Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels and Stories Vol. 1 (LOA #296): Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / ... of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition)

, #1

Hardcover, 1100 pages

English language

Published Sept. 5, 2017 by Library of America.

ISBN:
978-1-59853-538-9
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4 stars (2 reviews)

The star-spanning story of humanity's colonization of other planets, Ursula K. Le Guin's visionary Hainish novels and stories redrew the map of modern science fiction. This first volume in a definitive two-volume edition gathers the first five Hainish novels: Rocannon's World, in which an ethnologist sent to a bronze-age planet must help defeat an intergalactic enemy; Planet of Exile, the story of human colonists stranded on a planet that is slowly killing them; City of Illusions, which finds a future Earth ruled by the mysterious Shing; and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning masterpieces The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed—as well as four short stories and a new introduction by the author.

"Ursula Le Guin can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory." —Jonathan Lethem

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Excellent Books from A Different Time

4 stars

This book is a collection of five novels and four short stories, as well as an essay and introductions to each of those novels, set in Le Guin's Hainish universe. Each novel contains all the information about the universe necessary to understand that novel, though taken together they reveal a more complex picture than any one alone. The gist is that millions of years ago, the people of a planet called Hain or Davenant seeded various worlds with human colonists. (Though most of these worlds had no previous inhabitants, it is mentioned in one story that hominid life arose independantly on Earth; humans, however, are descended from Hainish settlers.) This serves as a vehicle for exploring humanity in various contexts and situations which otherwise do not exist in real life, as the League of All Worlds - or the Ekumen, in the later novels - started by Hain seeks to …

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