“Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it.”
Aldo Leopold: A Sand CountyAlmanac (New York: OUP 1949)
Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle is a series of novels and short stories written between 1966 and (to date) 2001. Often characterised as typifying the “soft” tendency in science fiction, the focus of these works is the interaction between worlds, ideas and technologies. They are, in short, political works.
The great strength of these pieces is the complexity of the ideas they construct and examine. Le Guin is anything but a didactic writer, allowing the central characters space to develop as fully rounded beings, with wholly cogent, if at times self-contradicting notions. She is clearly a morally guided writer, but one who is alive to the possibilities of other judgements and rationalisations.
Over the course of the cycle Le Guin sets as backdrop to the individual dilemmas and conflicts of the central characters a panoply of forms of government, of cultures and – most pertinently for this essay – environments. These do not merely function as neutral contexts to the drama: they are the motivation and the inspiration of all that ensues. Throughout her work she examines what it means to live within a landscape/live on a planet. In doing so she provides an overview of a deeply ecological and environmental rooted notion of society, one which points a way forward. Her message is essentially positive, despite, or perhaps because of, the struggles her characters must work through.
Behind these narratives lies an attitude towards the environment which is particularly American, one which combines an endless questioning of frontiers, with a profound dislocation from an appropriated and devastated land. In subsequent postings I will examine the great journeys made by some of Le Guin’s pioneers, and examine the often ambiguous relationship these have to the context of a tradition of frontiersman literature.
Central to the Hainish cycle is the concept of time. From the time dilations of near-lightspeed travel, to the differing cyclical rates of the various worlds, there is a perceptive reading of time as a linear/non-linear dichotomy, one which Le Guin balances with care. This again chimes in with many strands of American nature writing from Thoreau through to Wilson.
There are clear parallels with much ecofeminist thinking throughout the cycle – indeed Le Guin’s work is often labelled as such. I will provide examples of this in the following section, but also show that Le Guin is not so easily pigeon holed. That whilst the political equation of masculinity with empire with ecological devastation is made variously through the cycle, there are also pertinent critiques of other potentially damaging attitudes, both male and female.
As an illustration of just how complex her overarching narratives are a list of (just some of) the tropes within the Hainish cycle linked directly to the nature writing tradition as outlined above is illustrative:
the journey through a harsh land;
following the caravan;
the necessity of becoming one with the land;
the folly of imposition;
the shallow richness of technology as opposed to the deeper, holistic richness of living with the land;
the wisdom of ancient words;
the difficulties of being an outsider to a land;
how an environment conditions the society;
the metaphors which can and cannot be drawn from the environment;
observers who are altered by the observed and visa versa;
many notions of time;
slavery and mechanisation;
In the Hainish cycle, Le Guin has created a universe of ideas which functions as a mirror as complex as the world it reflects. Within contemporary science fiction, indeed within fiction of any category, this is a great – if not unique – achievement.
I will, in future posts, examine some of the ideas Le Guin has developed. In the meantime… go buy (in no particular order): The Dispossessed; The Word for World is Forest; The Left Hand of Darkness; City of Illusions; Planet of Exile; Four Ways to Forgiveness… etc!
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