#177 Other ways to live: introducing the Hainish stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

A beginner’s guide to her groundbreaking SF setting

Between 1966 and 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin published seven novels and 17 stories in the Hainish setting, which together comprise a large proportion of her science fiction. Collectively, they have won numerous major awards and sparked a large and growing body of scholarship. Le Guin’s work is frequently invoked in discussions of feminism, anthropology, sociology, and gender in science fiction. She was and remains a major figure in so-called soft SF, and the Hainish stories have a strong anthropological bent.

This is serious-minded SF, a conscious departure from pulp formats and sureties that had long prevailed in the genre. Le Guin’s hostility to violence, openness to change, and call for understanding are everywhere in these pages. The Hainish stories have little in the way of physical action, but are rich with ideas - at their frequent best they are thought-provoking and even moving. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the Hainish stories. 

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Transcript

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018) imagined that humans did not evolve on Earth, but rather on a world of her creation - Hain. The people of this distant planet achieved starflight, and reached numerous other habitable worlds. The colonists they left behind on these planets developed distinct cultures of their own, and evolved separately. In time, they were drawn back together, first in the League of Worlds, and later in the Ekumen, an interstellar affiliation centred on Hain itself. 

Between 1966 and 2000, Le Guin published seven novels and 17 stories in the Hainish setting, which together comprise a large proportion of her science fiction. Collectively, they have won numerous major awards and sparked a large and growing body of scholarship. Le Guin’s work is frequently invoked in discussions of feminism, anthropology, sociology, and gender in science fiction. She was and remains a major figure in so-called soft SF, and the Hainish stories have a strong anthropological bent. 

The Hainish stories resist easy organisation into a rigid series. Le Guin said of them that “they aren’t a cycle or a saga [...] they do not form a coherent history.” What they do share is a setting, certain peoples and technologies, and a particular feel. Very often, these novels and stories are about the interaction of different cultures, and the challenges this contact can produce. 

This is serious-minded SF, a conscious departure from pulp formats and sureties that had long prevailed in the genre. Le Guin’s hostility to violence, openness to change, and call for understanding are everywhere in these pages. The Hainish stories have little in the way of physical action, but are rich with ideas - at their frequent best they are thought-provoking and even moving. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the Hainish stories.

Early life, early novels: 1961 - 1967

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in California and attended the same school as Philip K. Dick, although they did not know each other. Both of her parents were anthropologists, so she was steeped in the study of peoples and their cultures from an early age. Le Guin read books and genre magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding, while visitors to the family home included Robert Oppenheimer. 

Following childhood experiments, she began writing in earnest in the 1950s, and published her first story in 1961; her first genre story, “April in Paris”, followed in 1962. Cele Goldsmith, whom Le Guin described as “as enterprising and perceptive an editor as the science fiction magazines ever had”, was a key early supporter as editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic. Crucially, Goldsmith bought “The Dowry of Angyar”, the first Hainish story, which was published in Amazing in September 1964.

Later, Le Guin connected with Donald A. Wollheim, whom she called “the tough, reliable editor of Ace Books”. In this capacity he purchased her first novel Rocannon’s World (1966), plus two further Hainish novels Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967). “The Dowry of Angyar” was incorporated as the opening for Rocannon’s World, re-named to “Semley’s Necklace”. 

These three first novels are most commonly found in the omnibus Worlds of Exile and Illusion. Le Guin the writer was not fully formed at the time these novels were written. They contain some limited concessions towards the pulp concerns and formats that Le Guin grew up with - Rocannon’s World in particular is a relatively straightforward SF adventure. While it reads superficially like fantasy - complete with alien races which resemble elves and dwarves - its heroic protagonist is an agent of a sophisticated, high-tech interstellar culture. 

Maturing alongside the New Wave: 1969 - 1975

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is one of Le Guin’s best-known novels, and a turning point within her Hainish writings. By this time, Le Guin was emerging as a key figure in science fiction’s New Wave. With its strong emphasis on gender roles, religion, and politics, the fourth Hainish novel aligned strongly with the shifts of this new movement. 

The novel focuses on Genly Ai, a human who - like Rocannon before him - is a representative of the Ekumen and a kind of hybrid anthropologist and diplomat. He is dispatched to the planet Gethen, also known as Winter, on a mission to induct it into the Ekumen. Ai’s mission is complicated both by the political conflict on Gethen, and by the unique physiology of its people. Gethenians are androgynes, but enter a phase called “kemmer” in which they can temporarily acquire male or female characteristics.

While the gender theme tends to dominate many discussions of Left Hand, the novel is just as much about cultural exchange, love, war, and peace. While it may be going too far to say that its reputation is outsized, the novel is arguably even more interesting in the wider context of the Hainish stories, rather than in isolation. 

In Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Le Guin published The Word for World is Forest. Eventually published as a freestanding book in 1976, this is variously referred to as a novel or a novella, and won the Hugo Award for latter category. The book is a visceral howl of anger, Le Guin’s anguished response to the horrors of the Vietnam War and to ecological destruction. The novel is set on Athshe, a densely forested planet which is a clear analogue for Vietnam. A brutal Terran occupation is violently suppressing the local, peaceful, matriarchal tribespeople. 

Brief and extremely powerful, The Word for World is Forest is unlike Le Guin’s other work. While her antipathy to violence is evident throughout her books, this novel is a vivid depiction of its horrors. Crucially, violence is depicted as a kind of contamination, one that infects the Athsheans who learn it from humans and turn it back against them. Le Guin does not celebrate this supposed victory, but rather mourns the loss of a peaceful way of life that may never be regained. An intense condemnation of colonialism, this novel is arguably underrated, too often written off as mere polemic. [More coverage in episode 25]

The Dispossessed (1974) is another of Le Guin’s best-known and most-discussed works, inside or outside of the Hainish series. While something so banal as continuity has little role in Le Guin’s work, this novel is in part something of a prequel. A minor plot element concerns the theoretical underpinnings of the ansible, an interstellar communications device featured in many other Hainish novels and stories. 

The principal architect of the ansible is Shevek, a brilliant but troubled physicist living on the hardscrabble anarchist moon of Anarres. The novel’s unusual structure follows Shevek’s life both on the moon and on Urras, a world which is more technologically advanced but driven by capitalist exploitation. In this way, The Dispossessed is a complex exploration of two distinct societies, two diverse ideologies. While at times it can be rather dry, even didactic, this is not a good starting point but a humane and thought-provoking novel which is rich in ideas. 

Re-focusing on short stories: 1990 - 2000

After 1974, Le Guin published no new fiction in the Hainish setting for over 15 years. Her novels in this period were unrelated singletons: The Eye of the Heron (1978), The Beginning Place (1980), and Always Coming Home (1985). The hiatus came to an end in 1990, with the novelette “The Shobies’ Story”, published in the anthology Universe 1. Previously, Le Guin had published only four Hainish short stories, all collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975). During the 1990s, she published 13 stories and over half of all Hainish short fiction was published in the years 1994-95.

All of the short fiction is contained within four readily available collections:

• The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)
  • “The Dowry of Angyar” (1964)
  • “Winter’s King” (1969)
  • “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (1971)
  • “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974)
• A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994)
  • “The Shobies’ Story” (1990)
  • “Dancing to Ganam” (1993)
  • “Another Story, or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994)
• Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) [More coverage in episode 40]
  • “Betrayals” (1994)
  • “Forgiveness Day” (1994)
  • “A Man of the People” (1995)
  • “A Woman’s Liberation” (1995)
• The Birthday of the World (2002)
  • “The Matter of Seggri” (1994)
  • “Unchosen Love” (1994)
  • “Solitude”  (1994)
  • “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995)
  • “Mountain Ways” (1996)
  • “Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999)

In general, the short stories can be thought of as more peripheral than central, more complementary than truly essential. Some of the 1990s stories have a cumulative kind of feeling, as if Le Guin was consciously tying together previously established settings and concepts. The three Hainish stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, for example, form a loose trilogy focusing on interstellar teleportation. These stories not only mention various previously explored planets like Gethen, Hain, O, and Terra, but also their discussion of “churten theory” mirrors the development of the ansible in The Dispossessed.

Four Ways to Forgiveness is particularly interesting in that it is Le Guin’s only short fiction collection to focus entirely on Hainish stories. All published in that 1994-95 period, they are all set on the worlds of Werel and Yeowe and explore the themes of freedom, slavery, trauma, and revolution. 

Le Guin returned to the Hainish setting one final time with the novel The Telling (2000), the first long-form entry for over 25 years. Like some of the late short stories, this relatively slight novel revisits some themes and concepts which Le Guin had explored in earlier Hainish works. For example, its main character Sutty is a representative of the Ekumen, just like Rocannon from Rocannon's World, Genly Ai from The Left Hand of Darkness, and Solly from Four Ways to Forgiveness. Similarly, the planet Aka - to which Sutty is sent - resembles in some ways the repressive capitalism of Urras in The Dispossessed.

What about the reading order?

Le Guin shared her own view on reading order:

“Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions: where they fit in the "Hainish cycle" is anybody’s guess, but I’d read them first because they were written first. [...] Then you could read The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, [and] The Dispossessed, in any order.”

From there, it seems logical to dip into the short stories, and then to read The Telling, which while certainly not a conclusion to the Hainish stories, could be said to amount to a summation of them. What can be argued strongly is that as powerful as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are, newcomers to Le Guin’s work have a lot to gain from reading more widely around them. 

Further reading

Le Guin’s fascinating book of essays, The Language of the Night (1979) has recently been returned to print and collects numerous pieces of non-fiction about SF and fantasy. Some of these are quite well known, including “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “American SF and the Other”. 

Le Guin said of her novel The Eye of the Heron (1978) that it “may or may not” be in the Hainish setting - it is almost never included. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) is her excellent singleton SF novel, which explores the power of dreaming, the dangerous desire to “improve” the world, and is strongly influenced by Le Guin’s interest in daoism.

Conclusion

Ursula K. Le Guin’s towering reputation has only grown since she passed away in 2018. Her work is often considered “essential”, or “vitally important”, and these kinds of framings can make the books seem intimidating or unapproachable. The sheer moral seriousness and ideological complexity of the Hainish stories can compound this effect. With that being said, Le Guin’s work is very readable, perhaps particularly if these books and stories are read in the order that they were written.

The Hainish stories offer no high adventure, no easy answers, no straightforward confirmations of already-held ideas. These are challenging and complex books, but always at their centre there are people - as inspiring, frail, frustrating, and comprehensible as people can be. This essential humanism at the core of Le Guin’s work is its animating spark. It flickers fitfully in the early novels, but develops and burns brightly from Le Guin’s middle period. For all their alien locales and strange cultures, the Hainish stories are about us, are no less so for the passage of time.