Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dr_matthew_lloyd 's review for:
Planet of Exile
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Last year I listened to the audiobook of Ursula K Le Guin's [b:Rocannon's World|1367537|Rocannon's World|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1295271496s/1367537.jpg|1357368] thinking that it might start a reread of the Ekumen/Hainish novels. As I started listening to City of Exile a year to the day after I started listening to Rocannon's World, it seems pretty clear that it didn't. But after reading an article about the Hainish Cycle by [a:Charlie Jane Anders|4918514|Charlie Jane Anders|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1532450668p2/4918514.jpg] on Tor.com, I decided to go back to these early novels and give them another shot.
There's certainly things that I find interesting in Planet of Exile that I had forgotten about. There's the long, slow cycle of the planet around its star that makes the years last a lifetime and the seasons last years. There's the fact that the Terrans have been on Werel for so long that they are barely aliens - none of them has been to Earth for many generations; they were born and raised here and the League of All Worlds is a myth to them. There's the way Le Guin uses this detail, and the Law of Cultural Embargo, to blend the science fictional premise with the more fantasy elements of her narrative - although here 'fantasy' simply means a civilization of limited technological development, rather than many of the actual tropes of fantasy.
I think re-reading this book does it no favours: the first time I read it, back in 2010, I didn't know how the Hainish/Ekumen Cycle was going to develop; I hadn't read [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|6425272|The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1257028344s/6425272.jpg|817527] or any of the subsequent novels (I think I had read "Coming of Age in Karhide", which did not work for me without context), in which Le Guin does much more interesting things with this universe and setting. Nevertheless there's some interesting stuff in here, and it is worth a read alongside all of the other, mostly better, Hainish novels.
There's certainly things that I find interesting in Planet of Exile that I had forgotten about. There's the long, slow cycle of the planet around its star that makes the years last a lifetime and the seasons last years. There's the fact that the Terrans have been on Werel for so long that they are barely aliens - none of them has been to Earth for many generations; they were born and raised here and the League of All Worlds is a myth to them. There's the way Le Guin uses this detail, and the Law of Cultural Embargo, to blend the science fictional premise with the more fantasy elements of her narrative - although here 'fantasy' simply means a civilization of limited technological development, rather than many of the actual tropes of fantasy.
I think re-reading this book does it no favours: the first time I read it, back in 2010, I didn't know how the Hainish/Ekumen Cycle was going to develop; I hadn't read [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|6425272|The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1257028344s/6425272.jpg|817527] or any of the subsequent novels (I think I had read "Coming of Age in Karhide", which did not work for me without context), in which Le Guin does much more interesting things with this universe and setting. Nevertheless there's some interesting stuff in here, and it is worth a read alongside all of the other, mostly better, Hainish novels.