I’ll admit that my first exposure to Le Guin’s work was the awkward and often painfully boring Sci Fi adaptation of Earthsea, which incidentally was blasted by the author herself in the article A Whitewashed Earthsea, How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. This article did not appear on my radar until very recently so I was under the impression for the past year that Le Guin might possibly suck as bad as that mini-series did so it was with great relief that she felt the same about Legend of Earthsea as many SciFi viewers. Having finished Worlds of Exile and Illusion I am solidly convinced of her abilities to tell a compelling story and draw characters that have depth, meaning and a tangible sense of humanness.

World of Exile and Illusion is a compendium of three novellas originally published in the 1960’s and comprise the first works of the Ekumen series. Each story is a distinct tale largely separate from the others, though, they are bound to the same universe and fictional backdrop and occasionally share small details for the sake of continuity. What I found most fascinating was that the tales are dressed in the pretense of science fiction–interstellar travel, galactic intrigue and war, and highly advanced technologies and civilizations–but in their telling are more akin to high fantasy in that the protagonist struggles in lands of rudimentary technology among civilizations that are mired in feudalism to attain a goal that impacts the world as a whole. The cycle progresses from an individual ripped from his technology, to one struggling to remember its far distant cultural achievements, to the last, which turns the first story on its head, where the protagonist has no recollection of who he is or where he came from. Le Guin put a great deal of care into portraying all characters and cultures with a great deal of sensitivity offering valid motivations for action and behavior, enough so that I found myself wistfully thinking that an anthropological companion would make a nice addition to her work in this series.

If I have one complaint is that the book ends so abruptly, one Amazon reviewer put it nicely by saying, “Did Ursula run out of paper? or typewriter ribbon?” Upon reflection it does make sense in that throughout each story reminds the reader that the impact of time in interstellar travel is greater than the distance itself so that the journey of the character in the last story does in fact signal the end of his presence and, very likely, the memory of him on that planet. The trouble is that the endings come at such a breathless pace in contrast with their often languid and relaxed beginnings leaving me feeling slightly disorientated at the story’s close.

Minor quibbling aside, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a good story. Irregardless of whether or not you like science fiction or fantasy or dislike both the book is well written, and the characters and their worlds are portrayed with sensitivity and detail which are the prerequisites for excellent fiction.  I will be looking forward to reading more of Le Guin’s work and am glad that it bears no resemblance to the hatchet job that appeared on Sci Fi.

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