g. the relation between signifier and signified, place and name, etc. differently than humans and refuses to tell their individual names. It makes me think about Le Guin's father who for many years researched and to some extent cooperated with the last native American of California - a taciturn man who never told the family his real name. Lastly, Le Guin - I think - tried to give women somewhat of a lather role, but could not move beyond the genre's focus on queens and noble women, and only in the form of a legend and wisd via foresight.
Nevertheless, the novel's prose, shortness, and themes are typical for classic sci fi, and clearly predates the British New Wave of sci which foregrounded literary style and ideas rather than technology and adventure, even though some reviewers think otherwise. Still, any reader of Le Guin will find some kernels of her later work there, and maybe therein lies most fun of this reading experience.
Essentially this is a story with a typical golden age sci fi plot about an explorer sent to a planet by a galactic federation, but whose ship and crew are attacked by a rebel planet. The book subsequently revolves around the explorer's quest to reach the enemy's secret base and contact the federation, aided by warriors of the planet's different Tolkienesque and Viking like races and traveling across the world.
In other words: little else than an average sci fi novel from the 1960s mixing high fantasy, space opera, and a sense of male adventure. Not insignificantly, this book was Le Guin's first, after several yeats of publishin in sci fi magazines, published as an Ace double paperback for less than a dollar with a pulp looking cover.
Still, we see an author struggling with what the sci fi publishing market of the 1960s demanded, trying to find her own voice. The protagonist is of course a brave male, but he is an anthropologist - like Le Guin's father. Throughout the book, the anthropologist questions his task to find a suitable race to advance technologically as well as the underlying principles of development, even halting forced modernization schemes, albeit not always explicitly. Moreover, through the anthropologist's eyes, Le Guin teases out some tensions in the planet's supposed rigid hierarchic race system, illustrating hybridities and false self perceptions of purity. In this sense, it turns the space opera genre upside down: instead of war ships and empire building, we see races on the periphery and a person questioning the point of it all, even thougj he ultimately acts in the federation's interest.
In many ways, the novel borrows from high fantasy tropes, from metalworking dwarves to prophecies, but also from Icelandic sagas and Norse mythology. Something we do not see in either is the existence of a race which perceives language and names, e.g. the relation between signifier and signified, place and name, etc. differently than humans and refuses to tell their individual names. It makes me think about Le Guin's father who for many years researched and to some extent cooperated with the last native American of California - a taciturn man who never told the family his real name. Lastly, Le Guin - I think - tried to give women somewhat of a lather role, but could not move beyond the genre's focus on queens and noble women, and only in the form of a legend and wisd via foresight.
Nevertheless, the novel's prose, shortness, and themes are typical for classic sci fi, and clearly predates the British New Wave of sci which foregrounded literary style and ideas rather than technology and adventure, even though some reviewers think otherwise. Still, any reader of Le Guin will find some kernels of her later work there, and maybe therein lies most fun of this reading experience.