144 pages
English language
Published Nov. 1, 1984 by Ace Books.
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.
Comme c'est une véritable découverte : de cette histoire de science fiction, de l'auteure et de tout cet univers; le début de ma lecture a été un peu laborieux car j'ai dû me familiariser avec le vocabulaire spécifique à cette ambiance stellaire. Après ça... c'était que du plaisir et je me réjouis de lire la suite.
It's a story. More fantasy than science-fiction. I had a time piecing together what the events in the first part of the book actually meant with regards to the story. I had to read someone else's synopsis to then realize, "oh! That's what happened!" I'm glad I'm starting here with Le Guin. Her works can only get better, I assume.
I plan on reading more of the Hainish to at least get to the book I'd purchased first, The Left Hand of Darkness.
I must admit, this book didn't capture me as much as others. It is not long though, and you have to consider its age (published in 1966!).
Its ideas and story are therefore quite remarkable. I have not read the other, more famous stories from the Hainish novels, but I'm sure this is not the best.
It contains some landmarks of Scifi though (even though most of it is high fantasy), most remarkably the Ansible, which Le Guin invented here and which is a mainstay for so many other works from later authors.
La narration est un peu datée mais quelle richesse imaginative!
Ansible—the open-source “infrastructure as code” tool—borrowed its name from this novel.
In the story, an ansible is a faster-than-light (FTL) communication device—words typed on one ansible appear instantaneously light-years away.
This factoid was chief among my reasons for reading this book.
I also read it for completeness sake—“Rocannon’s World” is the first novel in the Hainish Cycle—Ursula K. Le Guin’s epic future history, which includes one of my all-time favorite books: “The Dispossessed.”
But this was my least-favorite Le Guin story I’ve read thus far (although that’s a high bar).
The story was nothing more than your average 1960s sci-fi/bronze-aged castles with flying cats mashup.
While that sounds exciting, the actual book was slow.
There needed to be more plot for such a plot-driven story.
Plot
I ride with Olhor, who seeks to hear his enemy’s voice, who has traveled through the great dark, who has seen the World hang …
Ansible—the open-source “infrastructure as code” tool—borrowed its name from this novel.
In the story, an ansible is a faster-than-light (FTL) communication device—words typed on one ansible appear instantaneously light-years away.
This factoid was chief among my reasons for reading this book.
I also read it for completeness sake—“Rocannon’s World” is the first novel in the Hainish Cycle—Ursula K. Le Guin’s epic future history, which includes one of my all-time favorite books: “The Dispossessed.”
But this was my least-favorite Le Guin story I’ve read thus far (although that’s a high bar).
The story was nothing more than your average 1960s sci-fi/bronze-aged castles with flying cats mashup.
While that sounds exciting, the actual book was slow.
There needed to be more plot for such a plot-driven story.
Plot
I ride with Olhor, who seeks to hear his enemy’s voice, who has traveled through the great dark, who has seen the World hang like a blue jewel in the darkness.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, "Rocannon's World"
The novel opens with an explosion. The eponymous Rocannon's ship is destroyed by an unknown enemy.
Rocannon (later: Olhor) is an ethnologist of high-intelligence life forms for the League of All Worlds. The League is studying a bronze-age civilization on an unnamed planet orbiting the star Fomalhualt.
The League has managed to catalog three of the five (maybe) species of the planet:
As Rocannon explains his ship-explosion troubles to Lord Mogien of Hallan Castle—a high-born Angyar—they cross paths with a lone Fiian. The Fiian reveals his whole village was also decimated by the enemy.
Bound by their common enemy (and the Angyar's unexplainable "All for One" philosophy), Lord Mogien, Rocannon, and Kyo the Fiian join with three of Mogien's Olgyior servants on a quest to the unknown and uncharted South in the hopes of sending a distress signal to the League from the enemy's ansible.
Semley's Necklace
The story opens with its best part: "The Dowery of Angyar" (AKA, Semley's Necklace), which was published as a stand-alone story in 1964, two years before the publication of Rocannon's World.
This prologue is a reimagining of Freyja's Brísingamen necklace of Norse Mythology.
The eponymous Semley, a high-born Angyar, is attempting to track down a family heirloom—the sapphire necklace known as the "Eye of the Sea."
She seeks out the Gdemiar (dwarves), who made the necklace, who agree to take Semley to meet the necklace's new owners—the Starlords, who include a young Rocannon.
The journey teaches us all about time dilation and the deleterious effects of near-FTL travel.
This prologue has all the best parts of the novel and none of the slow, slightly dull, ungainly attempts at character development—highly recommended.
3.5 rounded up to 4. I think. Im gonna need a minute to figure out what even happened.
Så vackert språk. Lätt och luftigt på något vis. (Förstås utan att vara det minsta pretto, sådant står jag inte ut med.). Väldigt fascinerande, spännande.
Le Guin själv ska om denna sin första roman ha fällt omdömet att den innehöll en "promiscuous mixing of fantasy and science fiction". En sådan blandning är tvärtom, skulle jag säga, alldeles underbar. Det som i senare tiders genrebeskrivningar kom att kallas rymdopera, en genre som jag ofta tycker mycket om.
Främlingsskap, möten, det okända, äventyr. Ser verkligen framemot att läsa mer av författaren.
Some parts was great. Others where boring.
Historia épica de explorador en un planeta habitado por heroicos reinos de la Edad del Bronce. La primera novela publicada por LeGuin, probablemente mucho antes de alcanzar su madurez narrativa. Entretenida, pero no pasa de ahí.
An early attempt at true alien contact. Much promise of what is to come.
Perhaps if it was as short as Planet of Exile I would have enjoyed it more.
Too long and the Viking like warriors weren't very convincing.
Rocannon's World is interesting. LeGuin maintains a fairy tale quality of sorts while setting the story in a high science-fiction world, complete with FTL ships and ansibles. The combination is almost dream-like and provocative, but unfortunately falls into LeGuin's most common flaw -- a slowness that makes the book hard to want to pick up and difficult to concentrate once you have.
