Five years after the death of Ursula K Le Guin, it’s beginning to feel like history will remember her more for her Earthsea novels, a juvenile fantasy series, than for her science fiction novels set in the Ekumene, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, USA) and The Dispossessed (1974, USA). Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised — fantasy is more popular than science fiction, and children’s fantasy even more so; also, a new omnibus edition of all of the Earthsea novels and stories was published in 2018, and heavily marketed.
The Earthsea books are good, and that’s in a market which includes a number of excellent and much-loved series (we will not mention the much-loved but not excellent novels by She Who Must Not Be Named).
The Telling (2000, USA) is not part of the Earthsea series. It’s a science fiction novel, and it’s set in the Ekumene, a loose confederation of human worlds linked by slower-than-light ships (actually, NAFAL, nearly-as-fast-as-light) and faster-than-light communicators called ansibles (although novels and stories set in the Ekumene may take place before, or after, or during, or both, the invention of the ansible). The Ekumene novels are based on the premise that Earth is a colony world, and was originally settled by humans from a world called Hain. As were all other worlds populated by humans. Such as Aka, the world on which The Telling takes place.
Sutty, an Anglo-Indian linguist, is sent to the newly-discovered world of Aka to document its languages and culture. She is a member of the second expedition to visit the world, sent many years after the first expedition, which means that much of the material she studied about the world proves to be obsolete when she arrives. The natives of Aka have replaced their previous ersatz Buddhist agrarian culture with a corporate-state dedicated to building a starship to match that from Earth.
Sutty is then invited to visit and research in a remote mountain village. There, she finds hints of the Aka which existed in the records of the first expedition from Earth, prior to the creation of the corporate-state. And central to this is the oral history culture known as “the telling”.
Le Guin’s science fiction novels are often characterised as “anthropological” (her father was a celebrated anthropologist), as if they were chiefly about exploring other cultures and societies. But the Ekumene novels and stories are also very much about story-telling. The first line of The Left Hand of Darkness is “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination”. ‘The Shobie’s Story’, published in 1990, contrasts the dream-narrative nature of a new interstellar drive with that of profoundly reality-based NAFAL travel. In The Telling, forms of narrative are central to the plot.
Sutty learns about Aka’s pre-corporate-state culture, and is subsequently invited to visit a “library” hidden deep in a mountain range. She is pursued there by an agent of the state. The more she learns, the more she understands how the Akans’ worldview was predicated on the stories they told each other of their world, and how the corporate-state rewrote history to better align the population with its objectives.
Le Guin’s science fiction was never subtle — or rather, it was never very subtle in what it was about, but it was usually very cleverly and very subtly put-together. The Dispossessed is known for its non-linear narrative. City of Illusions (1967, USA) is about telepathic manipulation and false narratives presented as history. The Telling, the last Ekumene novel Le Guin wrote, is explicitly about telling stories and how history is formed from stories. History, we are repeatedly told, is written by the winners, which tells us that even history, a record of the fixed past, is subject to interpretation, interpolation and invention. My favourite example, and I believe it dates from the late 1980s or early 1990s, concerns an attempt to produce a pan-European history book, which foundered because to the British and Spanish Napoleon is a villain but to the French and Belgians he is a hero. And rightly so, on both counts.
In The Telling, the corporate-state’s crack-down on old culture may be presented as necessary to meet the state’s, er, stated objective, the starship, but that old culture also holds clues to the truth of the corporate-state’s beginnings. Which are not entirely as advertised. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we are told by the media and our governments and our “approved” history texts and our social media influencers (for those dumb enough to believe them), all of those contribute to our worldview. The Telling is a novel, a narrative, and so by definition simplified, even though the point it is making, twenty-three years ago now, six years before the appearance of social media (Facebook and Twitter), and seven years before the iPhone, the first smartphone, may seem somewhat simplistic, perhaps even banal, in today’s world.
According to critics and reviewers, The Telling was inspired by cultural revolutions in China — even though there’s a lot of Tibetan, Buddhist and Indian iconography and cultural analogues in the novel. I think that misses the point. Some science fiction novels do indeed feature analogues of historical events or personages, but to reduce The Telling to that, I think, does Le Guin a disservice. Many see her later novels (such as The Telling, or Tehanu (1990, USA)) as inferior to earlier works, but I actually think they’re much better novels. In them, Le Guin has made her concerns central to her story. The Left Hand of Darkness is a report told as a story, but it’s the biology of the Gethenians, and the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven, which forms the core of the novel. In The Telling, the core of the story is Sutty’s relationship with Aka’s oral history, a relationship based on narratives, on telling.
I first read The Telling in 2006, and thought it a somewhat dull addition to Le Guin’s oeuvre. Rereading it recently, I decided it’s not only a better story than I’d originally thought, and still very readable, but it also makes clearer the structure, and perhaps the objectives, of Le Guin’s works based in the Ekumene.
Le Guin’s body of work is important — to science fiction, and to US, or indeed Western English-language, fiction at large. Some of her books have, I feel, been unfairly discounted — because they have not appealed to a genre market. I think that’s a mistake. The Telling is a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, but it does not have the shock-value of the Gethenians’ biology in the former, or the innovative politics and narrative structure of the latter.
It’s one thing to claim books first published forty or fifty years ago as classics, it’s quite another when that classic status was applied within only a year or two of a book’s original publication. I’m not saying The Telling is a classic, even though it’s over twenty years old, just that it deserves equal footing with The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. At present, it doesn’t have it.
Perhaps because gatekeepers only lionise books from their youth.
