Rocannon's World, part 1

Today we'll be looking at the first two chapters of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World. It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign. This is a format in which two short novels are arranged back-to-back and upside down, so that you can flip the book around and read the other novel starting from the other cover.

The Ace Doubles format is known more generally in the book-binding world as dos-à-dos or tête-bêche. It became a signature style for the publisher Ace Books, which was founded in 1952 as a publisher of mysteries and Westerns, but quickly took up science fiction as well. The format allowed them to easily publish shorter works, as well as leveraging an established author to advertise a newer one. That's what we see with Le Guin, whose first novel was packaged alongside one from Avram Davidson, who was more well-known at the time. Fans of Davidson would buy the Double for his work, and then discover Le Guin. Other authors who got their start this way include Philip K Dick, Samuel R Delany, and Roger Zelazny. The Doubles format continued until 1973, when financial troubles led Ace to be subject to a series of mergers and acquisitions. The original Doubles have become hot collectors' items.

As Le Guin became more popular, Rocannon's World was reprinted several times. Today it's easiest to find as part of the compilation Worlds of Exile and Illusion, which contains her first three Hainish novels, or in the Library of America complete Hainish series.

It's worth noting that while this was Le Guin's first published novel, it was not the first that she wrote. She had written several novels set in Orsinia, one of which was gently but firmly rebuffed by a publisher. Having found success in publishing science fiction short stories, she turned her novel-writing in that direction as well to get her career started. We'll have more to say about these early draft novels when we get to the point later in her life when her success allowed her to get more of the Orsinian material published.

After a prologue consisting of the story "Semley's Necklace," we pick up with the anthropologist Rocannon, who is living as a guest of Semley's grandson Mogion. They see a huge explosion outside the castle. Rushing out to investigate, they discover that someone has blown up Rocannon's ship, killing the rest of his crew and destroying his instantaneous communication device, known as an ansible. Rocannon is worried that this must be the work of someone trying to undermine the League of Worlds and their preparations for the coming war against a galactic invader. Rocannon and Mogion visit the Gdeimar, hoping to use their ship to send a message to League headquarters, but the Gdemiar rebuff them. Leaving the caves, they encounter Kyo, the last survivor of a group of Fiia who were murdered by what they assume is the same enemy. Kyo accompanies them back to the Angyar palace, where Rocannon's radio overhears a transmission from their enemies giving the geographical coordinates of their rendezvous point. Rocannon plots this on a map, and sees that it's located on the distant southern continent. He, Mogion, Kyo, and two servants make ready to go to the rendezvous point, hoping to steal their enemies' ship and ansible.

In the 1975 essay "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," Le Guin said "A book does not come to me as an idea, or a plot, or an event, or a society, or a message; it comes to me as a person. A person seen, seen at a certain distance, usually in a landscape. The place is there, the person is there." Certainly this seems to be the case for Rocannon's World. Semley's character completed her arc in the short story, but Le Guin was left intrigued by this anthropologist character who had intruded into the story. So she brought him to Fomalhaut II, suitably later in its history in line with the idea that living humans cannot travel faster than light.

Rocannon appears not just as a character in isolation, though, but as a character in a landscape. This is, at root, a novel about the relationship of the anthropologist to the world he is studying. The adventure of finding the enemy who destroyed his ship gives the book's plot its direction and excitement, but that plot is used to explore the interaction of the foreign scientist with the places and peoples he is encountering.

It's hard not to see Rocannon as modeled in some ways on Le Guin's father, Alfred Kroeber. There's certainly danger in being reductionist here, or making unwarranted inferences that everything said about Rocannon expresses her opinion of Kroeber. But it's the elephant in the room, so let's address it head-on.

Kroeber is best known for his work on indigenous Californians. He approached them with interest and sympathy, but also from within a framework that viewed them as a dying race, being swept aside by the currents of settler history. The anthropologist's job is to record what can be salvaged of the pre-colonial culture, while also acknowledging when it had been lost. Among the critiques of Kroeber's work today is the fact that he declared the Ohlone to be "culturally extinct," leading to a loss of federal recognition for the tribe.

The inhabitants of Fomalhaut II aren't nearly as precarious in Rocannon's eyes as the California natives were in Kroeber's, but he still treats them as threatened in a similar way. Inspired by his meeting with Semley, Rocannon convinced the League of Worlds to place an Interdict on Fomalhaut II, preventing further interference -- such as the technological development previously bestowed on the Gdeimar -- until a full ethnographic survey was completed, under Rocannon's direction.

Rocannon comes to regret the Interdict, though. He laments that in its absence, there would be regular traffic between Fomalhaut and the League worlds, which means he would be able to be rescued. But now he has lost his ship, the rest of the members of his mission, and his ansible with which he could call for help. Moreover, the Gdeimar resent being cut off, and he infers that this is their reason for refusing to let him use their ship, the one they used to bring Semley to New South Georgia.

His statement to Mogien expresses well the issues he faces trying to be a good anthropologist, within the framework of being a representative of a more powerful culture studying those regarded as primitive: "the planet's been under Interdict for forty-five years now. Due to me. Because I interfered. Because, after I met Lady Semley, I went to my people and said, what are we doing on this world we don't know anything about? Why are we taking their money and pushing them about? What right have we? But if I'd left the situation alone at least there'd be someone coming here every couple of years; you wouldn't be completely at the mercy of this invader--"

Exploitation, or protection. Those are the two conceivable relationships that the colonizer can imagine having with the colonized. Protection sounds more enlightened and kinder. But it carries with it condescension, and an insurmountable barrier between peoples. The protector claims the right to decide who should be protected, and how -- after all, the people of Fomalhaut weren't consulted about whether they wanted an Interdict. And even rulers like Mogien defer to Rocannon, calling the anthropologist "Starlord." One of the questions to watch for as the novel progresses is the degree to which Rocannon gets beyond the dilemma of exploitation versus protection, and comes to have a relationship of genuine equality with his "subjects" -- a word that can refer to the people an anthropologist studies, or the people that a king rules.

Colonialism is always tied up in questions of race, and so it's worth saying more about how race is portrayed in this story. The Gdeimar and Fiia remain somewhat alien, and indeed they're the most un-human intelligent life forms encountered in the Hainish works. Le Guin had at this point not fully worked through the idea that all humanoids in the universe are descended from the Hainish long ago. The more human species, with which the reader is led to identify, are the Liuar. As I mentioned in the last episode, these are subdivided into the ruling Angyar, and the servant class of Ogiyor, also refered to as mid-men.

Le Guin describes the Angyar as having dark skin and light hair, while the Ogiyor have light skin and dark hair. This performs something of a reversal from the common trope, in both fantasy and real life, of having the so-called "higher" races, with more advanced civilization and a right to rule, marked by their lighter complexions. The obvious point of contrast here is Faramir's speech in The Two Towers describing the racial hierarchy of Numenoreans, "middle men," and indigenous inhabitants of Middle-earth -- though it should be noted that Le Guin had not yet read Tolkien when she wrote Rocannon's World.

Le Guin seems to be attempting a small gesture of racial justice here, by putting dark-skinned people on top -- though in giving them blond hair, she also distances them from association with any specific real-world race. This is a trope she will return to, notably in the Earthsea books and Five Ways to Forgiveness. Each iteration becomes more sensitive and better executed. Here in Rocannon's World, it is a fairly crude reversal, maintaining the idea of the racial hierarchy while swapping out the skin colors. By the standards of 1966, that may have been enough, but it's unsatisfying today. It's worth noting that nearly all of the covers I could find for this book depict Rocannon -- who is light-skinned -- alone riding his windsteed. It's a kind of whitewashing by omission, just neglecting to show the dark-skinned major characters. There is, however, a small amount of fan art if you search for the name of the book and some of the Angyar characters.

Rocannon's primary relationships are with the ruling Angyar. This reflects the way that anthropologists often end up working through powerful brokers in the communities they study. Having good relationships with local leaders certainly makes it easier to gain permission to be in a place, move about freely, and ask questions. But it comes with both explicit and implicit pressures to take the side of those leaders in conflicts within the community, turning the anthropologist into a potential tool for reinforcing their power. Contemporary anthropologists wrestle with this issue extensively, whereas Rocannon seems to have just accepted his position as a guest and ally of the Angyar.

As a geographer, I can hardly pass up commenting on the fact that the quest is made possible by obtaining a set of latitude-longitude coordinates. There is a tension in many fantasy works between the iconic overview maps provided to the reader, and the limited geographical knowledge held by characters within the story as they set out on their quest -- captured by Frodo's line in The Fellowship of the Ring, "I will take it, though I do not know the way." Science fiction, on the other hand, commonly applies the trope of cartesian coordinates to the vastness of interstellar space.

Like Frodo, Rocannon will have to rely on the skills and knowledge of local inhabitants to guide him across the landscapes and seascapes of Fomalhaut II. But he also has a map, and in fact it's only because of his map that anyone involved knows where to go. Le Guin never drew a pictorial map of the planet, but the book opens with a verbal map, describing the shapes and relationships of its main landmasses. Rocannon's understanding of the world began with this high-level mapping, presumably accomplished by telescope and remote sensing before anyone landed on the surface. The Hainish have imposed an abstract geographical grid onto the world, which they can use to move about and reference places. Rocannon's job as an anthropologist is to fill in that grid with detailed place-based knowledge. This is, as I suggested earlier, a book about different ways of relating to places.

To close our discussion, we should note that this book marks the introduction of one of Le Guin's most notable bits of technological worldbuilding, the ansible. While faster than light travel remains impossible for her characters in the Hainish universe, instantaneous communication is possible. She gives little thought to the physics of how such a thing might work. She's more interested in its implications. She's writing about a universe in which ideas move faster than people, and thus where cultural clash is more important than military conquest. That sets the tone for a lifetime of writing.

Next time, join me for a discussion of chapters 3 and 4 of Rocannon's World.