Rocannon's World

Rocannon's World

Cover of the first edition
Author	Ursula K. Le Guin
Cover artist	Gerald McConnell
Language	English
Series	Hainish Cycle
Genre	Science fiction
Published	1966 (Ace Books)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	117
ISBN	0-8240-1424-3
OCLC	9159033
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/4
LC Class	PZ4.L518 Ro4 PS3562.E42
Followed by	Planet of Exile (1966)

Rocannon's World is a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, her literary debut. It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double, along with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign, following the tête-bêche format. Though it is one of Le Guin's many works set in the universe of the technological Hainish Cycle, the story itself has many elements of heroic fantasy. The hero Gaveral Rocannon encounters lords who live in castles and wield swords, and other races much like fairies and gnomes, in his travels on a backward planet.

The word "ansible" for a faster-than-light communicator, was coined in the novel. The term has since been widely used in science fiction.

Plot summary

Semley's story

Main article: The Dowry of Angyar

The novel begins with a prologue called "Semley's Necklace", which was first published as a stand-alone story titled "The Dowry of Angyar" in Amazing Stories (September 1964). A young woman named Semley takes a space voyage from her unnamed, technologically primitive planet to a museum to reclaim a family heirloom.

The interstellar League of All Worlds has placed an automated spaceship at the disposal of the more advanced underground dwellers of the planet. Semley descends into their tunnels, uses the spaceship for the flight and returns after sixteen years. Due to relativistic time dilation while the trip will be of short duration for her, many years will elapse on her planet. She returns to find her daughter has grown up and her husband is dead.

Rocannon's story

The novel then follows Gaverel Rocannon, one of the ethnologists who met Semley at the museum. Years after meeting Semley, Rocannon embarks on an ethnological mission to her planet, Fomalhaut II. It was through Rocannon's efforts that the planet had been placed under an 'exploration embargo' in order to protect the native cultures. Unbeknown to him and his colleagues, the planet hosts a base of an enemy of the League of All Worlds: a young world named Faraday, which embarked on a career of interstellar war and conquest, and which chose this "primitive" world as the location of a secret base. After this enemy destroys his ship and his companions, Rocannon sets out to find their base so that he can alert the League of their presence with the enemy's ansible. However, with his advanced means of transport destroyed, he must rely on alliances with the people of the planet, and he must use other means of travel, including walking, boating, and riding on the back of windsteeds, which are large winged carnivores that resemble big cats.

His long and dangerous quest, undertaken with loyal companions from a feudal culture called the Angyar, takes him through many lands, where he encounters various other cultures and species of the planet and faces numerous threats and obstacles that are unrelated to the enemy he intends to confront. He identifies five species of highly intelligent life forms (hilfs): the dwarf-like Gdemiar, the elf-like Fiia, the rodent-like Kiemhrir, the nightmarish Winged Ones, and the most human-like species, the Liuar. Increasingly, as the plot progresses, his experiences impact his personality, making him more attuned to the planet's culture than with his previous interstellar sophisticate role. Before the final encounter, Rocannon has an intense encounter with an entity in a mountainside cave. Here, in exchange for "giving himself to the planet", he receives the gift of Mindspeech, a form of telepathy.

Finally, after traveling halfway across the globe and suffering much loss and bereavement, he reaches the enemy's stronghold which had been set up in a heretofore unknown land occupied by far distant relatives of the Angyar in whose strongholds in the northern continent his journey had begun.

Rocannon reverts from the effective role of a Bronze Age hero, into which he had been increasingly pushed during most of the book, and returns to his role as the resourceful operative of an interstellar civilization. He uses his mindspeech abilities to formulate a plan and successfully infiltrate the enemy base, where he enters one of the parked ships and uses its ansible to alert the League of All Worlds. Rocannon escaped, and shortly thereafter an unmanned Faster-Than-Light (FTL) ship destroys the enemy installation. Because of his newly developed telepathic ability, Rocannon feels the shock of hundreds of deaths at the moment they happen.

After the completion of his quest, Rocannon retires with the Angyar of the south continent, surrounded by sympathetic people, including the woman he would marry. When rescuers from the League arrive nine years later, they find that he has died without knowing that the planet has been named after him.

Literary significance and criticism

Rocannon's World along with its two sequels combine emerging British New Wave science fiction sentiments with established American genre imagery and Le Guin's signature anthropological interests into a tale of loss, companionship, isolation, redemption and love.

One science fiction scholar points out that Rocannon's World, along with Planet of Exile and City of Illusions exhibits Le Guin's struggle as an emerging writer to arrive at a plausible, uniquely memorable and straightforward locale for her stories. The tropes in Rocannon's World adhere closely to those of high fantasy, with Clayfolk resembling Dwarves and the Fiia resembling Elves, especially in their dialogue. Additionally, Rocannon's World is noted to be a lightly disguised fantasy in which the legendary characters are easily interpreted by the readers as characters from the real world's future.

Robert Silverberg described the novel as "superior space opera, good vivid fun ... short, briskly told, inventive and literate."

Publication history

Rocannon's World was initially published with no introduction, but Le Guin wrote an introduction for Harper & Row's 1977 hardcover edition. Rocannon's World was also issued in a 1978 book club omnibus along with Planet of Exile and City of Illusions in a volume called Three Hainish Novels and in a 1996 volume with the same novels titled Worlds of Exile and Illusion.

Sources

• Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (1st ed.). Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-33225-8.
• Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Ursula K. Le Guin (1st ed.). New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 978-0-87754-659-7.
• Cadden, Mike (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97218-5.
• Le Guin, Ursula K. (May 1992). The Language of the Night (revised ed.). HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-016835-3.
• Le Guin, Ursula K. (1978). Three Hainish Novels (1st ed.). Nelson Doubleday. ASIN B000H6R3Q6.
• Le Guin, Ursula K. (1996). Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1st ed.). New York: Orb. ISBN 978-0-312-86211-4.
• Morse, Donald E.; Matolcsy, Kalman (2011). The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction (1st ed.). London: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-7864-4942-2.
• Spivack, Charlotte (1984). Ursula K. Le Guin (1st ed.). Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7430-6.

External links

• Rocannon's World title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database