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A review by outcolder
Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin
5.0
I devoured this one afternoon, a few days after Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for Literature so there was this voice in my head the whole time: "Ursula K. Le Guin should get the Nobel Prize for Literature" because she should. The best stuff is always when the Daoism comes poking through, right? There was a line in here about the guards being the prisoners of the prisoners... I love stuff like that. And weird bits about refusing to name things. There was a nod to the Book of Daniel, I think, and the influence of Tolkien of course and maybe something about the Vietnam War if you squint.
Yahan, who is good with a lute, says something like "They say I am a slave but I would rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts... " is maybe a misstep on the path to revolutionary consciousness. It is an interesting contrast to the people of the "the Dispossessed" and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Olemas." But for me, it gets at something that pisses me off but that I hear a lot: people talking about how they would just quit a job they didn't like. That always pisses me off. It must be nice to have that choice. Like Yahan, I would rather stay and I would rather fight, (he does disobey his master) then run (or walk) away like the 70s Le Guin stories I just mentioned. And I think, and this is going to sound messed up maybe, that Le Guin might have been thinking about the Civil Rights Movement... the book came out in 1966, right? "Love it or leave it" but why should you have to? Leaving America doesn't necessarily make you "a beast hunting beasts" but I mean, it's a fantasy novel, she can up the stakes. Well, I'm spilling a lot of digital ink about something that was just one line in a hundred plus page fantasy novella so let me back off of it now.
I actually read this in the first edition Ace Double but since I have no intention of reading Avram Davidson "the Kar-Chee Reign" I decided to use this edition here on goodreads. Those Ace Doubles are amazing. They have a whole lot of them, maybe all of them, at the Villa Fantastica which is a science fiction and fantasy library in Vienna, Austria. The covers are like Whaaaat? And then the price: 50 cents... the whole thing makes me think about the people who actually read these back then, when nerds got no love.
Yahan, who is good with a lute, says something like "They say I am a slave but I would rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts... " is maybe a misstep on the path to revolutionary consciousness. It is an interesting contrast to the people of the "the Dispossessed" and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Olemas." But for me, it gets at something that pisses me off but that I hear a lot: people talking about how they would just quit a job they didn't like. That always pisses me off. It must be nice to have that choice. Like Yahan, I would rather stay and I would rather fight, (he does disobey his master) then run (or walk) away like the 70s Le Guin stories I just mentioned. And I think, and this is going to sound messed up maybe, that Le Guin might have been thinking about the Civil Rights Movement... the book came out in 1966, right? "Love it or leave it" but why should you have to? Leaving America doesn't necessarily make you "a beast hunting beasts" but I mean, it's a fantasy novel, she can up the stakes. Well, I'm spilling a lot of digital ink about something that was just one line in a hundred plus page fantasy novella so let me back off of it now.
I actually read this in the first edition Ace Double but since I have no intention of reading Avram Davidson "the Kar-Chee Reign" I decided to use this edition here on goodreads. Those Ace Doubles are amazing. They have a whole lot of them, maybe all of them, at the Villa Fantastica which is a science fiction and fantasy library in Vienna, Austria. The covers are like Whaaaat? And then the price: 50 cents... the whole thing makes me think about the people who actually read these back then, when nerds got no love.