Rocannon's World, Part IV

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Today we'll be looking at chapters seven, eight, and nine and the epilogue of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World, from 1966.

Last time, we left Rocannon and his companions in the city of the Winged Ones, a previously unknown humanoid species that turns out to eat people. Raho has been killed. Rocannon runs away from the building where he saw them feeding, trying to figure out how he will rescue his friends. He runs into a small fuzzy creature that turns out to be capable of speech, which calls itself a Kiemhrir. The Kiemhrir help Rocannon find his remaining companions, summon their windsteeds, and escape from the city.

The group retrieves their gear from their campsite and resumes their trek southward. Kyo reveals that the Fiia have stories about the Kiemhrir, but not the Winged Ones. He describes his own race as "half-people" who remember the good and forget the bad.

Crossing the mountains, the group arrives at a friendly Fiian village. They proceed southward through a long valley inhabited by many such villages. At the final Fiian village before they have to cross the mountains again, Kyo announces that he will be staying behind.

Rocannon, Mogien, and Yahan proceed onward through a grueling week-long mountain crossing which taxes their stamina and that of their windsteeds. As they finally descend the mountains, Yahan is in poor health and Rocannon gives him the impermasuit to keep him warm. At camp one night they see a shadow watching them. Mogien insists that it is an omen of his own death, while Rocannon is skeptical. Rocannon then discovers that it was a relative of the Gdemiar and Fiia, who lives in a cave nearby. He strikes a deal with the cave dweller to learn mindlistening, which is a kind of non-consensual mindspeech that allows him to detect the presence and emotions of his enemies.

Rocannon's use of mindlistening eventually draws the notice of some of his enemies, and they send a helicopter to investigate and attack the small party. The helicopter's laser gun wounds Rocannon's hand, but Mogien makes a suicide attack that brings it down, killing himself and his windsteed in the process.

Rocannon and Yahan continue onward and are taken in by a group of Liuar, the ancestors of the Angyar, who are still living in the far south. Lady Ganye, who reminds Rocannon of Haldre, nurses them back to health. Meanwhile, Rocannon uses his mindlistening to work out the location and layout of his enemies' camp. The Liuar call them the Strangers, and have been driven out of their lands beyond the river by these newcomers.

Rocannon sets out on the final leg of his journey alone, despite Yahan's offer to accompany him. Instead, Rocannon frees him from the bonds of service and encourages him to return to the north. Rocannon flies close to the enemy base, then hides his windsteed and approaches on foot. The enemy base's security is quite lax, as they don't see the local peoples as much of a threat.

In the base there are six egg-shaped faster than light ships. Aboard each is an ansible and a pilot willing to take off in the event of an emergency, despite the fact that this would mean certain death, since living things can't travel faster than light. Rocannon detects that one pilot has gone to a different ship for a game of chess with another pilot, so he sneaks aboard the empty ship and uses its ansible to send a message back to his base on New South Georgia. He gives the coordinates of the enemy base and explains that they are a group of Faradayan rebels that the League of Worlds has been trying to track down. Then Rocannon flees.

It seems as if there will be no response from the League as Rocannon flies away, but then a blast of energy obliterates the enemy base. The League has sent uncrewed faster than light drone ships to the location to destroy it.

Rocannon settles in to spend the rest of his life with Ganye. We learn in the epilogue that he has died by the time the next League expedition comes to this planet and visits the southern continent, but that they have named the planet Rocannon's World.

We can see in these last chapters a number of themes that we've already discussed. First, we get continued careful and care-full descriptions of the natural landscape. Le Guin does a particularly good job of conveying the simultaneous harshness and beauty of the mountains that Rocannon, Mogien, and Yahan struggle to cross. She writes: "Snow began to dance about them, not falling, only dancing here in its habitat, its birthplace, a dry flickering dance." (98) This is a beautiful image of snow as a living being with its own home, which contrasts with the inability of the human characters to survive in the high mountains without food or wood. The snow lives here, but they do not.

To view the snow as a living being dovetails nicely with another important theme running through these chapters, which is Rocannon's attempts to fit the beings of Fomalhaut II into his conception of the world. He is, after all, an anthropologist, which means his focus is on learning about and documenting HILFs, High Intelligence Life Forms. When he encountered the Winged Ones, his first thought was that they confirmed the mention in his training materials of a possible additional HILF species on the planet.

Yet Rocannon's encounter with the Winged Ones leaves him shaken, not just from the physical danger he risked, but from the conceptual challenge that he faces from the Winged Ones as well as the Kiemhrir. The Winged Ones' overall body shape and ability to build complex structures make them seem human -- but their penchant for eating other HILFs and their communal, hive-like social structure demote them to animal status. He describes them as "tall angelic figures whose noble heads held brains degenerated or specialized to the level of insects." (?) The Kiemhrir challenge him from the other direction, as they initially seem like animals but then start to display human-like characteristics such as speech. It seems that Rocannon -- and likely Le Guin herself -- are trapped within the Great Chain of Being. They insist on seeing a separation and hierarchy between animal, human, and divine. Beings that challenge or disrupt those categories are problems or even threats. I think this is something we will see Le Guin revise in her later work, in parallel with progress in the discipline of anthropology, but it's useful to note the point that she's starting from.

The disorienting effect of these two new species continues to hit Rocannon even after they have escaped the Winged Ones' city. The group camps by a waterfall, where they can catch a type of furry shellfish. The others happily eat these creatures, but Rocannon refuses. He says "You eat them, Yahan. I can't shell something that might speak to me." Kyo replies "If all things could be heard speaking..." Rocannon: "I for one would starve." Kyo: "Well, the green creatures [trees] are silent." This exchange sounds a lot like the logic that leads many people to become vegetarians. The difference here is that Rocannon is specifically worried about the possibility that he would be eating creatures that can speak, not just ones that are alive or able to feel.

Only Rocannon, though, is disturbed in this way by the ambiguous status of the Winged Ones and Kiemhrir. His companions who are native to this world are shaken by their near death, but do not have a problem eating the shellfish. One might interpret this as an indication that Rocannon is more thoughtful, more intelligent, more ethically advanced, as a representative of a spacefaring civilization among a group of medieval people. And his job as an anthropologist should put him at the pinnacle of that enlightenment, a member of the profession whose job it is to understand and care about others, a science fictional reflection of postwar anthropology's self-appointed mission to intellectually debunk racism.

On the other hand, perhaps this passage should really be read as a cautionary tale of intellectual hubris. Rocannon's disturbance comes, ultimately, from trying to force new data into a preconceived theoretical framework. The very concept of HILF is not one native to Fomalhaut. It's something created by the League of Worlds to systematize data collection and political relations with a diversity of planets. Mogien, Yahan, and Kyo are not disturbed by the thought of accidentally eating a HILF because they aren't burdened by this foreign intellectual apparatus in the first place.

What disturbed Kyo about the Winged Ones episode is quite different. His people have stories of the Kiemhrir, but not of the Winged Ones. This, he says, is because they insist on remembering only the good, not the bad. In so doing, though, they become -- in Kyo's own words -- "half people." That is, Kyo is not disturbed about the status of the species they encountered, but rather by what those species' presence says about the status of his own people. When he labels the Fiia "half people," he's not talking in Great Chain of Being terms, placing them halfway between true people and animals. Rather, he is pointing out a kind of spiritual hollowness. The Fiia are renouncing their place in the world by only halfway engaging in it, preferring an ignorant naievete over a full reckoning with truth.

Kyo's assessment of his people elaborates on the presentation of the Fiia and the Gdeimar -- two branches of the same species -- in both the story "Semley's Necklace" and the first chapter of this book. Recall that Rocannon and Mogien had gone to the Gdeimar to request the use of the ship that they had been given by the League, only to be turned down. They concluded that the Gdeimar were selfish, uncooperative, and ungrateful. Like the Dwarves of many fantasy books, they have heartless capitalist vibes.

The Fiia, on the other hand, are presented as innocent and friendly. That the Strangers wiped out Kyo's village is considered an even bigger travesty than their attack on Rocannon's crew. Rocannon asks Kyo to mind-hear the enemy, but he must sadly reply that he cannot. The ability to use mindspeech with the Gdeimar, as well as other beings, was known to the two people's ancestors in the far southern mountains, but has been lost by those living in the north near Hallan.

The naive innocence that Kyo laments certainly seems to characterize the Fiia that the party meets after their departure from the city of the Winged Ones. They dance, and eat good food, and extend hospitality freely, the opposite of the group's treatment by the Gdeimar in the first chapter. And also in contrast with the Gdeimar, they are blissfully unconcerned with the wider world. The Gdeimar resent having been teased with gifts of League technology then cut off when the League decided not to interfere with Fomalhaut. They are too selfish to help with Rocannon's quest. The Fiia are unimpressed by the mission because they can't bring themselves to care about the big picture. Rocannon laments, "At each village here I ask what are those western mountains called, the range that towers over their lives from birth to death, and they say, 'Those are mountains, Olhor.'" (95) They mountains don't even get a name that would distinguish them from other mountains.

In the end, Kyo is still one of them. At the first village, Rocannon notes a difference between Kyo and his kin, something that has changed from his adventures. Yet he hasn't changed entirely. At the last village, Kyo announces that he will remain behind. He has completed his own personal quest to find his people again after his village in the north was wiped out. He was a loyal and helpful companion to Rocannon, but he has not committed to Rocannon's quest or tied his personal honor to it the way Mogien has. I think it would have been easy for Le Guin to give Kyo a character arc where he learns an important lesson about courage and saving the world. But that's an arc that would make him more human and less Fiian. He has his own work to do among his own people, and as an anthropologist, Rocannon respects that without challenging Kyo or demanding an explanation. Whatever Kyo has learned from the quest, it's not purely for Rocannon's benefit as the main character.

Kyo's bit of history about mindspeech comes back in a big way for Rocannon once he crosses the fabled southern mountains. There he meets the cave dweller, who is described as resembling both the Gdeimar and Fiia, part of the original stock from which those two races diverged. The cave dweller is capable of much more powerful mindspeech than his northern relatives, and is able to bestow this power on Rocannon.

The cave dweller offers the mindspeech in a way that finds a middle road between the Gdeimar and Fiia. Like the Gdeimar, he insists on a deal or exchange. But this is not a trade of something I want for something you want with both parties looking to profit as much as possible. It's a gift, like the Fiia give, but a gift that must be reciprocated. When Rocannon protests that he has nothing of value to offer, the cave dweller tells him to give "A thing, a life, a chance; an eye, a hope, a return: the name need not be known. But you will cry its name aloud when it is gone." (101-102). In other words, the point of the gift is not for the cave dweller to profit or be compensated for his time and effort. Rather, it's to ensure that Rocannon is serious about needing the mindspeech he receives. He must declare himself freely willing to lose something of value.

To understand the cost that Rocannon ultimately pays for the gift, we have to look at the role of violence in the book. The irony of Rocannon's struggle to make sense of the violent Winged Ones as human or animal is that his whole quest was prompted by a group of his own human people committing a mass murder far worse than anything the Winged Ones were planning. He wonders whether the Winged Ones chased the other people of Fomalhaut out of this region -- but we will later learn for a fact that the human enemy chased every other human out of the region where they built their base.

Rocannon himself is, in turn, responsible for the greatest act of violence that we see directly on the page of the book. He completes his quest by calling in a drone strike that totally obliterates the Strangers' base. The point here is not that the Strangers aren't bad guys or that Rocannon should have found a pacifistic way to resolve the conflict, but rather just to look at the way Le Guin shows violence responding to violence. This happens on three levels.

On the first level is violence between a HILF and a non-HILF. This set of chapters began with the animalistic feeding of the Winged Ones. Rocannon viewed this feeding as a grave danger to himself and his companions, but not as a moral wrong. So his solution is simply to escape from it, running away and being thankful to have left that danger behind just as they left behind other natural dangers like the desolate plains or the harsh water crossings. The reverse kind of violence is also thoroughly normalized, as the various HILF species eat non-HILF meat regularly. Rocannon has an attack of conscience only because he temporarily doubts his ability to identify non-HILFs as such. For non-HILFs, killing and being killed is just part of life -- as illustrated by the carnivorous windsteeds, who regularly hunt for food with no particular notice being taken by the human characters.

The second level of violence involves the humanoid HILFs of Fomalhaut. The savagery of the Olgiyor is repeatedly portrayed through their use of violence. This is showcased most explicitly with the violence of the lord of Plenot against Tolen, and again by Zgama toward anyone crossing his lands. This base and unruly violence becomes the occasion for corrective or disciplinary violence by higher or more noble individuals. In the case of Plenot and Tolen, Mogien demonstrates the proper way to reestablish order by leading a retributive attack on Plenot.

Olgiyor violence again comes up when Rocannon is accosted by Zgama, and yet again when Piai extorts the necklace from him. In both cases, Rocannon squirms out of the situation without engaging in violence himself -- he implicitly threatens Zgama, then he pays off Piai. But following after, Mogien comes to both of these Olgiyor settlements and subjects them to disciplinary Angyar violence. Mogien proudly reports to Rocannon that both Zgama and Piai's groups were violently punished for their presumptuousness and misbehavior.

The third level of violence is that which involves people from off-planet. We begin the book with Rocannon desiring to paternalistically protect Fomalhaut from getting involved in that violence. The League of Worlds is preparing for a great war, and there are some who would love to exploit Fomalhaut for resources to help in that, but Rocannon insists that the planet is not developed enough, not adult enough, to get involved. But external violence comes to Fomalhaut anyway, as the story is touched off by the Strangers blowing up Rocannon's ship and killing his crew, as well as Kyo's village. This is a totalizing kind of violence -- the ship and crew and village are obliterated in an instant, with Rocannon and Kyo only escaping by happenstance.

The opening chapters position Rocannon as the victim of this most extreme violence. He, like the inhabitants of Fomalhaut, is at risk from the Big Bad. Rocannon, Mogien, Yahan, and Kyo form a kind of multi-racial Fellowship on a quest to find an ansible, whose power of communication they will use to save the world.

At the end, it is Rocannon, the off-worlder, who must go in to save Fomalhaut from this external threat. And he does, successfully calling for help with the Strangers' own ansible. But then we're forced to realize what that help consists of: more totalizing violence. The League can't rescue Rocannon. All they can do is to send drone ships to instantly obliterate the Strangers' base. Weak and vulnerable Rocannon turns out to be capable of the biggest act of violence in the whole book.

Now, my point is not to pacifistically mourn the deaths of the Strangers. After all, they started it with their attack on Rocannon's ship, and they have been conquering land in the south and expelling the southern Liuar from it. My point is to note the structural parallels here. Throughout the journey, Mogien has been demonstrating to Rocannon how to respond to violence with greater violence to reestablish the proper order and hierarchy. When this violence was between Angyar and Olgiyor, Rocannon had mixed feelings, and his participation was compromised in various ways. Mogien's suicide attack on the Strangers' helicopter, however, seems to have passed the torch. After that event, Rocannon becomes capable of retalliatory violence, on a scale much greater than that of the "primitive" inhabitants of Fomalhaut.

This structure of violence puts the final naming of the planet as Rocannon's World in a different light. At first blush, it seems to be a way of honoring the peaceful anthropologist. After all, this book is often pointed to as an illustration of Le Guin's rejection of the trope of the conquering hero with a laser gun that was so common in masculinist science fiction of the time. Yet from another light, Rocannon is at the end of the story not a peaceful anthropologist, but a conqueror in his own right. He violently subdued the Strangers and earned himself a place at the side of Ganye, the southern Liuar queen.

The ansible is Le Guin's most famous piece of science fiction tech, and in some ways her Hainish series of novels and short stories can be seen as a career-long exploration of the implications of having a device for instantaneous communication between worlds separated by vast stretches of space and time. Importantly, the ansible is not just a device that sends communication very fast, an improvement on radio waves like radio is an improvement over sending a letter. The ansible creates an instantaneous connection which does not travel across the intervening distance. This is true of the faster than light travel of uncrewed ships as well. Observing the Strangers' ansible-equipped ships, Rocannon notes "Since it did not proceed through spacetime it had no forward or back end, no logic" (111-12).

The ansible is symbolic of Le Guin's "softer," more anthropological approach to science fiction. The instantaneous communication suggests a merging of the selves at either end, something that she will later explore in more depth in the short story "The Shobies' Story." And yet in its first appearance, its first use by a character, the ansible is used to call down obliterating violence.

The ansible is not the only fictional form of communication appearing in these chapters -- we also need to consider the mind-listening that Rocannon learns from the cave dweller. For most of the book, it's emphasized that mindspeech is a mutual process, creating a connection between two willing participants. This is an idealized view of communication, a kind of communication that stands at the opposite end of the spectrum of interaction from violence. 

Mind-listening, on the other hand, is not consensual and mutual. It is specifically a way for Rocannon to overhear the activities of the Strangers who don't want to be listened to. These are people who started the story off with mass murder, so my point is not that I feel bad for the violation of their privacy. Rather, I'm noting that Rocannon's final triumph in the story requires him to embrace forms of communication based on conflict. Moreover, Rocannon has already done something somewhat like mind-listening all the way back at the begininng of the book, when he overheard his enemies' radio communications in order to learn the coordinates of their base. So perhaps the high tech capabilities of the League that are being paternalistically kept from Fomalhaut, and the semi-mystical native capabilities of the planet's inhabitants, are not so different after all.

What we can take from this is that Le Guin herself does not endorse the dichotomy between communication and violence that is sometimes attributed to her by sympathetic critics. From her first novel, she is interested in exploring the ways that communication is implicated in power and politics. This is a theme to watch out for across her career.

The brief epilogue brings the story full circle from the ending of "Semley's Necklace." At the end of that story, Semley returns to Hallan with the necklace, only to find that so much time has passed in her sub-lightspeed journey to New South Georgia and back that everyone she knew had grown old or died. In despair, she fled the castle, leaving the necklace behind. At the end of the novel, the length of time required for sub-lightspeed travel has meant that Rocannon cannot go home to New South Georgia, and by the time League visitors return to Fomalhaut II, he has grown old and died. Instead those visitors find Queen Ganye, who closely resembles Semley, wearing the necklace.

Next time, join me for a special interlude episode looking at Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign, the book that was published back-to-back with the first edition of Rocannon's World.