Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels and Stories Vol. 2 (LOA #297): The Word for World Is Forest / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling / stories (Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition)

Are these things science fiction? Well, yes. But they are also parables of very great depth. If science fiction is not up to your standards, these pieces will be. Ursula K. Le Guin was a powerful write of lyrical prose. (She was also an interesting poet). She was not a seeker of honors, but she was frequently awarded for her work - by touchy literati, no less. These are the most literate science fiction around. Ursula Le Guin did not approve of Amazon, as she made clear at an awards assembly. She had too high a regard for brick and mortar bookstores (which never did her justice) and excessive distaste for enterprises of great size. So, she was not a perfect analyst of interactions. But I'll bet you could look all day in boutique book shops and find very little (if any) of her work. Show her she was wrong. Buy, buy, buy!

I am so happy to have all of LeGuin’s Hainish novels in two beautiful collector-worthy editions. LeGuin is the Master & these stories are her opus. What literary treasures!!

My review of Volume 1 applies to Volume 2.

Le Guin's Hainish elaborations (not a cycle, more of a convenience, so she says in the v. 1 intro) continue into the mostly shorter pieces of the second volume. The novella The Word for World Is Forest has always struck me as a protest against the defoliation of Vietnam. It may align more with the Earth Day sentiments of the early Seventies, but either way, the revolt of those on Athshe against the invading Terrans bent on taking its resources to sustain their own depleted earth has remained topical. Le Guin acknowledges this sad truth in her appended 1976 introduction for Word. She relates how her own "fantasy" at that time that a Philippine tribe called the Senoi stood for a "dream culture" akin to her imagined one for her indigenous resisters. While these claims were largely debunked among anthropologists, Le Guin reasons that for her threatened world, the use of its scientific data may diminish accordingly as its "speculative element" compensates.Hainish stories overlap in characters and ideas now and then among the seven compiled here. Her faster-than-light communication device the ansible excited her fellow scribes. By 1990, Le Guin took up a possibility akin to Madeleine L'Engle's "wrinkle in time." Le Guin was "allured by the notion of transilience, the transfer of a physical body from one point in space-time to another without interval."Christening it "churtening," she allows that those who pull it off in her fiction are never sure how they did it, or if they can do it again. "In this it much resembles life." Her 1994 collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea weaves influences from a Japanese folktale with Hain-adjacent love stories. She attempted in this decade "to learn how to write as a woman." Her latest brainstorm, the "sedorutu," sets on the world named O an institutionalization of hetero- and homosexual relationships "in an intricate four-part arrangement laden with infinite emotional possibilities--a seductive prospect to a storyteller." Her "gender-bending" produces stories enriched by her own decision to speak out not only on behalf of women, but all who are loners and introverts. In an era bent on overpopulation, "unlimited growth," and "mindless exploitation," Ursula Le Guin retreats. She considers the misfit.Her final entries twist more categories. Dark-skinned people enslave light-skinned ones. The emerging "story suite" becomes Four Ways to Forgiveness. Meanwhile, Le Guin learns of the destruction of "religious Taoism" during the regime of "aggressive secular fundamentalism" in China.The Telling (2000) closes this volume. Le Guin sees around her in her own homeland the rise of similar "divisive, exclusive," and dogmatic instigators of hatred perverting "the energy of every major creed." This concluding novel depicts "the secular persecution of an ancient, pacific, non-theistic religion on another world." Those responsible, tellingly, originate among "a violent monotheistic sect on Earth." No matter what ignites the dynamic fusion of thought and action in her Hainish fictions, Ursula Le Guin generates provocative and intelligent considerations of complex forces. A tribute to her craft, these elegant volumes combine into a welcome set for loners, introverts, and the rest of us.

This book is one of the most boring, insufferable things I've ever read. My grandma literally read the synopsis and told me she would pray that I could get through it. Had to read for college, would not recommend.