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A review by lory_enterenchanted
Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.0
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.