Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Of the three stories in this book I read “Rocannon’s World” because I saw a brief article where UKL recommends starting with it for context since she wrote several “Hainish” novels. I intend, eventually, to read Lathe of Heaven or Left Hand of Darkness. Anyway, in this novel, the titular Rocannon, is the original surveyor of his world and has stayed on as the only “sheriff” representing the authority and interests of a space empire in sheparding the civilization to a level where it can really participate in the empire. Rocannon is not secretly surveilling the planet; he is known to the local rulers as “starman”. The planet has several "HILF"s (High Intelligence Life Forms) including a race that is very human-like as well as other races I interpreted as dwarves, elves, trolls(?) etal. And these races have at best something like feudal level technology and feudal governments (with the exception of the dwarves who have been granted steel and electricity by the empire).

The space empire employing Rocannon has faster-than-light ships as well as rockets for getting around. They also communicate using an FTL teletype called an “ansible”. So… yeah this is sort of Tolkien meets Star Trek. And probably, in 1966 when it was originally published, your average sci-fi reader thought it was groovy, but I found it boring and shlockey: it hasn’t aged well and I could not bring myself to really read more than a third of it. Still though, I finished my assignment.

As a side note, having recently read A Room of One’s Own and having lamented of not being able to recognize a female “voice” in a novel, I realize that if I did not know who wrote this book I would assume that it was written by a guy.