The Telling: Akan Story-Slip

Aka is one of the many worlds of the Hainish diaspora – a planet settled millions of years ago by human beings from Hain, original homeworld of humanity, only to culturally diverge after a general galaxy-wide technological collapse. Just over 70 years ago, Aka was recontacted by the Ekumen – the Hainish-spearheaded interstellar organisation of recontacted Hainish worlds. The local Akans were fascinated with the offworlders, and many came to believe that their future was among the stars; the first contact team left with high hopes for future interactions with the Akans.

When an Ekumen Observer team was sent as a followup, they discovered that Aka had undergone a disturbing social change. A monolithic Corporation now ruled the world, which had become addicted to rapid technological progress in a bid to be seen as equals to the offworlders. Moreover, their society had undergone a harsh backlash against traditional knowledge – including folk histories and medicine – regarded as superstitious, and had undertaken a massive purge of their literary and cultural history.

All this coincided with convulsions on Terra – the rise of the terrifying Unist government, a force which spliced the extremist Christian right with anti-Ekumen feeling and which undertook a campaign of violent persecution on Earth. The Ekumen suspected that somehow the Unists had attempted to tamper with Aka, perhaps to convert them to their way of seeing things, only for this tampering to backfire catastrophically, prompting the Corporation to ramp up its anti-religious campaign and to mistrust offworlders.

Tong Ov, the head of the Ekumen mission on Aka, has struggled to get permission for any of his people to explore Aka beyond the strictly-controlled capital city; now he finally has the opportunity to send one of his aides on a trip to a rural town to get a picture of life there. He chooses Sutty, a Terran member of the team whose bitter memories of the Unists may be a burden to her mission, or might perhaps be the key to her reaching an rapproachment with the locals. Indeed, Sutty is eventually able to make contact with the network of traditional teachers and storytellers who maintain the Telling – the framework of traditional knowledge which was formerly the underpinning of Akan culture.

However, a Monitor for the Corporation has been trying to keep tabs on Sutty’s movements, fearful of the consequences if the Ekumen should make contact with this subculture. If Sutty is to get her report back to Tong Ov, get to the root of the Telling, and perhaps exert a positive influence on the future of Aka, she will sooner or later have to understand not just the stories of the Telling, not just her own story, but the story of the Monitor as well…

Le Guin Grasps the Nettle

Perhaps the trickiest subject for any American author to attempt to write about is slavery, since it’s a subject which shaped the history of the United States so profoundly and whose echoes are still heard so loud and clear today that it’s near-impossible for any American reader (or any reader exposed to American culture) to avoid having strong emotions about it. Nonetheless, Ursula Le Guin decided to tackle the subject directly in a sequence of novellas based in the twin worlds of Werel and Yeowe, part of the Hainish universe that was the backdrop of her early science fiction novels (including The Left Hand of Darkness, the book which put her on the map when it came to serious, literary science fiction for grown ups).

These tales were written as part of Le Guin’s 1990s process of re-examining her early fictional settings (as well as returning to the Hainish universe at this time, she also made her long-awaited return to Earthsea). This return to a cosmos she’d otherwise let lie fallow since the 1970s would also yield a clutch of short stories and a full novel, The Telling; the Werel and Yeowe stories represent a halfway point between these two.

For those new to Le Guin’s galaxy: the Hainish stories take place in a universe where once upon a time humanity arose on the world of Hain, colonised the stars some two million years ago, and then interstellar contact was lost and the colonies (including Earth!) were left to go their own way. Eventually, contact was re-established, helped in part by the invention of the ansible which allows for faster-than-light communication (but faster than light travel is, for much of the Hainish series, unknown), leading to the eventual establishment of the Ekumen, a sort of benign interstellar community which helps encourage best practice in inter-world relations and promotes a progressive set of values but is not overly interventionist.

Four of the five Werel and Yeowe stories were penned in rapid succession from 1994-1995, and were published in the collection Four Ways To Forgiveness. In 1999, Le Guin decided that the story cycle needed a fifth tale to round it out; this last tale was initially published in the collection The Birthday of the World and would later be republished with the others as part of the retitled Five Ways To Forgiveness by the Library of America, at first as part of their second hardcover omnibus of Le Guin’s Hainish works and also as a standalone ebook.

Adrift At the Dawn of Empire

One might question whether yet another English translation of The Aeneid is called for, but Shadi Bartsch’s recent version of the book is at least packaged with an erudite introduction, extensive notes on the poem, and a glossary of terms, places, and people mentioned in the epic poem. Originally penned by Vergil/Virgil (Bartsch prefers “Vergil”), The Aeneid is essentially Homeric fanfic, a sequel to The Iliad and The Odyssey: Troy has fallen, Aeneas of Troy has fled with a bunch of his buds, and the goddess Juno has kept up her grudge against the Trojans and will not let Aeneas be at peace.

Aeneas is not without divine allies, however: he is the son of the goddess Venus, who intervenes to help, and Jupiter has big plans for him: he intends that Aeneas and his followers will eventually find a safe harbour in the land of Latium and become the forefathers of the Romans, chosen by Jupiter to rule the world. King Latinus, ruler of Latium, is glad to welcome Aeneas, seeing in him a very suitable match for his daughter Lavinia – but Turnus, who Lavinia was promised to, will not let that stand…

On his deathbed, Vergil infamously urged that The Aeneid be destroyed, and it’s been speculated that this is because it was unfinished: there’s certain contradictions in the text, and the story cuts off very abruptly after Aeneas slays Turnus in a fit of fury mid-battle. However, Bartsch presents a cogent argument that this ending is an apt way to close the story: there’s textual reasons to think that even as Juno is finally persuaded to relent and stop messing with the Trojans (Jupiter placates her by promising that the Trojans will become so integrated with the Latins as to lose their cultural distinctness), Aeneas himself ends up taking on some of Juno’s vengeful, grudge-bearing qualities.

Wayward Tales of the Ekumen

A good chunk of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction takes place in the Hainish setting – a future history wherein it is revealed that an extremely long time ago humanity originated on the planet of Hain and colonised much of the galaxy, including Earth, before a major disaster caused the worlds of the Hainish diaspora to lose contact with each other. The stories of the era relate to the slow, agonising process of the human family rediscovering its true, astonishing diversity, first in the era of the League of All Worlds and then, after a crisis which sees Earth conquered and the League dispersed for a while, a successor organisation known as the Ekumen.

Le Guin would explore this universe through a range of novels and short stories. The first Hainish short story – Semley’s Necklace, AKA The Dowry of Angyar – would be incorporated into Rocannon’s World, the first of the early Hainish novels. Another set of them – the tales of the twin worlds Werel and Yeowe and the bitter history between them – would form a story-cycle collected in the book Four Ways To Forgiveness and then, when Le Guin wrote an additional tale in the cycle, eventually reincorporated into that book in its republication as Five Ways To Forgiveness. The Word For World Is Forest is a long enough novella that whilst it was originally published in a story anthology (Again, Dangerous Visions) it got a standalone release later and is generally regarded as a short novel.

Other short stories of the setting, however, were not so easily absorbed into one book or another. In English-speaking markets, you would get all of them by picking up the anthologies The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and The Birthday of the World. Alternatively, the Library of America’s two-volume hardcover release of the entire Hainish series, compiled with Le Guin’s blessing, brings together all of the novels and stories in one collection, along with interesting alternate texts, essays, and other bits and pieces. For this article, I’m going to go on a quick tour of the Hainish cosmos in order to take in the sights which you won’t see if you just stuck to the novels. (Counting Five Ways To Forgiveness as a novel comprising an episodic story-cycle, in much the same way Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus is seen as a novel comprised of three novellas. Come to think of it, perhaps that was Le Guin’s inspiration, since she’s on the record as admiring Fifth Head.)

The earliest of the wayward tales is Winter’s King, a companion piece to The Left Hand of Darkness, and like the people of Gethen in that world the story expresses itself in two distinct ways; the original 1969 publication of the story used “he” pronouns for characters hailing from Gethen, and then in a later revision Le Guin flipped the pronouns to “she”. Since the “she” version was published in Le Guin’s seminal 1975 short story anthology The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, it is this version which is most commonly available, with the 1969 rendition having fallen out of favour, though the Library of America compilation presents both. For a fun experiment, if you have the two versions to hand you can flip between them and see if you find the scenes land differently when different pronouns are used.

What We Gain By What We Give Away

Tau Ceti boasts two habitable worlds, the planet Urras and its moon Anarres. (The Anarresti regard Urras “the Moon”, but since Anarres’ gravity is noticeably less than that of Urras it’s evident that Urras must be the larger world.) The political situation on Urras is much like that on Earth, with various nation-states and hierarchical governments – some of which resemble quasi-Victorian robber-baron capitalism, at least one of which resembles Soviet-era authoritarian socialism. Nearly two centuries ago, the political structure of Urras was rocked by the rise of Odonianism, an anarcho-socialist philosophy. The social tensions arising from this were eventually resolved by the mass settlement of Anarres by the Odonians of the time – after which the two societies largely went their own way, with a small amount of trade established via treaty.

Though Anarres is habitable, it’s not as hospitable as Urras, and it may be a long, long time before it is. Nonetheless, the Odonian society there has survived, proving the viability of a society which acknowledges no formal hierarchy or property rights. However, whilst fiscal currency does not exist, social currency very much does: the approval or disapproval of one’s peers can be a tool of social control in its own right, and successive crises have allowed a conservative faction to gain extensive soft power, which they can exert through the gentle expression of quasi-official disapproval of unsanctioned activities.

Take, for instance, the example of Shevek, a physicist who we first meet as he makes his way to the space port for a trip to Urras, a proposed journey which has so outraged his peers (who have been primed to be outraged in this manner by individuals with high social capital) that an angry mob forms at the gates and lobs stones at him as he leaves. Shevek, however, believes in the necessity of his trip: he thinks that true anarchism does not build walls, and that includes the wall that has been built between Anarres and Urras.

If Shevek can use the resources placed at his disposal by the A-Io government on Urras to complete his theory, he could break down more walls than that: his theory could become the working basis of a proposed device called an “ansible”, which would allow instantaneous communication across any distance. Perhaps this would be the seed that would allow the disparate worlds of Tau Ceti, Terra, Hain and beyond to become a true family, rather than distant cousins. But just as Anarres’ property-less, anarchist society seems unusual to us, A-Io’s propertarian, “archist” society seems bizarre to Shevek. As a stranger in a strange land, can he prevent his theory from becoming one more form of private property?

Athshean Dream-Slip

The planet Athshe – referred to by the Terran colonisers as “New Tahiti” – is a water-logged world, its main landmasses being an archipelago of heavily-forested islands. (Since we are in an Ursula Le Guin creation here, one might note certain parallels with Earthsea.) The Terran colony has about 2000 or so humans who work primarily as loggers, since wood is a fabulously valuable luxury item on an Earth whose ecosystem has been comprehensively wrecked.

Captain Don Davidson is the square-jawed, manly, red-blooded American who, at the start of the story, is the leader of one of the logging camps. Like most of the colonists, he makes extensive use of “voluntary” labour from the local Athsheans – a diminutive people distinguished by their green fur and their unusual sleep patterns, in which rather than entering into full sleep they enter a placid state for a time being, at some points during which they enter a type of dream state which is much more consciously directed than is typical in humans, through which they navigate their inner worlds. A dreaming Athshean might have some form of interaction with their dead loved ones, for instance, and think of them as retaining some semblance as life for as long as Athsheans dream of them.

At least, that’s what the likes of Dr. Raj Lyubov, the colony’s main anthropologist, would say. Lyubov puts a lot of energy into trying to understand the Athsheans. Davidson can’t be bothered – as far as he’s concerned, they’re just lazy, idle monkeys who need to be dealt with harshly in order to keep them in line. After all, they’re passive lumps. They don’t even put up a fight – violence isn’t part of their mental makeup, even Lyubov knows that!

Imagine Davidson’s surprise when, flying his helicopter back from the colony’s central town, he discovers his logging camp has been raised and its inhabitants slaughtered by the Athsheans, led by one Selver. It’s through Selver that Lyubov was been able to learn the most about the Athsheans, once upon a time – until the day when Selver, heartbroken after his wife Thele was raped and murdered by Davidson, violently attacked Davidson and, after medical treatment for the brutal beating Davidson inflicted on him, was shipped off by Lyubev to a far-off part of Athshea and set free.

Clearly, the brutality of Davidson and his ilk – and the institutionalised slavery practiced by the colonists – have taught the Athsheans a thing or two. And with an entire island – now referred to by the Terrans as “Dump Island” – having been reduced to near-useless desert by the Terran’s agricultural miscalculations already, there is ample reason for a planet of millions of Athsheans to quickly pick up this new idea of violent warfare as a means of getting results that Selver has discovered.

Selver’s discovery of an effective Athshean form of guerilla warfare makes him a god in the eyes of his people – the Athshean word for “god” and “translator” is the same, since a deity in their worldview is someone who glimpses a new idea in dream and enacts it in the waking world, making it part of the waking world (thus “translating” it from one world to the other). But can even a god put an idea back in its bottle once it’s unleashed – or will this new Athshean way of violence linger long after the existential crisis which brought it about has been resolved?

Charting a Course For Gethen

For me to review The Left Hand of Darkness at this point in time would be futile; what else could be said about it? It won its Hugo and Nebula Awards for good reason – by positing the world of Gethen, a place whose otherwise human-like inhabitants have no inherent sexual dimorphism, instead entering the state of “kemmer” during their monthly cycle, at which point any individual could potentially end up expressing any reproductive role. (So, for instance, you could impregnate a friend one month and then fall pregnant the next.)

This wasn’t Le Guin’s initial seed idea for the book – she wanted to depict a world where war was unknown, which prompted her to posit all sorts of other social structures and shifts, and eventually she decided that the way to go was to depict a world where gender isn’t a thing and sexuality is not a hallmark of identity so much as an expression of what happens to float your boat this month.

The end result isn’t perfect, and she would admit as much – particularly taking onboard criticisms that she chose to use the term “he” for all the Gethen (though it does mean she could say stuff like “The King was pregnant” to shake up readers’ preconceptions) – but in the midst of the New Wave of Science Fiction it really helped open up the door for other authors to consider such subjects in an SF context (or to use SF as a basis for their porn, but eh, not everything has to be high philosophy).

Dick On Dick

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve loved Dick. Like many of my generation, my first exposure to Dick was through a film, which made me curious enough to seek to experience Dick first-hand for myself. Having sampled my first few Dicks, I was soon hooked; my Dick collection, though not complete (a lot of the lesser mainstream Dicks have yet to grace my shelves) is still expansive, and I would say that it features the best Dicks available to the public.

But here, thanks to the efforts of Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem and a team of assistants, is a Dick which is a bit much for me to cope with. It is a monster Dick. In sheer girth it’s about seven or eight times larger than most Dicks, and three times larger even than most omnibus Dicks. As far as the actual experience of it goes, it’s a little bit of an ordeal; Dicks are known for being an acquired taste to begin with, but there is much about this one which is quite hard to swallow. As it goes through its repetitive motions, there’s no building to a satisfying thematic climax; you just slog on and on, taking more and more in until you have to take a break. Only those with a ravenous appetite for Dick should even think about taking this on; it speaks a lot for the editors’ love of Dick that they were able to derive this Dick from its source, which is apparently around ten times as long.

If Anglophones Were Civilised They Would Read Angélica Gorodischer

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In the discussion following Dan’s article on race in fantasy fiction, it was pointed out that we don’t seem to get much in the way of translations of SF beyond the English-speaking world. While cultural myopia probably bears much of the blame, I believe there are other factors at play. There’s the economic reasons, of course – why spend the money on translating someone’s work on top of the effort of getting the rights to their work when there’s always another English-speaking mug who thinks that he or she is Tolkien? Then there is the inherent difficulty of translating SF and fantasy – how to translate one particular made-up word such that it makes sense in another context?

Of course, some authors are of sufficient stature that you can’t not translate them. Stanislaw Lem’s fiction has been praised within the English-speaking world for years. But there’s certainly not enough effort being made to translate the best of the world’s SF into English, and we anglophones are suffering for it. It is completely unjust that of all of Angélica Gorodischer’s work, only Kalpa Imperial has been translated. Then again, maybe the translation of great fiction requires a translator of comparable talent to the author. As you have probably noticed to the illustration to the right, Kalpa Imperial was translated by none other than Ursula le Guin. (Incidentally, my copy claims that she wrote the Bartimaeus Trilogy, which as far as I am aware is wrong – although John Stroud should probably take it as a compliment.)