Planet of Exile

Rating:
Summary: First impressions - not always true
Review: This book has been a really remarkable experience for me. I had first herd of Ursula here on Amazon.com when I read through the Hugo and Nebula award listings. As her work was behind a number of those, figured reading some of it was well worth a try. I picked the planet of exile out, from the library, as it was the thinnest there. I thought it would be enough to just get the taste of Ursula's style of writing. My first impressions were not that great. As a matter of fact, I found the book to be very boring and hard to read. Of course, I had just finished Clark's "The city and the stars", and my expectations from this other great SF author were pretty much down the same epic-far-in-the-future-undertakings-using-supreme-technology line of Clark's book. Ursula was far from that. Her work featured much less a gadget-full and more of a fantasy-barbaric setting. This was a major setback at first, but when I toned down on my expectations and accepted the book for what it was, and what it had to offer; I found it to be very pleasant and even delightful to read. Ursula talks about a distant future in which mankind has reached the stars and united many worlds in an organization known as the League. The League dispatches colonies onto alien planets where they judge on the option of entry of the world into the League. However, a colony of humans remains stranded on an alien world, as the spacecraft they came in leaves in haste to aid the League, in a war that has ensued far away. The planet itself is very peculiar as one Year lasts 24000 days (c. 65 years), making only one season last 15+ years! Ursula masterfully explores the impact of these awkward time patterns on the life of local hominoid species. She paints a vivid image of their culture with a remarkable wholeness, achieved through incorporating various traditions and rituals, and even such little things as formal speech patterns. The same is done with the culture of the humans left on the planet (christened the "farborn"). Besides delving deep in the particulars of the two cultures, Ursula also does an excellent job in exploring the interaction between them. In these hypothetical explorations is her aptness clearly noticeable and they were what I found the most intriguing and delightful in the novel. Overall a great book that I liked very much; I warmly recommend "The planet of exile" to anybody that is wondering whether to read it or not. You might not like it at first, but give it a chance. I did, and I can tell you for sure that the next book I'm taking out of the library is definitely going to be another work by Ursula Le Guin.