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Ursula K. Le Guin: Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two

The Word for World Is Forest | Five Ways to Forgiveness | The Telling | stories More

Edited by Brian Attebery

“Genre cannot contain Ursula Le Guin: she is a genre in herself.”—Zadie Smith

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

News Fellow writers remember Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929–2018
January 5, 2022

Interviews “Pure imagining,” within limits: Ursula K. Le Guin on The Hainish Novels & Stories
March 5, 2019

News Neil Gaiman on Ursula K. Le Guin: “a magic of true speaking”
January 24, 2018

Save $25 when you buy both volumes of Le Guin’s Hainish Novels & Stories in a boxed set.

This second volume of Le Guin’s complete Hainish novels and stories opens with the Hugo Award–winning The Word for World Is Forest (1972), set on the colony planet of Athshe, where Terrans have arrived to strip its rich natural forests for a depleted Earth. To do so, they enslave the peaceable indigenous population, until the Athsheans rise up in a desperate act of defiance that will leave them and their planet forever changed.

Of the seven stories gathered here, three concern the invention of a new technology for instantaneous interstellar travel—an advance that brings with it unforeseen dangers—and three explore the complex matrimonial arrangements on the planet O, where unions consist of four individuals in both same and opposite sex pairings.

Five Ways to Forgiveness presents for the first time the complete story suite previously published as Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). These five linked stories tell the history of the planet Werel and its slave planet Yeowe as their peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain revolutionary future.

In The Telling (2000), Sutty, an observer of the interplanetary confederation known as the Ekumen, has been sent to Aka to investigate why the planet has almost entirely lost its vital oral traditions and spiritual beliefs in the span of a single generation. Sutty’s quest for traces of Aka’s original religion causes her to reexamine her own childhood growing up amidst a repressive religious regime on Earth.

Also included are Le Guin’s 1977 introduction to The Word for World Is Forest and her provocative 1994 essay “On Not Reading Science Fiction.” The volume’s endpaper features a planetary chart of the known worlds of the Hainish descent.

Brian Attebery, editor, is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Fellow writers remember Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929–2018
January 5, 2022

Interviews “Pure imagining,” within limits: Ursula K. Le Guin on The Hainish Novels & Stories
March 5, 2019

News Neil Gaiman on Ursula K. Le Guin: “a magic of true speaking”
January 24, 2018

News Around the corner from the revolution: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish stories
September 15, 2017

Story of the Week Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Day Before the Revolution”
August 22, 2017
Table of Contents

Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST

STORIES
The Shobies’ Story
Dancing to Ganam
Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Unchosen Love
Mountain Ways
The Matter of Seggri
Solitude

STORY SUITE: FIVE WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
Betrayals
Forgiveness Day
A Man of the People
A Woman’s Liberation
Old Music and the Slave Women
Notes on Werel and Yeowe

THE TELLING

APPENDIX
Introduction to The Word for World Is Forest
On Not Reading Science Fiction

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-539-6 808 pages

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N° 297 Library of America Series

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