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

Edited by Brian Attebery

“Ursula Le Guin can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”—Jonathan Lethem

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

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

Influences Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut
November 3, 2021

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

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

Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, Ursula K. Le Guin redrew the map of modern science fiction. In such visionary masterworks as the Nebula and Hugo Award winners The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, she imagined a galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain—an array of worlds whose divergent societies, the result of both evolution and genetic engineering, afford a rich field for literary explorations of “the nature of human nature,” as Margaret Atwood has described Le Guin’s subject. Now, for the first time, the complete Hainish novels and stories are collected in a definitive two-volume Library of America edition, with new introductions by the author.

Le Guin first conceived her League of All Worlds in three early novels of daring inventiveness. In Rocannon’s World (1966), Hainish scientist Gaverel Rocannon ventures to an unnamed planet to conduct a peaceful ethnological survey only to discover a secret outpost of the League’s deadly enemy. In Planet of Exile (1966), the fate of colonists from Earth stranded on distant Werel depends on working together with the planet’s indigenous peoples if they are to survive the oncoming fifteen-year winter. City of Illusions (1967), set far in the future on a sparsely populated Earth that has lost contact with all other planets and is ruled by the mysterious, mind-lying Shing, turns on the appearance of an amnesiac with yellow eyes who may hold the key to humanity’s freedom.

In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Earth-born Genly Ai travels to wintery Gethen to convince its nations to join the Ekumen, the confederation of known worlds. To do so he must navigate the subtleties of politics and culture on a planet populated by an ambisexual people who have never known war. This is the novel that inspired Harold Bloom to observe that “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature.”

The Dispossessed (1974), a philosophical adventure story in which a physicist strives to complete a theory of simultaneity that will for the first time allow instantaneous communication between all the planets of humanity, is set against the backdrop of Le Guin’s richly textured vision of what an anarchist society might look like in practice.

Also included are four short stories and six essays about the novels, plus the surprising original 1969 version of the story “Winter’s King.” The endpaper map of Gethen has been colorized from a drawing by Le Guin herself.

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

Influences Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut
November 3, 2021

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
Table of Contents

Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin

ROCANNON’S WORLD

PLANET OF EXILE

CITY OF ILLUSIONS

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

THE DISPOSSESSED

STORIES
Winter’s King
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow
The Day Before the Revolution
Coming of Age in Karhide

APPENDIX
Introduction to Rocannon’s World
Introduction to Planet of Exile
Introduction to City of Illusions
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness
A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti
Is Gender Necessary? Redux
Winter’s King (1969 version)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-538-9 1113 pages

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N° 296 Library of America Series

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