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j_m_moore 's review for:
Planet of Exile
by Ursula K. Le Guin
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!