Year-End Booklist 2018

too many books

Reality unraveled at an even faster rate than usual throughout 2018, and its disintegration brought a corresponding uptick in anxiety, confusion, and general not-goodness. Luckily, books were here, doing what they always do: transforming chaos into meaning, helping humanity impose order on the universe through the exercise of words, words, words. I read sixty-four books and enjoyed most of them. Some of my reading preferences have changed (I’m getting more and more of a yen for nonfiction and enjoy less and less SF written before 1973) and some have stayed the same (I still cannot stand the let’s-focus-on-a-succession-of-trivial-details style of “Literary Fiction” storytelling — if you’re doing lit fic, every word better be beautiful or something weird better be happening (good job, Jesmyn Ward!)). At bottom is a full list of what I read in 2018, but following are some recommendations based on that list.

Top 5 Recommended Fiction Books

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Picture of a Le Guin novel collection
Left Hand is good, but honestly just get this and read her entire Hainish series.

Always and forever, everyone should read this. An envoy of a galactic civilization undertakes first contact on a winter-locked world where gender does not exist. It perfectly melds mysticism, future history, clear prose, thriller tension, and sheer beauty. I am not overstating the matter when I say this book changed Science Fiction forever. The audiobook version is wonderful, read by George Guidall.

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells (4-novella series)

murderbot computer shelf
Ebooks are great until you need to take a picture. Ah well. Murderbot is still incredible.

I was surprised by this one. I bought the first entry, “All Systems Red,” because I couldn’t resist the title. I expected a fun book about a badass far-future killer robot, and that’s what I got, but I also got a tightly-written thriller about personal accountability and the dangers of the economics of exploitation, with an incredibly empathetic protagonist thrown in as a bonus. The Murderbot of the title calls itself that. It’s a SecUnit, a cyborg loaned out to space expeditions to protect humans. The protagonist hacks its “governor module” and gains the ability to do whatever it wants. Mostly, what it wants is to curl up in the corner, not interact with anyone, and watch massive amounts of illegally-downloaded space TV because, as it turns out, non-governor-moduled SecUnits have crippling social anxiety (no social skills + constant pressure to appear normal so as to avoid getting scrapped as defective). Problem is, the humans it is contracted to protect stumble into the middle of a lethal conspiracy, and Murderbot has to get to work. The mix of the SecUnit’s extreme competence melded with its crushing social anxiety builds a character that’s fun to watch as it kicks ass but easy to relate to as it complains about what it has to do.

The Odyssey, Homer/Emily Wilson

Odyssey fagles on a bookshelf
So, this is not the Wilson translation, but I mean, close enough

Along with TheĀ Iliad, the oldest story in the Western canon (Gilgamesh beats it out by a millennium, but it’s Sumerian). It fascinates me because Odysseus’ concerns are so close to our concerns (returning home, vengeance, atonement), and Homer’s narrative techniques are so close to what we use (metaphor, story-within-a-story, thrilling action scenes). I also love Odysseus, the clever bastard who lies with the ease of Huckleberry Finn, executes complex strategy more smoothly than Napoleon, and murders enemies as easily as the man with the hammer in a 19th-century Chicago slaughterhouse. It’s also just a real swashbuckler — Odysseus is basically a pirate, reaving his way around the Aegean, sneaking in and out of kingdoms under assumed identities, outsmarting enemies. It’s great stuff. I read Emily Wilson’s new translation, which I enjoyed. My go-to is Robert Fagles, but Wilson used more down-to-Earth, modernized language and a tripping rhythm. It also avoided euphemisms — all the people serving wine and drawing baths weren’t called “serving girls” — they were called slaves.

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf 

nice rich lady, fears death
On the surface, just rich people running around. whiling away the time. Inside, so much more.

I barely remember what happened in this book because I was so deeply engaged with the people of this book. Joyce gets a lot of buzz for his stream of consciousness technique, but Woolf is the undisputed master. So smoothly, so effortlessly does she slip the reader inside a character that you don’t feel sad or happy or heartstring-tugged, external to the character. You are brought into their sensorium, you experience as they experience all the emotional complexity of humanity — a woman’s simultaneous dissatisfaction with and love of her life, a soldier’s slowly increasing PTSD, the soft regret of a wistful lover — you don’t watch these emotions, you are in them, entirely thanks to Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest talents of the 20th century.

Le Chien Jaune (The Yellow Dog)Georges Simenon

Ceci n'est pas un chien
Yellow Dog. What a weird book title.

This book isn’t as must-read or upending/impressive as some of the others on this list, but I loved it because it was my first Simenon. Georges Simenon wrote dozens of detective novels starring Inspector Jules Maigret, a down-to-earth detective who waits and sees, who asks around, who lets the solution develop without any outlandish cerebrational tricks. The language is clear and direct, the pacing is good, the characterization exists in that perfect detective-novel style in which the author puts a splash of paint on each character, just enough to vividly identify them and give them clear motivations, and then sets them loose, light and free, into the plot.

Top 5 Recommended Nonfiction Books

1491, Charles C. Mann

1491, Charles C. Mann's Masterpiece
If you read nothing else in 2019, read this. Most impactful book I read in 2018, and possibly the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read.

Amazing, life-changing. Everyone should read this book because it explores an American history that high school textbooks leave pretty fuzzy or outright misleading. Indian societies were larger, were more culturally complex, and had more of an effect on their environment than we’re taught. Most Europeans observed Indian settlements after what was basically a zombie apocalypse (some estimates of the indigenous death rate from European diseases is 90%+), so our conception of American Indians has about as much to do with their pre-contact society as The Walking Dead has with ours. It’s written in a clear, engaging style, and literally every single fact Mann offers up is fascinating. For example, ancient Indians in the Yucatan bio-engineered a type of prairie grass into maize, one of the most important crops in the history of Earth. It’s mind-blowing that anyone could achieve this without modern gene-splicing technology. This scientific achievement, to hear 1491 tell it, is just a few steps behind Victor Frankenstein’s.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

HeLa saves lives, give her credit
Great job balancing the science with the human story.

Multilayered history of the most famous cell line in the history of science, HeLa. HeLa cells are immortal — the line will keep dividing and dividing, infinitely, and those identical cells can be used to test vaccines, cancer treatments, basically anything having to do with medicine’s effect on the human body. Problem is, the cells were harvested from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman living in Baltimore, at a time when the phrase “medical ethics” got, at best, an apologetic shrug from doctors. Lacks had terminal cervical cancer, and a scraping of her cells ended up being immortal and incredibly useful (and expensive, at $250 a vial) to science. Problem is, Henrietta’s descendants are still living in poverty in Baltimore. A beautifully interwoven tale of the scientific feats made possible by HeLa, the bioethical problems arising from them, and a biography of the Lacks family and their concerns. Both an exploration of towering scientific achievements and of the people whom Scienceā„¢ marginalized to make it happen.

Born a Crime, Trevor Noah

A delightful autobiography, read delightfully by Trevor Noah himself. It seems half of audiobooks are recorded with this weird, half-breathless, simultaneously melodramatic but solemn style that just puts me to sleep. Trevor reads this lightly, with real humor and feeling, and his engagement with the text translates to our enjoyment of it. The subject matter is his childhood in South Africa, where he was born a crime — the son of a white man and a black woman, relations between whom were illegal under apartheid. It ranges from his Mom’s attempts to build a good life for him, to his time (briefly) in a private school, to his teenage career as an off-the-books DJ and black market CD seller. It is infused with love and humor, and while it is mostly the story of the lives of two people — Trevor Noah and his mother — you can’t tell the story of a person’s life without telling the story of the place they live, so it gives insight into South African society. More than anything else, this is a work dedicated to his mother, her determination, her quirks, and her love for him.

Pale Rider, Laura Spinney

The book that warns you about ducks
This book contains a lot of duck-based warnings.

A history of the Spanish Flu that reads almost like a thriller as the disease tears across the globe, devastating a pre-CDC world. The origin point of the Spanish Flu is not entirely clear (other than it didn’t start in Spain), but it was a global pandemic once it really got going, fueled by the demobilization of WWI soldiers. The book alternates between interesting factoids and visceral, atmospheric descriptions of what humans in the middle of outbreaks experienced — the most surreal were the excerpts from the journal of a young doctor in Rio de Janeiro as that vibrant city slowly went quiet, to the point that the government couldn’t keep up with the deaths and “[p]eople would prop the feet of the dead up on the window ledges so that public assistance agencies would come to take them away.” One important fact — the most common natural reservoirs of influenza are waterfowl, and a little shift in the protein coat (allowing the disease to attack humans instead of birds) of any given virus is all that’s needed to set off an outbreak. So stay the hell away from ducks. Or surround yourself with ducks and develop immunity before the next pandemic.

I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong

A wonderful hard-science read. Yong, with a deft and clear pen, explores the science of what’s inside us, mostly our guts. In every person, human cells are outnumbered by microbes that achieve all manner of vital tasks, ranging from digestion to the regulation of brain chemistry. Humanity is not Yong’s sole focus — he takes us through the microbiome of multiple other species. Not a lot of forward momentum other than “Oh man that’s so cool to know!” but the facts used are so well-selected and -explained that the book develops a kind of propulsive intellectual excitement.

The End

So that’s it. Ten books I read last year that I think everyone should read, and that I hope everyone will enjoy. Books that expanded my emotional landscape, that scratched my itch for adventure, that tickled my intellectual fancy, that filled me with facts that are good to know, that made my world more complete, less shattered by the constant informational onslaught from the global trashfire that was 2018.

If you care to skim the sixty-four books I read last year, my finishing a book at all is a soft recommendation. So go for it.

List of Every Book I Read in 2018

To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
Murder on the Orient Express — Agatha Christie
All Systems Red — Martha Wells
Night Watch — Terry Pratchett
Le Petit Prince — Antoine de Saint-ExupĆ©ry
The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe — Kij Johnson
Kalpa Imperial — AngĆ©lica Gorodischer
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Rebecca Skloot (nonfiction)
Six Wakes — Mur Lafferty
The Traitor Baru Cormorant — Seth Dickinson
I Contain Multitudes — Ed Yong (nonfiction)
Les MisĆ©rables Tome 3 – Marius — Victor Hugo
Lords and Ladies — Terry Pratchett
Sing, Unburied, Sing — Jesmyn Ward
Life, the Universe, and Everything — Douglas Adams
The Collapsing Empire — John Scalzi
The King of Elfland’s Daughter — Lord Dunsany
Artificial Condition — Martha Wells
War on Peace — Ronan Farrow (nonfiction)
Rocannons World — Ursula K. Le Guin
Planet of Exile — Ursula K. Le Guin
City of Illusions — Ursula K. Le Guin
The Metamorphoses — Ovid
No Time to Spare — Ursula K. Le Guin (nonfiction)
Diplomatic Immunity — Lois McMaster Bujold
Le scaphandre et le papillon — Jean-Dominique Bauby (nonfiction)
The Hidden Life of Trees — Peter Wohlleben (nonfiction)
Proven Guilty — Jim Butcher
Fear — Bob Woodward
Trail of Lightning — Rebecca Roanhorse
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance — Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma — Jane Austen
Exit Strategy — Martha Wells
Monstress vol. 1 — Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda
Grant — Ron Chernow (nonfiction)
Lud-in-the-Mist — Hope Mirrlees
A Darker Shade of Magic — V.E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows — V.E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light — V.E. Schwab
Monstress vol. 2 — Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda
The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx (nonfiction)
The Conquest of Bread — Peter Kropotkin (nonfiction)
Hunger — Roxane Gay (nonfiction)
The Illustrated Man — Ray Bradbury
Born a Crime — Trevor Noah
Thief of Time — Terry Pratchett
The Genius of Birds — Jennifer Ackerman (nonfiction)
The Odyssey — Homer, Emily Wilson
Exit Strategy — Martha Wells
Pale Rider — Laura Spinney (nonfiction)
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
The Snowman —Jo NesbĆø
Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
Roughing It — Mark Twain (nonfiction? ish?)
1491 — Charles C. Mann (nonfiction)
The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin
Carpe Jugulum — Terry Pratchett
A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle
The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain
The Consuming Fire — John Scalzi
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson (nonfiction)
How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? — N.K. Jemisin
Three Men in a Boat — Jerome K. Jerome
Le Chien Jaune — Georges Simenon
The Wizard and the Prophet — Charles C. Mann (nonfiction)

Review: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is fresh and clear nearly a hundred years after its publication

Human consciousness, accurately captured, doesn’t age and doesn’t go out of style.

I just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway, and it is the best pure Art I’ve experienced in years. It is beautiful, full stop. Reading it is like closing your eyes in a rowboat on the middle of the ocean — you’re rocked slowly, effortlessly back and forth, you inhale buffets of fresh salt air, you feel the warmth and shadow of the sun as clouds cover and uncover it — it is an art so sure, so natural, that reading it is relaxation. It is one of those rare books that, being read, makes the reader more deeply human. My alma mater committed educational malpractice when they gave me an English degree after I somehow dodged reading this in my courses.

nice rich lady, fears death
On the surface, just rich people running around, whiling away the time. Inside, so much more.

Mrs. Dalloway covers one summer day in London, as Clarissa Dalloway (nĆ©e Parry) prepares a party for her and her upper-class friends. As she’s walking through London, as she’s running errands, as she’s sitting in her room, her mind wanders seamlessly between what’s in front of her, what she’s processing then and there, and her deep internal life. Woolf builds a facsimile of human thought so faithful that it breaks normal perception — Clarissa’s thoughts are your thoughts, the barriers between the reader and the read tremble, become porous. The technique is stream of consciousness, but I’ve never seen it used to better effect, done with more sheer control, more ability to enfold and instill empathy — not with Joyce, not with Proust, not even with Woolf’s other experimental novel, To the Lighthouse.

Look at this, the opening paragraphs of the book:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning–fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, ā€œMusing among the vegetables?ā€–was that it?–ā€I prefer men to cauliflowersā€–was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace–Peter Walsh.

The narrative moves so effortlessly from speech to thought, from the trivial everyday to a memory so important and deep-seated that it’s still clear, still rises unbidden to the forefront of the soul 30ish years later, and the effortlessness, the smoothness, is the beauty of the book. We are lulled into the thoughts of another; we inhabit them fully. A woman steps out of her front door into a beautiful London day, and immediately thinks of a beach when she was 18, and we are on the beach with her.

Woolf’s power does not limit her to just Mrs. Dalloway — wherever there’s a character, there’s an entrance into their internal state, and the characters range from bit players like a woman selling flowers on the street to the man Clarissa Dalloway almost married, Peter Walsh. The result is a deeply pleasurable flitting from consciousness to consciousness, like some demon who is sequentially possessing a fraction of the population of west London. Woolf follows about twenty characters this way, and they are mostly nearer or further friends and acquaintances of Clarissa Dalloway, the people between whom she is ā€œlaid out like a mist…the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.ā€

The book moves forward in that it begins in the morning and ends in the evening, in that the people run errands, meet acquaintances, and talk to each other, but so much of the novel takes place in the characters’ internal lives, as so much of human experience takes place in our internal lives, that the plot is almost secondary. Its achievement is in its exploration of the thoughts and fears of each character, from little annoyances like a traffic jam to whoppers like the contemplation of death.

George Saunders’ conception of fiction as a ā€œcompassion-generatingā€ machine applies here. Even though the characters might just be worried about getting the wrong type of flowers, or that they have the wrong dress for a party (and that’s not all they’re worried about), those trivial things are important to us, because they are important them, and while the book is open, we are them. Characters circle one round the other, their thoughts rising and falling, rising and falling, so flawlessly, so beautifully, that Woolf’s narrative is as powerful and eternal as the tides.

Naomi Novik’s new fantasy novel Spinning Silver is a perfectly-constructed wintry escape from July

I mean, what you’re escaping to is death and fear and destruction and love, but the worldbuilding is particularly impressive.

One of the benefits of growing older is that you collect authors as you go. Instead of slumping through an inexhaustible backlog great authors compiled before I was born, I now have a handful whose product I can pick up fresh, confident that the prose is clear, the characters well-developed, and the story twisty and powerful. Naomi Novik is one of those authors.

Spinning Silver Book Cover Rumpelstiltskin
Oh, also the main character turns silver to gold. Left that out.

I read Uprooted in one cold January day and fell deeply in love with its expert tension-building, its magic-for-a-steep-price, and the strange, pleasing depth of the world Novik builds out of scraps of folktales. Her talents are on display in the not-really-sequel out now,Ā Spinning Silver. She draws from Rumpelstiltskin (a tiny folktale you should definitely read first), but it’s not a fairytale retelling — classifying it as such takes away from Novik’s creativity. She uses Rumpelstiltskin as the spiritual base of the book, but the folktale only gives to the novel what onions give to a beef stew — a great stock, an important savor permeating the whole, but most of the nutritive value is added by Novik herself. It’s not a sly retelling but a brand new story, influenced by but not indebted to its source.

Spinning Silver centers on three women who are very similar, but are in very different circumstances. All three are marginalized, and the book is the story of how all three found themselves in an intolerable situation and refused to continue tolerating it. It’s a story of how they got angry. It’s a story of how they got revenge. Miryem is the daughter of a Jewish moneylender, Irina is the daughter of a Duke, and Wanda is the poor daughter of an abusive drunk. Their paths intertwine throughout the story, and I don’t want to get bogged down on plot here (it’s Naomi Novik — the plot is good, trust), but I do want to look at her worldbuilding.

I’m not even sure it’s named for the first part of the book, but Lithvas is a vaguely Slavic non-place, a land where the winters have been growing worse and worse, a land where sometimes a strange silver road can be glimpsed through the trees, the road of the Staryk, people of ice and hardness who come off the road to hunt treasure, to hunt gold, to hunt people. The first 100 pages of the book, there’s not even a whole lot of magic. It’s Miryem collecting debts and logging them in her book, Irina preparing to be married off to the tsar, and Wanda trying to protect her small raw nub of a family from any further depredations of her drunk, greedy father (she most especially does not want to be sold in marriage for a few goats). The first fourth of the book is filled with the concerns of a vaguely post-Medieval Renaissance town, with weirdness peeping out here and there through the pages like the Staryk road through the trees. It’s people worrying about their crops, worrying about their futures, trading in the market, cooking food for dinner. Novik builds her character’s lives on a broad, heavy base of normalcy so that when Miryem gets whisked away by the Staryk king to his glass mountain in the middle of a timeless frozen waste, it doesn’t feel fanciful. The description of fishing in the ice pools for silver fish and of gathering sweet fruit from snowtrees in the mountain’s core mirrors the more mundane growing of rye and boiling of kasha already described earlier. Novik’s attention to the ā€œfactualā€ underpinning of her world gives the fantastic aspects a better foundation to fly from. If one of the characters needed a weapon (they don’t, at least not a conventional one) they might get a magic sword, but they wouldn’t have just plucked it out of a stone. They would have saved for it, brought the strange metal to an accomplished smith, and spent hours honing and oiling the blade. Novik shows the work that goes into achievement, even in a fantasy setting.

This book is great. It has strong, swift prose, appealing characters, and a plot so quick and twisty that, at the end of it, I’m worried that I cheated myself by reading too fast, like scarfing down a particularly amazing sandwich. What really stands out to me though is Novik’s skill with detail. She supplies not too much, and not too little, and equally when describing workaday and fantastical events. She goes into the nuts and bolts of it, and this attention gives a reality and weight to her work that is one of its chiefest pleasures.

The simple greatness of Ursula K. Le Guin’s early Science Fiction Novels

Her early work (Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions)Ā contains all the pulpy goodness of 60s SF but is still distinctly Le Guin.

Science Fiction is beautiful. It can transport you to a planet of endless winter, make you feel the cold air prickle your lungs, see the strange clear emptiness of the sky. Science Fiction is powerful. It can make you question the foundations of human identity. Sturgeon’s Law, posited by Theodore Sturgeon in response to attacks on the quality of SF, states that 90% of everything is crap (including the High Literature from whose peaks some critics scold speculative fiction). He’s not wrong. In my early 20s I was under a different impression — almost all the SF I read at that point was steeped in beauty and shot through with clarity, because I was reading mostly Le Guin. Science Fiction, as practiced by Ursula K. Le Guin, is perfection, even in her early days when she was still finding her footing.

I picked up the Library of America 2-volume Hainish Novels and Stories a while back. It is a breathtaking example of just how beautiful physical books can be, and it contains most of Le Guin’s SF novels and many of her stories. After a few months just staring at the talismanic presence above my desk, I actually opened vol. I and read the first three novels of her Hainish cycle — Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions.

le guin science fiction books
Library of America does good work — these are beautiful.

A Summary

The three books are a loosely related trilogy chronicling the efforts of the League of All Worlds to prepare for the oncoming Enemy, their subsequent failure, and what happens next. The books don’t bother with the actual war, fiery space battles, or high statecraft. The collapse of galactic society happens almost in the background, and Le Guin focuses on the small, human stories of those who have to live through it.

In Rocannon’s World, the title ethnologist is sent to further study Fomalhaut II, an unadvanced planet whose people the League is attempting to train up for use in the coming War. His ship is destroyed by rebel elements, and the novel is him journeying across the strange planet to find a way to notify the League and retaliate.

In Planet of Exile, Terran colonists came to the planet Werel to bring the inhabitants into the League, again in an attempt to build their strength for the coming War with the Enemy. The war starts right after they land, and some of them take the ship and go back to help. The book starts 600 years later and follows the interactions between the native Tevar, a semi-nomadic culture whose major variance from Terran-standard is catlike eyes, and the colonial remnants, who call themselves Alterrans. Distrust becomes grudging respect becomes unity as both cultures work together to prepare for the dual threat of the oncoming (15-year-long) winter and barbarians who are marauding their way south.

In City of Illusions, the victory of the Enemy and the dissolution of the League is an established fact. The Shing control Earth and have made it fallow — the population is sparse, great forests and prairies are reclaiming forgotten cities, and humanity lives in small enclaves scattered throughout the wilderness. If they attempt to build anything of greatness (advanced science, a spaceship, a true civilization) the Shing wipe them out. Enter Falk, a man with cat’s eyes who wakes with no memory in the middle of the Eastern Forest. He spends five years with the kindly House who nursed him back to health, and then he goes on a mission to the Shing city of Es Toch (apparently in Colorado) to find out who he was.

The greatness of these novels isn’t so much their plot — the outline for 1 and 3 are fairly basic journey narratives, and book 2 is a forbidden love Romeo/Juliet thing with barbarians thrown in. It’s not the plot, though, it’s what you do with it. Shakespeare stole the plot of Hamlet outright from Thomas Kyd, a guy whose name no one knows. The framework, the general structure of the story is not what’s important here. It’s what Ursula Le Guin does with it. Steak is a basic foodstuff, but there’s a huge difference between well-done with ketchup and medium-rare with bĆ©arnaise sauce.Ā The greatness of these early novels lies in Ursula’s knack for invention and cognitive estrangement, her descriptive power, and her anthropological depth.

Games of Perception

Cognitive estrangement is the gap between the reader’s reality and the alternate reality presented by Science Fiction — that rubber-band snap of ā€œoh, that’s not how things are hereā€ that serves as a jumping-off point for further reflection. Le Guin is a master of it. Throughout these books, there is a shifting of perspective, both between the ā€œwhat isā€ of reality and the ā€œwhat is notā€ of fiction, and between our perception of basic objects and how an alien or far-future society might see those items. That second part, where the characters in the story don’t recognize futuristic objects, isn’t technically cognitive estrangement, it’s more dramatic irony, but the effect is still intriguing.

  • Erkar — In City of Exile, Rolery, a member of the nomadic Tevar tribe, has married into the Terran colonist society and sees a picture that confuses her. She asks what it is.

ā€œAnd that?ā€ [asked Rolery]

ā€œAn erkar.ā€

ā€œI listen again,ā€ Rolery said politely — she was on her best manners at every moment now — but when Seiko Esmit seemed not to understand the formality, she asked, ā€œWhat is an erkar?ā€

The farborn woman pushed out her lips a little and said indifferently, ā€œA…thing to ride in, like a…well, you don’t even use wheels, how can I tell you? You’ve seen our wheeled carts? Yes? Well, this was a cart to ride in, but it flew in the sky.

An aircar — the way Le Guin constructed this exchange, the reader’s realization of what the erkar is hits at the same moment that Rolery’s does. It’s a wonderful piece of narrative.

  • The entire United States — In City of Illusions, Terran society fell over a millennium ago. Everything the main character sees on his journey is after centuries of degradation. When he crosses the Mississippi from a tributary river on a glider, he sees it as we never could:

ā€œThe days and the river went on, flowing with him, until on one still gray afternoon the world opened slowly out and out into an awesome breadth, an immense plain of muddy waters under an immense sky: the confluence of the forest river with the Inland River. It was no wonder they had heard of the Inland River even in the deep ignorance of their isolation hundreds of miles back east in the Houses: it was so huge even the Shing could not hide it. A vast and shining desolation of yellow-gray waters spread from the last crowns and islets of the flooded forest on and on west to a far shore of hills. Falk soared like one of the river’s low-flying blue herons over the meeting-place of the waters. He landed on the western bank and was, for the first time in his memory, out of the forest.ā€

The Mighty Mississippi
Yep, it’s big.

In the far future of humanity, after the collapse, even something as well-known as the Mississippi River is shrouded in rumor and darkness, an unexpected glory to behold. On a barbarian planet, a local woman is completely unfamiliar with the concept of a flying vehicle. This dissociation between how things are and how things could be and the tension between the two is vastly pleasurable, and instances of this happen again and again throughout Le Guin’s work.

Exploding Starships and the Mississippi River

Other authors bring you to another world. Le Guin plants that world right inside you — she has such a strong conception of place and such power of description that she can make whatever she’s describing part of you. The passage about the Mississippi River above is one example. Another is the very beginning of Rocannon’s World, in which Rocannon’s ship is destroyed right off:

ā€œA high tree of blinding white grew quickly, soundlessly up the sky from behind South Ridge. Guards on the towers of Hallan Castle cried out, striking bronze on bronze. Their small voices and clangor of warning were swallowed by the roar of sound, the hammerstroke of wind, the staggering of the forest.ā€

She could have just written, ā€œRocannon’s ship exploded.ā€ Instead, she takes a few extra sentences to describe the harsh light of the explosion, the reaction of the indigenous people, the wash of sound and wind, the shaking of the trees — Le Guin anchors the reader so solidly in the world she builds that the only comparable talent I can think of is Tolkien.

Le Guin and Leakey

The sheer depth of the alternate societies in Le Guin’s work sets her apart from lesser SF writers, and that talent is on display here. The rules, structure, and mores of every place that Le Guin writes about are clear and intricate, and indicate an attention to detail lacking in a lot of other speculative fiction. All three books are filled with multiple societies, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll focus on fragments of two of them:

  • Rocannon’s World is inhabited by a stratified, medieval-level society. The dark-skinned, light-haired Angyar rule over the light-skinned, dark-haired Olgyior in a feudal system filled with castles, blood-oaths, forays, and marriage pacts. When all of Rocannon’s friends and colleagues are murdered, Mogien, the Angyar lord he’s been staying with and studying, pledges his sword to the defense of the League (against interstellar bombers). As Mogien drinks in sympathy with Rocannon, he states, ā€œMay our enemy die without sons,ā€ which is a perfect, jewel-bright encapsulation of their society — what greater curse in a rigid patriarchy than to die without sons?
  • Planet of Exile Ā has the Tevar, the indigenous semi-nomadic people who spend the long summer in tents in the Summerlands, and only come together as one in the Winter City, an underground warren where their grain stores are buried. In order to start clan meetings, everyone bangs on rocks in the stone circle in a cacophony until the chief comes and starts banging his own rock. Those to the right and left of him match his rhythm until everyone is hitting in unison. Any meeting starts with a mystical invocation of its ultimate goal — unity and agreement.

Le Guin builds societies of such complexity and detail that it feels like they would exist even if we weren’t there to watch. Their foundations are stone-solid and deep.

The Late Pulpalignean Era

These three books are early, not as polished, from the ā€œLate Pulpalignean Eraā€ as Le Guin calls it. The pulpiness is part of what I love about these though — the laser guns and barbarians. As Le Guin advanced through her career, she moved more away from violence and pulp (in her two masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, I don’t think the protagonist kills anyone at all. In fact, the latter is mostly an alien physicist talking to other alien physicists), but in these, people burn down castles, stab each other, burn peoples’ heads off with laser guns, and just generally treat the reader to a smorgasbord of aggression. These books are still distinctly Le Guin, with their tight prose, strong sense of place, and anthropological depth, but they have a pleasant roughness to them, like a chunk of amethyst pulled straight from the living Earth.