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Title: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 0-441-00863-1 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: 09 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (40 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Welcome return to Ekumen in novel form
Comment: "The Telling," like Le Guin's 1972 novella "The World for Word is Forest," is much more about our own world than the world it explores.
Here, a lesbian woman of East Indian descent, Sutty, signs on to be an ambassador for the Hainish Ekumen (the Hainish originally seeded human life on all the member planets) when her lover is killed by fundamentalist terrorists on earth.
But in transit, relativity plays a cruel trick on her: In the 60 years she's been traveling in a Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light starship, the planet Aka has adopted a severe, technophilic society not unlike that of Maoist China. Indeed, the Corporation State has done its best to eradicate its previous culture, a Tao-like, creedless system of wisdom known as "The Telling."
Sutty eventually travels to a distant, mountainous place where people secretly maintain their old system, and there she discovers how her own planet Terra may have catalyzed the culture-destroying changes.
As in Le Guin's 1969 classic, "The Left Hand of Darkness," the protagonist enters the society hoping to learn, and eventually undertakes a journey, this time deep into the heart of the high mountains. Here, the village of Ozkat-Ozkat is sharply reminiscent of Chinese-occupied Tibet.
Le Guin is brilliant at this sort of thing, and while the story is quite simple and takes a while to catch fire, the denouement is moving, engaging and illuminating. I still think she has a penchant for somewhat cold and distant, even a bit sterile, characters, but that detracts only a bit from this tale.
It's not as adventurous as "Left Hand," not as detailed in its world-building as "The Dispossessed," and lacking the action of "...World is Forest," but it's still a thoughtful, entertaining read.
"The Telling" is a meditation on cultural decimation, fundamentalism, colonialism and even gay rights, Earthly issues, that just happens to be played out on a distant world.
Rating: 3
Summary: Enjoyable reading, weak payoff.
Comment: Ursula Le Guin is considered a science fiction writer, but the science fiction she writes is something more than that. Her Hainish novels are like sociocultural travelogues that just HAPPEN to take place on other planets. Persons looking for really HARD science fiction might best look elsewhere. For me, reading one of Ms. Le Guin's tales is a lot like reading National Geographic.
In the case of "The Telling," we read about a world, Aka, that might very well be The People's Republic of China during the cultural revolution. Those in charge of the revolution are doing all they can to eradicate old "rotten-corpse" ways of thinking and interacting in their effort to advance technologically. Caught between this establishment and the isolated pockets of resistance and ancient culture is Sutty, an Earth-born woman who is part of a group of observers sent to Aka by the Ekumen.
I greatly enjoy reading Ms. Le Guin's rich portrayals of alien cultures and her painstaking attention to detail. Despite this book's very deliberate pace, I enjoyed immersing myself in the competing cultures and beliefs on Aka. "The Telling," however, is not nearly as satisfying as Le Guin's previous novel, "Four Ways to Forgiveness." The ending of this novel is rather weak, something of a big question mark with little sense of closure. There is also one brief incident of almost supernatural suspension of physical law that is never explained or even addressed later. Compared with some of Ms. Le Guin's wonderful earlier novels, I'd have say that "The Telling" is disappointing. Now, I wonder, how many more years until she completes another Hainish novel?
Rating: 5
Summary: It's not SUPPOSED to be hardcore sci-fi
Comment: This is a book of psychologically-developed science fiction. Quoting Le Guin in 1975's 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters': "Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens. Obviously my interest is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all that."
I own and have read most of her career's work. She currently writes like the wise old crone she is, no longer "like a man", which readers may or may not appreciate. 'The Telling' illustrates the ways LeGuin's characters are forced to confront themselves psychologically, making choices based on experience, need, limitations: the old woman taking in her neighbor the political exile; the smartass diplomat chick trapped in a cell with the bodyguard she'd misunderstood from day one (and he, her); a man leaving the village and home planet as historian-adventurer, to the grief of his family. Thoughtful stuff set in the Hainish Cycle of Le Guin's created future.
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Title: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 044100993X Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 0441009328 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Left Hand of Darkness (Remembering Tomorrow) by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 0441478123 Publisher: ACE Charter Pub. Date: 01 January, 1991 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Tehanu : The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 0689845332 Publisher: Simon Pulse Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin ISBN: 0312862113 Publisher: Orb Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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