Rocannon's World

Rating:
Summary: Lovely! An excellent book.
Review: A short summary:

The story is written from the perspective of Rocannon, an anthropologist, visiting and surveying a world of people with little technology. He discovers to his horror that this world has been chosen as a base for a rebellion against the League of All Worlds. With no way of contacting his own world, and all his colleagues dead, he decides to tackle the invaders himself.

I really enjoyed this book - what a pity it's out of print. It's short and easy to read, but very powerful. Le Guin has a distinctive writing style, beautiful but still very readable. She manages to convey information about the world and its many peoples and cultures with a few deft strokes, without resorting to heavy-handedness. At the same time Rocannon's character is revealed by his observations and reactions.

Rating:
Summary: Her first steps.
Review: The League of All Worlds never properly scouted Fomalhaut II. Noting the presence of several high-intelligence species, they chose one and accelerated its development in an effort to gain a new ally in time for the impending galactic war. But when a young ethnologist named Rocannon falls in love with Semley - a golden-haired native who has come to claim her inheritance from the spacemen's museum - he embarks on a voyage of discovery that will show how many of Fomalhaut's secrets still lie undiscovered. Rocannon's mission soon becomes one of utmost urgency: his ship destroyed, he discovers that a rebel faction plans to use the world as a base, and that he himself must warn the League of the peril - even if he must cross Fomalhaut II from pole to pole in search of a working ansible.

To label "Rocannon's World" a work of science fiction is a gross misnomer. LeGuin's first foray into SF - her first Ekumen novel - is almost entirely fantasy. Whatever science fiction there is in it (not much) is extremely pedestrian, so much a collection of deus-ex-machina plot devices that the author herself decries their use in the foreword. The fantasy, however, is much more palatable, though in making the world and its peoples LeGuin shows an extreme over-reliance on Norse myths. The writing shows glints of LeGuin's future greatness, but the style is awkward, unpracticed. The book's utmost brevity did not allow LeGuin to develop the major characters to any sufficient extent, who always remain rather flat and predictable. Rocannon himself is a carbon copy of Ged, though he lacks Ged's richness of character.

Rocannon's quest is artificial, and, on the whole, the book's setup - the first fifty pages or so - are haphazardly put together and not at all easy to read. Only through sheer effort did I choke them down. The going does get easier later on, when LeGuin unfolds the setting and describes the indigenous peoples and their myths. Nonetheless, I was never quite able to rid myself of the feeling that I was reading an overwritten short story - which this book once was.

Recommended reading to LeGuin completists.