Rocannon's World

Le Guin's first Hainish novel is as much fantasy as science fiction and as much derived from Norse myth as anything contemporary. It's slight but distinctive, more fun than profound. It saved my interest in Le Guin's SF, though, after I was heavily put off by The Dispossessed, which I found slow, dull and obvious - in sharp contrast to seemingly everybody else who's read it.

Planet of Exile
Probably the most conventional SF adventure tale Le Guin ever wrote and yet it shows glimmers of the concerns that would become trade-mark Le Guin themes; clash of cultures, reconciliation of differences, anthropology. Surprisingly violent.

City of Illusions
I liked this much more first time round, I think because it was the best Le Guin SF novel I had read at the time. Since then, Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven have completely overshadowed all these early works about the League of All Worlds. I'm not sure Le Guin has ever been all that comfortable with the technological trappings of SF or the pew! pew! of simplistic adventure/space opera stories. Her strengths lie in character and culture. The opportunity to imagine completely different societies is what SF&F gave her and when she shifted to play to her strengths her great works began to flow. Nevertheless, our protagonist's struggles when he arrives in the City of Illusions are still psychologically compelling to me and the description of a heavily depopulated North America are fun.

The Left Hand of Darkness
My re-reading of this was heavily disrupted by having to focus on other books as a matter of urgency. Nevertheless I enjoyed it greatly, as previously. This time I was struck by how everything goes wrong through mis-communication. Genli Ai can't understand the rules of the alien culture he's been dropped in, alone and with no immediate help to hand. On Gethen people can only communicate obliquely and this compounds the political shenanigans surrounding Genli's arrival. The confusion ultimately causes death. Nothing goes right until people start talking to each other openly and honestly.

It's nothing to do with gender, but it's what I took from this reading.

Winter's King
OK, now I want to talk about gender. The original version of this story was written prior to Left Hand of Darkness and is re-printed in the appendix of this volume. This version was re-written after Left Hand was published and it switches from referring to everybody on Gethen as "he" to referring to everybody as "she." Immediately I switched from thinking of the characters as male to thinking of them as female. But they are both and neither.

I've never come across a better illustration of why we need gender-neutral pronouns in English. It's looking like "they" is going to win out despite the consequent singular-plural ambiguity.

Also, good story about the effects of special relativity!

Winter's King
1969 (original) version. Not as good as the later revision.