The Telling

"Yes – most of Le Guin’s sci fi is part of this universe. But it’s a universe , not a world, so it encompasses very varied settings. The most famous ones are Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed , which are wonderful – particularly The Dispossessed , which is maybe the best exploration of political systems I’ve ever seen in a sci fi novel. But there are a handful of other Hainish novels, as well as short stories, that you hear less about. I’ve chosen The Telling because it’s so utterly unique. It’s the last novel she wrote in the cycle – it came out in 2000, when Le Guin was 70. It’s a sci fi novel that reads like a philosophical discourse, and also like a rebuttal of much of the ideology you might find in other sci fi. Our hero Sutty has been sent to observe the planet Aka for the Ekumen – the Ekumen is a league of planets that sends envoys to other worlds as anthropologists-cum-diplomats. Le Guin’s own parents were anthropologists, and it shows: her worlds are nuanced, real, and hard to pin down. In Aka, a scientistic bureaucracy has taken charge and is cracking down on old ways of life, including the religious tradition (a non-theistic tradition – Aka has no concept of God, or the soul). For Sutty, who left our own planet when religious fundamentalism took over, it is an adjustment to realise that the zealots here are the rationalists. Anti a certain strain of sci fi, for sure, although the genre has been shaped now by writers like her. Le Guin’s stories are always about humility and caution, not gung-ho advancement and adventure. But here her critique applies equally to much of religion, and to any system that makes people too certain. Sutty tells a state official that he is her enemy because he is “the true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. “ She becomes deeply sympathetic to the old way of life, and its core institution, the Telling – the passing on of a vast medley of stories with no hierarchy or central theme. This puzzles her at first – “The jungle was endless, and it was not one jungle but endless jungles, all burning with bright tigers of meaning, endless tigers” – but she comes to appreciate its purpose. I won’t try and summarise its purpose, because it’s too multi-faceted for that. Really, this novel is not about the story – there isn’t much of one. You stay to learn more about Aka and the Telling, and because Le Guin is an astute philosopher. Here’s an example, where a character speaks, and we might be reading an existentialist novel: “Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we’re animals with no nature. Eh? Animals with no nature. That’s strange. We’re so strange. We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. Eh? We’re born to be reasonable, so we’re born ignorant.” Some writers could make a novel like this amazingly boring. I’ve always hated Huxley’s The Island , where characters just drone on about the political and social arrangements of their world and how great it is. But Le Guin’s worlds are too complex and rich to be boring. It’s not didactic. It’s an exploration."