Hi Everyone 🙂

Another Monday is here, and I’m sharing another literary review made especially for you 🙂

And once again, it is about the sci-fi genre, which I enjoy reading so much. This time I’ve picked Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin for reading. It is quite a short novel; however, the author managed to fill it with engaging, immersive, and picturesque descriptions and touched upon numerous anthropological, cultural, philosophical, and racial awareness subjects.

Photo Credit: Richard Jensen, from here

Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) is a well-known American novelist. She is most famous for her sci-fi prose, especially A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), but she also did translations, wrote poetry, published short story collections, and even several books for children. Her father was an anthropologist, so she incorporated lots of knowledge on this point in her novels. And her mother was a writer, so U. Le Guin inherited her talent. She began her career in the 60s and was one of the first authors to emphasize the importance of female protagonists in sci-fi, which back then was typically male-centered. She also showed a lot of stubbornness and dedication as a writer, trying to get published, as her first works were declined by agencies. This can teach us to never give up for sure 🙂

“Among many honors her writing received are a National Book Award, seven Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2000, she was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and in 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.” – from the page dedicated to Ursula Le Guin.

Planet of Exile is a short novel that is part of the Hainish Cycle. The narrative tells us about the cultures and fates of three humanoid species living on the third planet of the Gamma Draconis system. One of them is the descendants of a human expedition group from Terra (Earth) that was left on this planet and lost half of their forefathers’ heritage. Still, they preserved books, medical knowledge, and astronomical maps. They have certain abilities, which can be seen as magic, though they are often referred to in the book as something any developed race can learn. Their number is receding due to their problem with fertility caused by living under the foreign sun.

Another group, the Tevarans, are primitive nomad tribes with no clear understanding of the future or ability to plan their actions. Their lifestyle depends on the long season cycles (60 years long altogether). They are socially organized, following their family leaders, and they have customs, ethics, traditions, and beliefs. They make pacts and interact with Terran humans sometimes, but they can’t have mutual children, so they don’t recognize each other as “real humans,” and their relationships are full of tension and minor conflicts.

Everything changes when, just before another long winter, the third humanoid group, the Gaal, learns how to organize itself and attacks both of them. This causes deep cultural changes in both groups, and this event teaches them cooperation, the need for which is especially emphasized by the love line between Jacob Agat, a Terran human, and Rolery, an aboriginal girl. We also know that the planet itself causes major biological changes in humans, which makes us wonder about the limits of natural influences and how far the adaptation of our organisms can reach!

Among the strengths of the novel, I’d like to mention the mesmerizing, musical descriptions and the captivating, thrilling storyline development. The world seems so real, well-thought-out, and perfectly functioning. Ursula Le Guin put a lot of her anthropological knowledge into describing the tribal life of the Tevarans, their philosophy, and how it all arises from the nature surrounding them. This shines through the narrative, making the reader wonder and contemplate.

The author also perfectly shows how all national/racial issues can evaporate in the face of danger, how “primitive” people can teach and enrich civilized societies, and vice versa. She brings to the reader’s attention how the dynamics of cultural development depend on the climate and interaction of the groups, and that one culture may fully absorb the heritage of another only when it is ready, and forcing it into premature changes is ethically wrong. The war that the humanoids face seems very real and frightening, but so are winter and the problem of hunger. We are especially moved by the sudden, almost impossible love between two representatives of the different thinking species.

Speaking of which, at the beginning, I thought this love line to be somewhat forced by the author, but later there was an explanation of what was happening. I found this quite satisfactory. Another point which I found somewhat far-fetched was the fact that this human group changed and adapted genetically to their new host planet to such an extent that in the end they could have a possibility to have children with the aboriginal species… As far as I know, this is biologically impossible, but I guess the author wanted to emphasize the evolutionary and developmental role of the planet and nature.

All in all, it was a captivating, amazing read, very thought-provoking, engaging, and full of stunning descriptions. I really advise it to everyone who is into philosophical sci-fi, and probably to all fans of Mircea Eliade hiding out there, as I felt a lot of common notions and perhaps a slight influence of his works in this book 🙂

I’d give it 4.5 points out of 5

Thank you for reading this post, as always! 🙂

© MarvellousNightmare on Coconut Doesn’t Exist

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