Nova Atlantis

In an attempt to have my blog bear some relevance to its host, RevSF, I’m going to try to do some informal mini-reviews of books and movies and the like (inspired by those on Deanna’s blog). Some of these could get expanded into proper reviews for the main site later.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness is no recent publication. It was first published in 1995, and I guess I bought it during a foreign-language-books-that-aren’t-selling sale at Maruzen well over a year ago. It’s not unusual for a book to remain unread on my shelf for that long–I buy them at a much higher rate than I can possibly read them. It’s a habit that goes back to the days when I actually had time to read that much.

This is a collection of four novellas, all based on the worlds of Werel and its recently-freed colony/slave world, Yeowe. The themes are the evils of slavery and the hardships of the aftermath of a slavery-ending war.

This is the book I took with me to read in Australia during the Utopias Conference. It is set within the larger Ekumen setting that Le Guin uses for many of her SF stories, and the Ekumen is a sort of utopian UN of space, so it seemed appropriate. I’d been reading a lot of Iain M. Banks in preparation for my paper, and it was nice to get a very different, more realistic perspective on utopia. Le Guin’s utopia is a bit more down-to-earth, considerably less perfect, than Banks’ Culture. That doesn’t mean Banks is any less fun–in fact, he’s more fun–but Le Guin is in some ways more satisfying.

The first story, "Betrayals," is about an old woman, a former slave, who finds that she has to take care of a corrupt former leader of the rebellion, who after the rebellion did the typical banana-republic politician thing and stole lots of money from his people. Now self-exiled and in disgrace, he falls ill and she’s the only one who can help. Classically Le Guin, the story focuses on deeply-drawn characters rather than typical SF tropes like action or whiz-bang technology. Even the romantic element defies cliche, as it’s between an old woman mourning all she’s lost, and a disgraced, sick old man.

The second story, "Forgiveness Day," features a young, arrogantly overconfident woman of the Ekumen, placed as an ambassador to a backwater country on the slave-owning world Werel. The story is also told from the perspective of her bodyguard, who fought against the slaves during the rebellion. Captured by terrorists, they have to learn to stop hating each other to survive.

The third story, "A Man of the People," is about Havzhiva, a man from Hain, who loses everything he loves again and again because of the choices he makes. Finally ending up as an ambassador to Yeowe, he devotes himself to bringing the former slaves true freedom, and finally finds a home.

The final story is "A Woman’s Liberation," told by the woman Havzhiva came to love in the previous story, how she spent her childhood as a sex-abused house slave. This one focuses even more strongly on the problems of establishing real freedom after slavery–the former slaves have now set up a strongly male-dominated society in which women are treated as slaves, and the women have to fight their own war of protest.

Overall, it’s a very solid story cycle, using SF to better explore humanity. Throughout, Le Guin avoids the easy cliches: there are no larger-than-life heroes, no princesses to save, and very little technobabble. This means it’s often not as exciting as some people might want, but the characters are captivating, and the slow unfolding of the Werel/Yeowe background is fascinating.

The only complaint I have is about the cover of my edition. I can’t find an image of it online, but it features four women’s faces, none of which seem to match any of the characters in the book. It’s like the artist only had the vaguest notion of what the book was about. Luckily, it looks like more recent editions have better covers.

The Washington Post has the first chapter of the first story here.