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What it argues
On the forested world of Athshe, small, green-furred humanoids called the Athsheans have lived in balance with their world for thousands of years, moving between waking life and dreaming with an ease that humans find incomprehensible. Into this comes a human logging operation: Earth's forests are gone, and the colonists are clear-cutting Athshean forest to ship timber home, using the Athsheans as slave labor. When Colonel Dongh's forces destroy an Athshean village and kill its women, the Athshean dreamer Selver does something his culture has no precedent for: he kills a man, and teaches his people how.
The novella was written in 1971, during the Vietnam War, and Le Guin was openly responding to it. That origin is present on every page — the American military officers who speak in the language of resource extraction and pacification, the atrocities committed by men who have classified the people they are harming as something less than human. But Le Guin is too careful a writer to make it allegory. The Athsheans are fully imagined, their consciousness genuinely different from human consciousness, and the moral weight of what violence does to the culture that commits it — and to Selver, who carries the knowledge of how to do it — is the novel's real subject.
What it gets right
- 1.
Davidson is the novel's most carefully drawn figure: not monstrous in a Gothic sense but in the ordinary sense of a man who has never been required to see anyone unlike himself as fully human.
- 2.
Selver's act of killing is treated as a genuine rupture in Athshean culture, not a heroic uprising. Le Guin is honest that violence changes the culture that uses it, even in self-defense.
- 3.
The Athshean integration of dreaming and waking consciousness is the novel's most original invention — a mode of being that makes no sense to the colonizers and is therefore dismissed, and is also the source of Athshean resilience.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Ursula K. Le Guin was an American author whose fiction and essays defined the literary possibilities of science fiction and fantasy. She is best known for the Hainish Cycle, which includes The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea series. She won five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, a National Book Award, and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She was a sustained advocate for the idea that science fiction could be serious literature, and her 2014 National Book Award acceptance speech making that case is one of the genre's defining documents. She died in 2018.
