Second paragraph of third story (“A Man of the People”:

His name was Mattinyehedarheddyuragamuruskets Havzhiva. The word havzhiva means “ringed pebble,” a small stone with a quartz inclusion running through it that shows as a stripe round it. The people of Stse are particular about stones and names. Boys of the Sky, the Other Sky, and the Static Interference lineages are traditionally given the names of stones or desirable manly qualities such as courage, patience, and grace. The Yehedarhed family were traditionalists, strong on family and lineage. “If you know who your people are, you know who you are,” said Havzhiva’s father, Granite. A kind, quiet man who took his paternal responsibility seriously, he spoke often in sayings.

I don’t think I had previously heard of this Ursula Le Guin collection, first published as Four Ways to Forgiveness in 1995, and then republished in 2017, with a fifth story added. I found it tremendous stuff. It’s set on a twin planet system, whose inhabitants are divided into slaves (“assets”) and owners, but whose unjust and evil social structures are being shaken to the roots by their integration into the Ekumen, her future universe of planetary civilisations (including Earth) linked by common ancestry.

Le Guin was of course fascinated by revolution and social justice, and those themes are prominent in most of these stories and present in all. But she uses the narrative format to paint a very convincing picture of the twin societies and the problems of adaptation, and the reactions of extremists on both sides. You don’t have to look vey far or very hard to see which parts of our own contemporary world she may have had in mind, but the worlds of Werel and Teowe are their own places too.

Two of the five stories in particular stood out for me. The second one, “Forgiveness Day”, has an Ekumen ambassador finding herself caught up in revolutionary violence and being unpredictably changed as a result. The fourth, “A Woman’s Liberation”, follows the life story of a woman slave who is freed, but finds it difficult to keep her freedom. The five stories are linked by a common setting and shared characters, but they don’t follow sequentially from each other; this doesn’t always work for me, but it did here.

Anyway, I’m glad to have discovered an excellent book by a favourite author which I didn’t previously know about. You can get it here.