Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Even from this early sample of Le Guin’s writing you can tell she’s not just another science fiction writer, authors of what I suppose my father had in mind when he always kept telling me to avoid reading this kind of literature: the jobs of her characters (Rocannon is an ethnologist, similar to the protagonist of The Word for World is Forest whose field is anthropology), their dispositions towards their world, what is uttered and what is done in her stories are just one-of-a-kind.
Precisely because this is one of her earlier works, and she hadn’t yet refined this type of sci-fi storytelling many would come to love, the plot of Rocannon’s World wasn’t anything spectacular. However, if I said that I didn’t enjoy travelling through this world, complete with different day-night cycles, different cultures and different forms of life, a journey to a world I wouldn’t have made otherwise and one that made me richer, even by a little bit, I would be lying. Even what would seem like a small part of what makes this book and other books by Le Guin so engrossing, like observing the discovery of a new continent on an otherwise insignificant planet, can feel mystical to me. It makes me want to go out and become myself a surveyor and ethnographer of planets whose description is only a paragraph long in the respective Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The ending I found particularly impressive and it stuck with me, even right now when I can’t look it up from the book itself. It managed to convey so much of the ambitions of Rocannon and the tragedy, paradox and incompatibility of the big picture vs. everyday life in a single line, that I was wearing a satisfied smile for at least the rest of the bus trip from the port to Nea Smyrni.
Yet again, thanks Daphne for giving me this book!