Ursula K. LeGuin - The Telling

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Hainish Universe, Book Six

Ursula K. Le Guin

GOLLANCZ

LONDON

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Earthling Sutty has been living a solitary, well-protected life in Dovza City on the planet Aka as an official

Observer for the interstellar Ekumen. Insisting on all citizens being pure "producer-consumers," the tightly

controlled capitalist government of Aka--the Corporation--is systematically destroying all vestiges of the

ancient ways: "The Time of Cleansing" is the chilling term used to describe this era. Books are burned,

the old language and calligraphy are outlawed, and those caught trying to keep any part of the past alive

are punished and then reeducated. Frustrated in her attempts to study the linguistics and literature of

Aka's cultural past, Sutty is sent upriver to the backwoods town of Okzat-Ozkat. Here she is slowly

charmed by the old-world mountain people, whose still waters, she gradually realizes, run very deep. But

whether their ways constitute a religion, ancient traditions, philosophy, or passive, political resistance,

Sutty is not sure. Delving ever deeper into her hosts' culture, Sutty finds herself on a parallel spiritual

quest, as well.

With quiet linguistic humor (Dovza citizens are passionate about their hot bitter beverage, akakafi

--the ubiquitous Corporation brand is called Starbrew), dark references to the dangers of restricted

cultural, political, and social freedom, and beautifully visualized worlds, award-winning author Ursula K.

Le Guin pens her latest in the Hainish cycle, which includes The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of

Darkness. Le Guin explores her characters and societies with such care, such thoughtfulness, her novels

call out for slow, deep attention. --Emilie Coulter --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In this virtually flawless new tale set in her Hainish universe, Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness; Four

Ways to Forgiveness) sends a young woman from Earth on her first mission, to the planet Aka as an

Observer for the Ekumen. Although well prepared for her role, Sutty has been horribly scarred by her

past. She grew up gay in a North America badly damaged by ecological stupidity and the excesses of a

fundamentalist state religion called Unism. Traveling to Aka, she expected (and had been... read more

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Spotlight Reviews

Welcome return to Ekumen in novel form, September 5, 2000

Reviewer:

"The Telling," like Le Guin's 1972 novella "The World for Word is Forest," is much more about our

own world than the world it explores.

Here, a lesbian woman of East Indian descent, Sutty, signs on to be an ambassador for the Hainish

Ekumen (the Hainish originally seeded human life on all the member planets) when her lover is killed by

fundamentalist terrorists on earth.

But in transit, relativity plays a cruel trick on her: In the 60 years she's been traveling in a

Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light starship, the planet Aka has adopted a severe, technophilic society not unlike

that of Maoist China. Indeed, the Corporation State has done its best to eradicate its previous culture, a

Tao-like, creedless system of wisdom known as "The Telling."

Sutty eventually travels to a distant, mountainous place where people secretly maintain their old

system, and there she discovers how her own planet Terra may have catalyzed the culture-destroying

changes.

As in Le Guin's 1969 classic, "The Left Hand of Darkness," the protagonist enters the society hoping

to learn, and eventually undertakes a journey, this time deep into the heart of the high mountains. Here,

the village of Ozkat-Ozkat is sharply reminiscent of Chinese-occupied Tibet.

Le Guin is brilliant at this sort of thing, and while the story is quite simple and takes a while to catch

fire, the denouement is moving, engaging and illuminating. I still think she has a penchant for somewhat

cold and distant, even a bit sterile, characters, but that detracts only a bit from this tale.

It's not as adventurous as "Left Hand," not as detailed in its world-building as "The Dispossessed,"

and lacking the action of "...World is Forest," but it's still a thoughtful, entertaining read.

"The Telling" is a meditation on cultural decimation, fundamentalism, colonialism and even gay rights,

Earthly issues, that just happens to be played out on a distant world. --This text refers to the

Hardcover edition.

A Good Book, May 28, 2001

Reviewer:

Le Guin is a major American writer. Two of her novels, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of

Darkness, are among the best novels written in this country in past half century. She has written also

some very good novels, like The Word for World is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven, as well several

fine short stories and some outstanding children's books. The Telling is not her best work. It returns to

the Hainish universe, a future history is which our part of the galaxy was settled millenia ago by colonists

from the planet Hain. Following an interstellar catastrophe, Hain is gradually recovering contact with the

human settled worlds and incorporating them into a benign information sharing order, The Ekumen. The

Telling takes place on a recently rediscovered world, Aka. It uses familiar themes and devices. There is

the Terran envoy discovering the complexities of a foreign world, as in the Left Hand of Darkness. There

is the catastrophic impact of aggressive Terran culture on a native society, as in The Word for World is

Forest. One of the characters was essentially abandoned as a child by his mother, similar to the hero of

The Dispossessed. For readers familar with Le Guin, this book lacks the originality of her previous

works. It lacks also the powerful writing that characterizes Le Guin's best work. There is little in The

Telling that can match the best scenes of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea

books, or her best short stories. It is not that this book lacks artistry. For example, the heroine of this tale

is a woman of Hindu descent named Sutty. This is likely a reference to the Hindu practice of immolating

widows after their husband's deaths; suttee. Sutty has essentially been widowed by a catatrophe on Earth

and then leaves everything behind her by the long relativistically sundering journey to Aka. A

metaphorical reincarnation, also a reference to Hinduism. Despite these touches, The Telling is not Le

Guin's second tier works, let alone major works such as The Dispossessed. --This text refers to the

Hardcover edition.

All Customer Reviews

Avg. Customer Review:

Dreary and Boring, May 27, 2003

Reviewer:

Reading back-to-back with The Left Hand of Darkness, it would appear that in the last thirty-odd

years Ms. Le Guin has moved backwards in style and presentation even with similar settings: long

arduous treks through rugged wildernesses, sociocultural conflicts, sexual politics, bla bla.

But the worst failing of this work is that it fails to entertain. The author is so caught up with grinding the

axe of how awful religious tyranny is, how communist-fascist states destroy real culture, and how

wonderful homosexual unions are, that she fails to tell a decent story or even adhere to classic dramatic

forms that are classic for good reason.

Bo-ring! There is nothing fun about this travelogue through pseudo-Tibetan or -Nepalese culture,

about being dragged through miserable upbringings and traumatic upheavals, or having to learn yet

another stupid set of pseudo-linguistic honorifics and sound-concepts. I finished this story feeling let

down, anti-entertained, and irritated at the waste of time spent waiting for it to get good.

The Right Wing would accuse Ms. Le Guin of lesbo-feminist leanings, which would be unfair except

for the evidence of the story itself: an idyllic persecuted pastoral-peasant utopian culture wherein a

significant portion of the population are gay or lesbian. Gimme a break! There has never been any

evidence that such a Terran-human cultural has ever existed for thousands of years, so it's not as if she is

writing from example.

Give this one a pass. If you like Le Guin (which I do less so since reading this story), stick with her

earlier works. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Fine Addition to Ongoing Hainish Cycle of Novels, April 19, 2003

Reviewer:

I concur that "The Telling" isn't Le Guin's best work of fiction, but it is nonetheless a fine addition to

her "Hainish" cycle of novels. Certainly it is a long overdue addition. All of Le Guin's gifts as a splendid

prose stylist and an expert at anthropological science fiction are well represented here in "The Telling",

which could be seen as a fictional commentary on the rise of Communism in Russia and China. Indeed,

much of her description of "The Corporation", the government of the planet Aka, draws instant

comparisons to Maoist China. She provides a fascinating protagonist in Sutty, a native of India. I don't

think I have read work by another American author which has so convincingly portrayed Indian culture;

here Le Guin clearly scores a home run. Admirers of Ms. Le Guin's fiction will not be disappointed with

"The Telling". --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The day I was born I made my first mistake,

and by that path have I sought wisdom ever since.

THE MAHABHARATA

Contents

O N E

T W O

T H R E E

F O U R

F I V E

S I X

S E V E N

E I G H T

N I N E

O N E

w h e n s u t t y w e n t back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the

Pale.

Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull

orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all

the colors of sunlight in the day. A whiff of asafetida. The brook-babble of Aunty gossiping with Moti's

mother on the verandah. Uncle Hurree's dark hand lying still on a white page. Ganesh's little piggy kindly

eye. A match struck and the rich grey curl of incense smoke: pungent, vivid, gone. Scents, glimpses,

echoes that drifted or glimmered through her mind when she was walking the streets, or eating, or taking

a break from the sensory assault of the neareals she had to partiss in, in the daytime, under the other sun.

But night is the same on any world. Light's absence is only that. And in the darkness, it was the Pale

she was in. Not in dream, never in dream. Awake, before she slept, or when she woke from dream,

disturbed and tense, and could not get back to sleep. A scene would begin to happen, not in sweet,

bright bits but in full recall of a place and a length of time; and once the memory began, she could not

stop it. She had to go through it until it let her go. Maybe it was a kind of punishment, like the lovers'

punishment in Dante's Hell, to remember being happy. But those lovers were lucky, they remembered it

together.

The rain. The first winter in Vancouver rain. The sky like a roof of lead weighing down on the tops of

buildings, flattening the huge black mountains up behind the city. Southward the rain-rough grey water of

the Sound, under which lay Old Vancouver, drowned by the sea rise long ago. Black sleet on shining

asphalt streets. Wind, the wind that made her whimper like a dog and cringe, shivering with a scared

exhilaration, it was so fierce and crazy, that cold wind out of the Arctic, ice breath of the snow bear. It

went right through her flimsy coat, but her boots were warm, huge ugly black plastic boots splashing in

the gutters, and she'd soon be home. It made you feel safe, that awful cold. People hurried past not

bothering each other, all their hates and passions frozen. She liked the North, the cold, the rain, the

beautiful, dismal city.

Aunty looked so little, here, little and ephemeral, like a small butterfly. A red-and-orange cotton

saree, thin brass bangles on insect wrists. Though there were plenty of Indians and Indo-Canadians here,

plenty of neighbors, Aunty looked small even among them, displaced, misplaced. Her smile seemed

foreign and apologetic. She had to wear shoes and stockings all the time. Only when she got ready for

bed did her feet reappear, the small brown feet of great character which had always, in the village, been a

visible part of her as much as her hands, her eyes. Here her feet were put away in leather cases,

amputated by the cold. So she didn't walk much, didn't run about the house, bustle about the kitchen.

She sat by the heater in the front room, wrapped up in a pale ragged knitted woollen blanket, a butterfly

going back into its cocoon. Going away, farther away all the time, but not by walking.

Sutty found it easier now to know Mother and Father, whom she had scarcely known for the last

fifteen years, than to know Aunty, whose lap and arms had been her haven. It was delightful to discover

her parents, her mother's good-natured wit and intellect, her father's shy, unhandy efforts at showing

affection. To converse with them as an adult while knowing herself unreasonably beloved as a child —it

was easy, it was delightful. They talked about everything, they learned one another. While Aunty shrank,

fluttered away very softly, deviously, seeming not to be going anywhere, back to the village, to Uncle

Hurree's grave.

Spring came, fear came. Sunlight came back north here long and pale like an adolescent, a silvery

shadowy radiance. Small pink plum trees blossomed all down the side streets of the neighborhood. The

Fathers declared that the Treaty of Beijing contravened the Doctrine of Unique Destiny and must be

abrogated. The Pales were to be opened, said the Fathers, their populations allowed to receive the Holy

Light, their schools cleansed of unbelief, purified of alien error and deviance. Those who clung to sin

would be re-educated.

Mother was down at the Link offices every day, coming home late and grim. This is their final push,

she said; if they do this, we have nowhere to go but underground.

In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God flew from Colorado to the District of

Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries

of history and millions of books into dirt. Washington was not a Pale, but the beautiful old building,

though often closed and kept locked, under guard, had never been attacked; it had endured through all

the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The

Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an

educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness,

error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks,

back at the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in

ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out!

But the new Envoy who had arrived from Hain last year, Dalzul, was talking with the Fathers. They

had admitted Dalzul to the Sanctum. There were neareals and holos and 2Ds of him in the net and

Godsword. It seemed that the Commander-General of the Hosts had not received orders from the

Fathers to destroy the Library of Washington. The error was not the Commander-General's, of course.

Fathers made no errors. The pilots' zeal had been excessive, their action unauthorised. Word came from

the Sanctum: the pilots were to be punished. They were led out in front of the ranks and the crowds and

the cameras, publicly stripped of their weapons and white uniforms. Their hoods were taken off, their

faces were bared. They were led away in shame to re-education.

All that was on the net, though Sutty could watch it without having to partiss in it, Father having

disconnected the vr-proprios. Godsword was full of it, too. And full of the new Envoy, again. Dalzul was

a Terran. Born right here on God's Earth, they said. A man who understood the men of Earth as no alien

ever could, they said. A man from the stars who came to kneel at the feet of the Fathers and to discuss

the implementation of the peaceful intentions of both the Holy Office and the Ekumen.

"Handsome fellow," Mother said, peering. "What is he? A white man?"

"Inordinately so," Father said.

"Wherever is he from?"

But no one knew. Iceland, Ireland, Siberia, everybody had a different story. Dalzul had left Terra to

study on Hain, they all agreed on that. He had qualified very quickly as an Observer, then as a Mobile,

and then had been sent back home: the first Terran Envoy to Terra.

"He left well over a century ago," Mother said. "Before the Unists took over East Asia and Europe.

Before they even amounted to much in Western Asia. He must find his world quite changed."

Lucky man, Sutty was thinking. Oh lucky, lucky man! He got away, he went to Hain, he studied at the

School on Ve, he's been where everything isn't God and hatred, where they've lived a million years of

history, where they understand it all!

That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training School, to try to

qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found them undismayed, not even

surprised. "This seems a rather good world to get off of, at present," Mother said.

They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don't they realise, if I qualify and get sent to one of

the other worlds, they'll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred, hundreds, round trips in space were

seldom less, often more. Didn't they care? It was only later that evening, when she was watching her

father's profile at table, full lips, hook nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it

occurred to her that if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had

thought about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had ever had.

And made the best of it.

"Eat, Aunty," Mother said, but Aunty only patted her piece of naan with her little ant-antenna fingers

and did not pick it up.

"Nobody could make good bread with such flour," she said, exonerating the baker.

"You were spoiled, living in the village," Mother teased her. "This is the best quality anybody can get

in Canada. Best quality chopped straw and plaster dust."

"Yes, I was spoiled," Aunty said, smiling from a far country.

The older slogans were carved into facades of buildings: FORWARD TO THE FUTURE.

PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Newer ones ran across the

buildings in bands of dazzling electronic display: REACTIONARY THOUGHT IS THE DEFEATED

ENEMY. When the displays malfunctioned, the messages became cryptic: OD IS ON. The newest ones

hovered in holopro above the streets: PURE SCIENCE DESTROYS CORRUPTION. UPWARD

ONWARD FORWARD. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multivoiced, crowding the air.

"Onward, onward to the stars!" an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where

Sutty's robocab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. "Superstition is a rotting

corpse," the sound system said in a rich, attractive male voice. "Superstitious practices defile youthful

minds. It is the responsibility of every citizen, whether adult or student, to report reactionary teachings

and to bring teachers who permit sedition or introduce irrationality and superstition in their classroom to

the attention of the authorities. In the light of Pure Science we know that the ardent cooperation of all the

people is the first requisite of— " Sutty turned the sound down as far as it would go. The choir burst

forth, "To the stars! To the stars!" and the robocab jerked forward about half its length. Two more jerks

and it might get through the intersection at the next flowchange.

Sutty felt in her jacket pockets for an akagest, but she'd eaten them all. Her stomach hurt. Bad food,

she'd eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments,

stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the

stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the

hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake every other population in FF-tech mode had ever

made. —Wrong.

Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice.

Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn't her world.

But she was on it, in it, how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either

the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away

from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she'd

come to observe.

The fact was, she was not suited to be an Observer here. In other words, she had failed on her first

assignment. She knew that the Envoy had summoned her to tell her so.

She was already nearly late for the appointment. The robocab made another jerk forward, and its

sound system came up loud for one of the Corporation announcements that overrode low settings. There

was no off button. "An announcement from the Bureau of Astronautics!" said a woman's vibrant,

energy-charged, self-confident voice, and Sutty put her hands over her ears and shouted, "Shut up!"

"Doors of vehicle are closed," the robocab said in the flat mechanical voice assigned to mechanisms

responding to verbal orders. Sutty saw that this was funny, but she couldn't laugh. The announcement

went on and on while the shrill voices in the air sang, "Ever higher, ever greater, marching to the stars!"

The Ekumenical Envoy, a doe-eyed Chiffewarian named Tong Ov, was even later than she for their

appointment, having been delayed at the exit of his apartment house by a malfunction of the

ZIL-screening system, which he laughed about. "And the system here has mislaid the microrec I wanted

to give you," he said, going through files in his office. "I coded it, because of course they go through my

files, and my code confused the system. But I know it's in here.... So, meanwhile, tell me how things have

been going."

"Well," Sutty said, and paused. She had been speaking and thinking in Dovzan for months. She had to

go through her own files for a moment: Hindi no, English no, Hainish yes. "You asked me to prepare a

report on contemporary language and literature. But the social changes that took place here while I was

in transit... Well, since it's against the law, now, to speak or study any language but Dovzan and Hainish,

I can't work on the other languages. If they still exist. As for Dovzan, the First Observers did a pretty

thorough linguistic survey. I can only add details and vocabulary."

"What about literature?" Tong asked.

"Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don't know what it

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HainishUniverse,BookSixUrsulaK.LeGuinGOLLANCZLONDONEditorialReviewsAmazon.comEarthlingSuttyhasbeenlivingasolitary,well-protectedlifeinDovzaCityontheplanetAkaasanofficialObserverfortheinterstellarEkumen.Insistingonallcitizensbeingpure"producer-consumers,"thetightlycontrolledcapitalistgovernmentofAka-...

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