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.

Second paragraph of third chapter (not at all representative of the book, whose paragraphs are generally very long):

What had he failed to see?

A reread of course, but a timely and sobering story from more than half a century ago. It has been widely interpreted, both at the time and since, as a reaction to and fictionalisation of the Vietnam War; but in fact the circumstances are much closer to the wars waged against indigenous people in Africa, Asia and the Americas, with the explicit agendas of the destruction and replacement of the original population – a pattern from seventeenth-century Ireland to today’s Gaza. There’s not much grey here – even the humans who try for better relations with the Creechie natives of the planet are fatally compromised by their participation in the project of conquest and domination.

Le Guin was familiar with the conquest and oppression of Native Americans, and the attempted counter-resistance by the earth soldiers is reminiscent of Rhodesia’s UDI in 1965. The part that perhaps does speak to Vietnam is the impact of new information technology, just as media coverage in the 1960s had an effect on the dynamic of support for the war in America. Reporting on atrocity was not new – it goes back at least to Bartolomé de las Casas – but there is a good point about the impact on a conflict when long-suppressed truth starts to leak out.

Anyway, a brief, tough, important read. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread science fiction book. Next on those piles are The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama, and I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman.