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    Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions
    Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions
    Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions
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    Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions

    By Ursula K. Le Guin

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Worlds of Exile and Illusion contains three novels in the Hainish Series from Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest science fiction writers and many times the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

    Her career as a novelist was launched by the three novels contained here. These books, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions, are set in the same universe as Le Guin's groundbreaking classic, The Left Hand of Darkness.

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 13, 2016
    ISBN9780765397669
    Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions
    Author

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (1929-2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

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    Reviews for Worlds of Exile and Illusion

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    327 ratings24 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Read "Planet of Exile" and "City of Illusions" as I'd read "Rocannon's World" earlier - not outstanding works, but interesting.
    • 5/5
      Ursula Le Guin's first novels are, in my opinion, among her very best. Rocannon's World follows on from the short story 'Semley's Necklace' published in 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters' - a story that still haunts me today. What I loved about Rocannon's world was the mixture of classic Tolkienesque fantasy and then science fiction, the interplay is really clever, and the ending is absolutely spectacular.Planet of Exile is probably the weakest of the three - it is an enjoyable read however, and sets up the thrid book:-City of Illusion is one of the best sci-fi stories I have ever read. Enjoyable and clever, with some of Le Guin's most exquisite prose, it follows a man who knows nothing about himself, on a sparsely populated earth, trying to find out who he is and what happened to him. Again the conclusion is wonderful and beautifully executed.I would recommend these stories wholeheartedly. Borrow my copy - they're wonderful!
    • 5/5
      These are the three backbone novels of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Series, and sweet jeebis they're pleasant to read! In each one Le Guin serves up a little bit of the shooting of the lazer guns, a little bit of the falling in love and getting busy, and a bucket full of the existential crisis of figuring out what it means to be human and how can people from different planets all be human together. I like feeling like I'm thinking about something important while I read about spaceships that can melt planets. I blame the paint chips. There are also baddass winged cats. And marauding barbarians. Le Guin is my hero.
    • 4/5
      This is an omnibus of Le Guin's first three novels. All three are very short -- the first two even by the standards of the time -- and the three together are not overlong for a modern novel.These are only loosely connected (especially the first to the other two), and while there's no particular reason to read them out of order (in this case, chronological and publication orders coincide, and are the order in which the books appear), if you should happen to come across individually published volumes, or if one of the three looks especially interesting, there's no reason you have to read them in order, either.The first novel, Rocannon's World, is a fairly straightforward quest narrative -- a journey to far-off lands, with companions of various races, to seek an important object. Of course, the various races are different intelligent species on a planet around Fomalhaut (except for Rocannon himself, an anthropologist from another world), and the object of the quest is an ansible with which to send a warning back to other worlds, but that doesn't change the shape of the story any. This isn't one of LeGuin's stronger works, but completists will want to read it, and if you're buying the omnibus anyway you might as well -- it's very short. At least read the prologue, if you haven't already read it as "Semley's Necklace" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, where it was published separately.The second novel, Planet of Exile, is the strongest of the three. An abandoned colony on a world with a year as long as a lifetime (predating the Helliconia series by 15 years; I don't know whether this was the first use of the "very long year" idea in SF), slowly losing technology and hope of recontacting the League of All Worlds, allies itself with a group of natives against invading barbarians. This novel is thoughtful and individually focused, with a sense of resignation -- in making this alliance the group is choosing the least bad of a set of options, but the future remains bleak. The alliance is personal as well as political, with a colonist falling in love with a native, despite the prejudices on both sides, against the low-tech natives by the colonists and against a marriage that is assumed to be necessarily childless by the natives.City of Illusion, the third and longest of the three novels, is set on a far-future Earth, in the aftermath of a war; it seems that the Enemy alluded to in the previous novels, who the colonists in Planet of Exile blame for their abandonment, attacked long ago, and broke up the League of All Worlds. Most of the novel concerns the journey of a (not entirely human) man called Falk. Falk has had his memory wiped and been left in the wilderness; after being found by a small human settlement, he makes a journey across the continent to the alien city of Es Toch (the only city left on the planet) to regain his memory. After a disconnected and episodic journey, Falk reaches Es Toch, where he learns that to regain his old self and old memories, he must irrevokably lose the last six years of his life, since being left in the forest; in effect, he must commit suicide so that his old self can live again. This interesting dilemma is not satisfactorily dealt with, and once Falk makes his decision the book takes a radically different turn.Overall, these definitely aren't the place to start with LeGuin; they're decidedly minor, and would leave a reader wondering what all the fuss is about. But they're interesting (though Planet of Exile is the only one I'd bother picking up as a separate volume), and definitely worthwhile for LeGuin fans. Seeds of some of her key themes of isolation and being surrounded by strangeness run through all three, and I think the reason I like Planet of Exile the best is that it balances both sides of the strangeness the best of the three; neither the landscape nor the protagonist is set apart as being strange, but there are two sides that are strangers to each other, both of which need to change to survive.
    • 5/5
      Rocannon's World:When all the other members of his ethnographic survey are killed, Gaverel Rocannon is stranded on the planet Fomalhaut II. The weapons that were used in the attack could only have come from an alien military faction. To stop them Rocannon must get a message back to the League of All Worlds. But on this planet the only equipment that can span the distance between the stars quickly enough to deliver the message in time could only be located on the enemy’s base. So Rocannon and his hosts from what The Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms describes as a “clan-descent society,” with a “feudal-heroic culture,” set out on a quest to find and infiltrate the base in the forgotten lands to their south. Will it be swords, lances, and griffins against helicopter gunships and faster than light bombers?Planet of Exile: The native girl Rolery, born out of season and impetuous, finds herself strangely attracted to Jakob Agat Altetta, the dark leader of the farborn, even though her people consider the farborn to be inhuman practitioners of witchcraft, and so rude that they would look you directly in the eyes. The attraction is mutual, and it leads to bitter misfortune and near disaster just when the two peoples should unite against a common enemy.City of Illusions: Five years ago a man without memory or language stumbled out of the wilds of the forest. At least he had the body of man, but his yellow eyes were like those of a cat. In Zove’s household the family debated what he was and what to do with him. Was he a spy, an agent of their enemy the Shing, or possibly an alien, even though, “No being from the Other Worlds that once were know has walked on Earth for twelve hundred years.” They let him live and learn, and now he’s about to journey across a continent to the city of the Shing, the masters of the “mind-lie” that defeated the League of All Worlds and enslaved humanity, to uncover the truth about himself. These first three of Le Guin’s science fiction novels were published in 1966 and 1967. Each is set on a different planet. The backstory to all three stories, each set about a millennium apart, is the rise and fall of an interstellar human, or perhaps humanoid civilization. During this time humanity gains and develops the skill of telepathy. More in the forefront of the stories is the clash between cultures, the interstellar and the native, and in final one, City of Illusions, between human and the truly alien. The three, taken together as in this edition, are two heroic quests framing a siege. If all this sounds more like the themes found in heroic fantasy rather than in science fiction to you, you have the author’s agreement. Eleven years after its first publication, in an introduction to the 1977 edition of Rocannon's World (reproduced in The Language of the Night, the author writes, "...of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue ; different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper—I work on paper) you get purple, something else again. Rocannon's World is definitely purple."
    • 3/5
      Easy to read sci-fi, more about people than technology. Ursula Le Guin's writing is as lovely as always.
    • 4/5
      The science fiction novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, often collectively called the "Hainish Cycle," are not intended to be a series in the conventional sense. They are meant to stand alone and be read that way. But collecting three of her earliest novels into one volume gives the reader the opportunity to read these as a series, revealing connecting themes and making for a very satisfying way to experience Le Guin's futuristic universe. The stories in themselves are ripping adventures, as well, with two quest tales bracketing a story of war.The three novels take place thousands of years apart, at pivotal points in the conquest of a galactic empire called the League of All Worlds, which includes Earth, by aliens from a distant galaxy. Each novel also sows the seeds for the future evolution of humanity, which will enable them to defeat their conquerors and establish a new galactic alliance.***There are some slight spoilers ahead.***In the first novel, Rocannon's World, a ship from the League of All Worlds is visiting a planet where several intelligent species have been found. The humans are studying the aliens for possible inclusion in the League. One of them is Rocannon, who is staying at the home of one of the natives when his ship and all his shipmates are destroyed by an unknown enemy. Rocannon deduces that this is the Enemy that has been foretold, alien conquerors from a distant galaxy, against which the League has been formed to resist. On his ship was a device called an "ansible," that enabled communication at faster-than-light speeds, with which he could have warned his home planet. He figures that the enemy aliens also has an ansible, and sets out with a few companions, riding big flying cats, on a quest to reach their base in the south of the planet and send the warning so that the secret base may be destroyed. It is a hazardous journey, and along the way, Rocannon encounters natives with telepathic ability, which is called "mindspeak," and which he begins to learn.The second novel, Planet of Exile, is set thousands of years later on another planet called Werel, which has been colonized by humans from the League planets. They have lost all contact with their home planets and have been stranded on Werel for generations. They have built a walled city on the seaside and holed up there, keeping themselves apart from the intelligent natives, who think they are witches because they can mindspeak and possess technology. Gradually, their numbers have been dwindling, due to the alienness of the planet where they have settled; they are being rejected as a foreign body.Werel has a very long orbit around its sun, which makes each season last for a lifetime. A person born in fall may never know spring. As Planet of Exile opens, winter is near, and a great wave of people are emigrating south, destroying everything in their path. The colonists join with the nearby natives to resist them. At the same time, the colonists discover that they are adapting to their new environment after all, which means that humanity won't die out on Werel.The third novel, City of Illusions, was my favorite of the three, although all of them are terrific reads. City of Illusions is set on a future Earth, a thousand years after the time of Planet of Exile. A man wakens in the forest with no memory of who he is or where he came from. He only knows that he looks different from the people who discover him. Gradually, he learns that the few remaining people of Earth live under the rule of a conquering enemy called the Shing; both the people and the Shing practice telepathy. The man sets out on a quest to reach the capital city of the Shing and find out who he is. What he discovers about himself sows the seeds for an eventual rebellion against the conquering aliens. This novel was so compelling and exciting that I really wanted there to be a sequel.There is not one, really, although the next novel to take place chronologically is Le Guin's most famous science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. But that is set on another planet and after another thousand years or so has passed. Interestingly, her other most famous sci-fi work, The Dispossessed, takes place before Rocannon's World does, just before the ansible is invented, although she wrote and published it much later.Le Guin's imagined worlds are a fantastic blend of advanced technology and high fantasy, combining faster-than-light space travel, magical powers in the form of telepathy and incredible beasts like the flying cats of Rocannon's World. Her worlds and her people are richly imagined and wonderfully detailed, and her writing is pitch-perfect: fast moving but still philosophical when it needs to be. I have never disliked one of her novels, and the three collected in this volume are no exception to that rule.
    • 5/5
      Excellant. Le Guin in storytelling mode without all the obvious social commentry that intrudes on the later books.This trilogy is the opening three books of her Hain cycle universe - which contains some of her most famous works, which I've read. These earlier books are far better stories. The gently interlinking themes mark the grand scale of a space opera, but the writing is much more fantasy than some technology based SF.Rocannon's World open's the trilogy and explains briefly how mankind has spread amoung the stars - many of which are inhabited by huamnoids. This is perhaps the only jarring note in the universe, it's never explained why this should be. the great Law of the League of Worlds is that of Cultural Embargo - civilisations should not be influenced by external technology, and at most can be gently influenced to progress. Hence on an unnamed world around the star Formalhut, the Emissory finds reports of helicopters amidst the traditional pastoral fantasy flying horses and knights somewhat disturbing. When his starship (and only ansible link to the rest of the universe) is destroyed he begisn to wonder whether he has found the Enemy's secret base. A trek through the countryside follows.World of Exile is set somewhat later, following the war with the Enemy, Werel is cutoff from the greater universe. And it's 24000 day Year means most humans see only a season or two. When Winter falls, savages fleeing the Ice attack. The League of Worlds expedition again barred from high technology tries to teach the natives how to survive, and a romance develops between the people. The shortest but perhaps most poignent story of the three.The last City of Illusions is an odd tale, and perhaps comes the closet to the more explict social commentry of the later works. It is set on Earth many thousands of years in the future of the other tales. the war with the Enemy is over, and mankind lives subjucated but free, the great law has been replaced with Do Not Kill. There is no League of Worlds, but the survivors of Werel have reinvented spaceflight, and return to earth, but an accident on re-entry leaves our hero berefit of memories and he must find his own way in the strangely segregated new human communities.Really well written enjoyable tales. Simple problems of humanity isolated but through strength of character overcoming different challenges. Read them...................................................................................If you wish to discuss or comment on this review, you can do so via my profile, or on a thread in the Review Discussions group
    • 4/5
      I purchased this collection of three novellas after having read Leguin's outstanding novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. These works are ostensibly related to LHoD, dealing with formation and history of the Hainish League. The first novella, Rocannon's World, has virtually nothing to do with science fiction, instead being almost entirely a work of fantasy, and not particularly good fantasy at that. Rocannon is something of an anthropological surveyor on behalf of the Hainish League, attempting to establish technologically advanced civilizations in order to present a line of defense against an anticipated invasion from outside the galaxy. The story presents a collection of life forms which are strikingly similar to Tolkien's elves, dwarves and even classes of men. Again, not particularly original and not very captivating. Two and a half stars. The final two novellas, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, are really neither fantasy nor science fiction. Each is more about the interaction between intelligent hominid species, and though I was expecting science fiction, I enjoyed these two stories significantly more than the first. In Planet of Exile, we have three vastly different cultures interacting against a highly unusual planetary climate pattern (unusual from our perspective). The World of Werel contains two native hominid species, the Tevarans, of roughly Iron Age technological proficiency, and the Gaal, more Stone Age in sophistication. Add to these, the Farborn, a much more technologically advanced species (from Earth, as it turns out), which has been on Werel for roughly 600 years. Part of an advance party from the Hainish League, they have ostensibly been exiled, supposedly as a result of a successful galactic invasion by the Shing. The planet of Werel has a moon phase of 400 days, and an elliptical orbit of 60 moon phases. Thus, each "season" lasts roughly 15-20 years. Our story is set at the onset of Winter and the seasonal migration of the Gaal through Tevaran lands. Always warlike, the Gaal have organized this Winter and are a very real threat to the civilizations of the Tevar and the Farborn. Prejudice, jealousy and distrust mark the relationship between the two species as they attempt to cooperate against their much more numerous and savage opponents. Four stars. The final novella, City of Illusion, finally introduces us to the Shing, the galactic invaders who threaten the Hainish League. In fact, the setting for this story is the Earth, far in the future, following its conquest by the Shing. We are introduced to Falk, a non-human hominid who finds himself stranded in a forested region of the United States (seemingly near Kentucky), without any memory of his past, only a desire to travel West to the Shing city of Es Toch, where he hopes to learn of his identity and past. Falk undergoes much hardship and experiences many adventures during his travels through the virtually deserted and depopulated United Sates, which eventually lead to Es Toch (located in southern Utah or northern Arizona). The experiences of Falk upon reaching Es Toch neatly tie up all the loose ends, binding the three novellas together. Four and a half stars. These final two novellas should be required reading for college level Anthropology majors.
    • 5/5
      While each books in the series has a similar tone, I feel this one is really well written and very intriguing. Exploring an unknown world while also exploring the relationship of power and illusion. The main protagonist is great and delves into personality being a creation of our experiences. While this is a series, so far all the books could be enjoyed as a stand alone book.
    • 5/5
      LeGuin is quite a writer. She takes the reader on a journey of discovery that plumbs the depths of the human condition while exploring the meaning of 'truth'. When someone tells you they are a liar, are they lying or telling you true? This is at the crux of the dilemma in which Falk, our protagonist, finds himself. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance and every action or reaction seems to lead toward disaster. The storylines of the preceding two Hainish Cycle books also dovetail nicely into this one.
    • 4/5
      This is SF written more in the style of epic fantasy, though at only 217 pages it's limited in scope. An amnesiac sets out to discover the truth about his identity and discovers a plot to dominate and subdue the human race in the process.I enjoyed this, though I felt it ended a bit abruptly. What happened next?!? Perhaps she's written other books in the same world? I'll have to look into it.
    • 4/5
      A man wanders out of the forest with a severe case of amnesia. The locals take him in and try to teach him their ways, as it is obvious that he is not of their world. When he has learned all he can from them, he must set out across the vast continent toward the city of Es Toch, hopefully to figure out where he came from, why he is there and what happened to his memory. The most important lesson imparted to him from the forest people is to trust no one, particularly the Shing. Three quarters of the book tells of this man’s journey to Es Toch, and as such is a sort of average questing tale with friends and foes along the way. It is up to our hero to figure out which is which. The ultimate answer he seeks is quite the interesting revelation, as is also what happens after he figures this out. For me, the book really didn’t get good until that final part, and the rest was fair to average. I wish we could have skipped a hunk of the journey and gotten more of the what-happens-next as the ending is just a tad abrupt. Very evocative writing, though, throughout.
    • 3/5
      Maybe I would have enjoyed this more if I had realized it was part of a series.... I didn't dislike it - as always, Le Guin has interesting ideas, good prose, and interesting characters. But I didn't really feel like the book had a point, which might be because I don't know the context of the series.
    • 4/5
      This is one of LeGuin's finest works. It is a cerebral puzzle of a story, part Wizard of Oz, part Man Who Fell to Earth. Set in a future Earth where mankind has been colonized and degraded by a parasitic alien race called the Shing, the book tells the story of Earth's last hope, a man who is only half human. LeGuin's style and themes are profoundly distinct. She is a genre writer that transcends her genre so completely you forget she is a genre writer.
    • 3/5
      Ursula is probably one of the best writers around. All of her books bring a sense of truth confronting power and this one is no exception. While this isn't her best work, it does present a unique psychological journey of truth to power. It's primarily one man's journey of self and social discovery as he confronts a system whose weapons are lies with truth.
    • 3/5
      An early LeGuin--I would not have believed she would publish such stereotyped characters. Seems to be preparation for Hainish novels. I picked it up because she is one of the authors I look for, but I'm not sure I'll keep it.
    • 4/5
      A man with amnesia appears in the forest but his eyes are not human eyes. The forest people took him in and taught him everything they know but he wants or needs to find out about his past. So he sets out for Es Toch, the City of the Shing.
    • 4/5
      The narrative could flow more smoothly, and the end is anti-climactic. But it plays with lots of fascinating ideas concerning anthropology, identity, epistemology, and ethics, all neatly entwined into a fairly straight-forward adventure story. Very cool.
    • 2/5
      A strange man with no memories is taken in by a rural community for years, until one day he decides he must travel west to find his past. The pacing is very uneven: pages slog by with nothing happening, and then suddenly in the middle of a sentence everything happens at once, and then you're back to slow and boring again. The concept was interesting, where you're never quite sure who the enemy is or if they even exist, but it was not one of Le Guin's best.
    • 3/5
      This is one of Le Guin's lesser works, in my opinion. Set in a post-apocalyptic world and universe, where it's not the humans who are in charge, the premise is good. But the insights aren't very telling, and I'm not returning to this one.
    • 3/5
      Most of Ursula LeGuin's books have as a protagonist a stranger coping with a strange land. As so often in her books the conclusion is not so much rushed as a sudden reversal of previous events or a coda to the main action. This short novel is somehow less satisfactory than its companion novels, Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile. This may be due to the fact that it is set on a post alien invasion earth that has failed and seems somehow pathetic. The character arrives at some conclusions about the aliens that seem basically meaningless. He seems to comprehend their motivations fairly well and by good fortune obstructs their evil designs. As with many of LeGuin's books he must leave the people he loves permanently in order to accomplish his goal, first on foot and then by NAFAL starship.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely fantastic. It touches the soul, is impossible to put down, pleasurable, but I spent too much time reading and must now do something productive in the real world.
    • 4/5
      A science fiction novel published in 1967 and early in the career of acclaimed author Ursula K Le Guin. The novel received little critical attention when published and I picked it up only because of its publication date ( my own category of science fiction novels from 1967). I thoroughly enjoyed the read and it took me back in time to the excitement of reading science fiction as a teenager.The story starts with a humanoid figure crawling through a forest and finally coming across a clearing whereupon it stands up on two legs and is noticed by a young woman (Parth) working in the fields. Parth goes over to him and leads him into the small community; they call him Falk and Zove a father figure of the community with the help of Parth help to educate him. Falk's mind has been wiped clean, but his intelligence enables him to learn the ways of the community and become a useful member. He learns that the world is made up of small communities separated by immense forests and that the inhabitants have been subjugated by the Shing an alien species. The scattered communities are left to their own devices as long as they do not band together and threaten the aliens. After a four year period Falk feels the need to travel, to visit the city of Es-Toch which people of the forest commune have heard speak. The first part of the book describes Falk's adventures as his path westwards leads him to various other settlements and many hostile encounters. He meets Estrel a woman captured by a nomad tribe on the great plains. They escape together and she leads him to Es-Toch the home of the Shing and where Falk feels he will meet his destiny. The second part of the book details Falk's struggles against the Shing who were responsible for wiping his mind and who now hold open the option of restoring his other self.The novel therefore falls into two distinct parts, the first a dangerous journey through a hostile environment, which is America after the Alien conquest and the second part is Falk's mind games with the aliens themselves. They are both voyages of discovery for Falk and the reader and the mystery of Falk is revealed carefully by Le Guin. There is mystery and imagination throughout, although the final battle with the aliens is perhaps oversimplified to ensure the reader is not left behind. Le Guin's writing is a cut above much of the pulp science fiction of the era and she handles the adventure story well enough. She imparts that sense of wonder that keeps the pages turning and the resolution is satisfying. Themes of identification and truth telling in City of Illusions add another layer and so a 4 star read.

    Book preview

    Worlds of Exile and Illusion - Ursula K. Le Guin

    INTRODUCTION

    by Amal El-Mohtar

    Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2004 collection of nonfiction, The Wave in the Mind, contains a curious, two-page essay titled Being Taken for Granite; punning on granted, she declares that she isn’t granite, she’s mud:

    I am not granite and should not be taken for it.… Granite does not accept footprints. It refuses them. Granite makes pinnacles, and then people rope themselves together and put pins on their shoes and climb the pinnacles at great trouble, expense, and risk, and maybe they experience a great thrill, but the granite does not. Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed.… I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite.¹

    I took Le Guin for granted. When she died in 2018, I could have fit the span of my life inside hers almost three times. She had always been there, like a mountain, or the sun, and it was easy to fall into the certainty that she always would be. I was unfamiliar with her most celebrated works—The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, books by which she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel, and then, five years later, the first woman to have won it twice. I had assumed, with all the oblivious confidence of youth, that I’d get to read them while she was still with us and talk to her about them. I imagined that I would meet her one day, under ideal conditions that would make me seem interesting enough for conversation, and ask her about poetry, about being a middle-aged woman in the 1970s, and about science fiction. Her passing hit me harder than I expected, considering my slender acquaintance with her work, but that was the thing about Le Guin: to have lost her was to have lost a world I longed to visit.

    I came to Le Guin’s work both early and late. On the one hand she introduced me to science fiction literature: I read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas—Le Guin’s famous story about a wonderful city whose existence depends on the torture of a single miserable child—when I was perhaps eight or nine and far too young for it, in a neighbor’s ragged old edition of Literature and the Writing Process. I remember feeling keenly the difference between Omelas and everything else I read in the anthology: the colors brighter, the voice clearer, the ending a quiet explosion in the mind. I would return to Omelas every few years and find a different story there, and admire its capacity to unmoor my certainties and launch them in new, questing directions.

    On the other hand, I wouldn’t read anything else of Le Guin’s until about a decade later, and I would read it badly, indifferently. I was introduced to A Wizard of Earthsea when I was eighteen, feeling like I was getting away with something by taking a contemporary fantasy literature course for which I could have written the syllabus. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, wizard schools and Jungian shadows were all the rage, saturating all the comics and novels I was enjoying. In the cacophony of sorting hats and color-coded Houses, A Wizard of Earthsea seemed drab, boring—and I mistook as derivative work that was foundational. It would be still further years before I revisited Earthsea and found treasure in it.

    But shortly after Le Guin’s passing I read The Day Before the Revolution—a short-story prequel to The Dispossessed—and it shattered me. It’s the story of an old woman’s last day, trembling on the cusp of her life’s work bearing fruit while looking back at everything she denied herself to get there. I still can’t think of the ending without tearing up: On ahead, on there, the dry white flowers nodded and whispered in the open fields of evening. Seventy-two years and she had never had time to learn what they were called.²

    In one sense, I read this too late—too late to write to Le Guin and tell her everything it had made me feel, how much it made me want to live my life by its light. But in another, I felt as if I was at last coming into alignment with Le Guin—that I was reading the right thing of hers at the right time to fall completely in love. It was almost like a meeting: hearing her voice clear and true, speaking through an old woman’s mouth and ringing in my heart like a bell.

    The Books

    All roads lead to Le Guin’s accomplishments, and whatever age you are, however familiar or unfamiliar with Le Guin you may be, this book is as good a place as any to begin or renew an acquaintance with her work. Collected in this edition are Le Guin’s first three published novels: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. Each one is set on a different planet, and only thin filaments of continuity bind them to one another. The books don’t form a trilogy; no circle closes between the first novel and the last, and they can only loosely be called a cycle, or a series. Voices, histories, and themes echo and repeat: the importance of names, the gift of mindspeech, the enormity of the universe and the resilient smallness of human life within it. Animated by the same spirit, these books are variations more than movements, improvisations on an aeolian harp, sounding again and again the importance of names, and journeys, and time.

    In Semley’s Necklace—initially a standalone short story, which now functions as a prologue—a woman seeks a fabled inheritance without knowing what it will ultimately cost her. In Rocannon’s World, a spacefaring traveler becomes stranded on a Bronze Age planet and struggles to reach an ansible—a technology that will allow him to speak instantly with people light-years away. In Planet of Exile, human settlers struggle to adjust to life on a planet that takes sixty Earth years to complete a circuit around its sun. In City of Illusions, a man is robbed of his name and his memories, and must begin again from scratch on an Earth that has, like him, been forced to forget its past and forfeit its future.

    In each of these, the heroes experience time’s relativity in moments of shocking dislocation. Nine years will pass in a single night; winter can last the whole of a man’s youth; a voyage through the stars will feel a few years long while over a hundred years pass on the planet left behind. Le Guin observes the nature of lineage and community by this uncanny, implacable light, never forgetting the human scale of a lifetime before obliterating it.

    There is a common line that critics sometimes adopt when looking at an author’s early writing, appreciating it only insofar as it heralds or presents in miniature later themes and accomplishments, as if the arc of the author’s life bends inevitably towards the work you’re more likely to have heard of or enjoyed. This baffles me; there is so much in these novels to be dazzled and moved by, so much to admire and marvel at. I’m awed by the stately grace of Le Guin’s prose, that feels both spoken from a great height and rumbled up through the earth; the physicality of her writing, the weight and dance of it, sounding a deep, pure love for the human body in a landscape.

    Most of my stories, Le Guin writes in her own introduction to City of Illusions, are excuses for a journey. I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B—or, more often, from A to A—by the most difficult and circuitous route. She says this somewhat self-deprecatingly, while her work demonstrates the multitudes a journey contains: movement, and friction, and transformation. Two of these novels feature long, difficult walks, punctuated by the rhythm of setting up and breaking down camp, of asking for hospitality and either receiving it or being violently, horribly denied it; one of them features a reversal of those dynamics, the heroes besieged, holding their city against a march of invaders. If there is a slowness here, there is a richness too—a propagation of sound through water, an immersion in the confident, clarion voice of a storyteller.

    I read all of Le Guin’s introductions to these works in preparation for writing my own, much as one might consult a guidebook before setting out on one’s own journey. But guidebooks have a very short shelf life; it isn’t long before signposts become curious artifacts themselves, describing in intimate detail a long-vanished restaurant or hotel, or more generally suggesting the shape of a bygone culture’s interests and concerns.

    Le Guin wrote her introduction to Rocannon’s World thirteen years after the book’s initial release. In it, she regrets what she calls the promiscuous mixing of fantasy and science fiction, of putting flying cats and impermasuits in the same story—placing her novel in a conversation about genre that is always exhausting but never exhausted. Reading that introduction almost fifty years after its appearance, I found that what embarrassed her had thrilled me, and couldn’t have failed to thrill every generation that found something to love in Star Wars’s battling space wizards—who, incidentally, would make their first appearance on cinema screens a single year after Le Guin’s introduction was published. What she named promiscuous mixing was, to me, generative and delightful originality, proof that genres can and should be bent and twisted into new shapes, new meanings. Each of these books strikes genre conventions together like pieces of flint, and kindles new flame from the sparks that result.

    It wasn’t all apologia, though; Le Guin also wrote that she could see in Rocannon’s World the timidity, and the rashness, and the beginner’s luck, of the apprentice demiurge … I certainly couldn’t write it now, but I can read it; and the thirteen-year distance lets me see, peacefully, what isn’t very good in it, and what is.… And it has a good shape. Were I equipped with an ansible I would reach across the decades to those words and engage them, say that genre rigidity will soon be as unfashionable as shoulder pads and plucked eyebrows (all the while casting an eye over my shoulder to future readers living at a time when those things will have again come into vogue). But while one needs an ansible to speak to the vanishing past, books are the technology we have to speak to the future, collapsing space and time into the simple honesty of an aging woman’s voice, telling the story of her earliest stories.

    I’m now the age Le Guin was when she wrote Rocannon’s World, and I’m perversely glad that I still haven’t read her more famous novels. I intend to, of course—but I’m grateful to have now the opportunity of keeping pace with Le Guin’s books as she wrote them, to follow the path she blazed without knowing what comes next. To treat her, and her work, not as a mountain to scale or a sun to see by, but as a journey to begin; to take her, not for granite or granted, but as a cheerfully muddy road, fragrant and yielding and winding through the ferny brae, over the hills and far away, beyond the worlds we know and through those we mistakenly think we know well. To have come to her work, not early or late, but in my own time—and to greet you here, fellow traveler, on the cusp of new adventure, whether or not you’ve passed through this work before, and to say to you, as we set out together:

    Return with us, return to us,

    be always coming home.³

    Ottawa, Canada

    August 2021

    PROLOGUE

    The Necklace

    How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away?—planets without names, called by their people simply The World, planets without history, where the past is the matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds.

    In trying to tell the story of a man, an ordinary League scientist, who went to such a nameless half-known world not many years ago, one feels like an archeologist amid millennial ruins, now struggling through choked tangles of leaf, flower, branch and vine to the sudden bright geometry of a wheel or a polished cornerstone, and now entering some commonplace, sunlit doorway to find inside it the darkness, the impossible flicker of a flame, the glitter of a jewel, the half-glimpsed movement of a woman’s arm.

    How can you tell fact from legend, truth from truth?

    Through Rocannon’s story the jewel, the blue glitter seen briefly, returns. With it let us begin, here:

    Galactic Area 8, No. 62: FOMALHAUT II.

    High-Intelligence Life Forms: Species Contacted:

    Species I.

    A) Gdemiar (singular Gdem): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid nocturnal troglodytes, 120–135 cm. in height, light skin, dark head-hair. When contacted these cave-dwellers possessed a rigidly stratified oligarchic urban society modified by partial colonial telepathy, and a technologically oriented Early Steel culture. Technology enhanced to Industrial, Point C, during League Mission of 252–254. In 254 an Automatic Drive ship (to-from New South Georgia) was presented to oligarchs of the Kiriensea Area community. Status C-Prime.

    B) Fiia (singular Fian): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av. ca. 130 cm. in height, observed individuals generally light in skin and hair. Brief contacts indicated village and nomadic communal societies, partial colonial telepathy, also some indication of short-range TK. The race appears a-technological and evasive, with minimal and fluid culture-patterns. Currently untaxable. Status E-Query.

    Species II.

    Liuar (singular Liu): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av. height above 170 cm., this species possesses a fortress/village, clan-descent society, a blocked technology (Bronze), and feudal-heroic culture. Note horizontal social cleavage into 2 pseudo-races: (a: Olgyior, midmen, light-skinned and dark-haired; (b: Angyar, lords, very tall, dark-skinned, yellow-haired—

    That’s her, said Rocannon, looking up from the Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms at the very tall, dark-skinned, yellow-haired woman who stood halfway down the long museum hall. She stood still and erect, crowned with bright hair, gazing at something in a display case. Around her fidgeted four uneasy and unattractive dwarves.

    I didn’t know Fomalhaut II had all those people besides the trogs, said Ketho, the curator.

    I didn’t either. There are even some ‘Unconfirmed’ species listed here, that they never contacted. Sounds like time for a more thorough survey mission to the place. Well, now at least we know what she is.

    "I wish there were some way of knowing who she is.…"

    She was of an ancient family, a descendant of the first kings of the Angyar, and for all her poverty her hair shone with the pure, steadfast gold of her inheritance. The little people, the Fiia, bowed when she passed them, even when she was a barefoot child running in the fields, the light and fiery comet of her hair brightening the troubled winds of Kirien.

    She was still very young when Durhal of Hallan saw her, courted her, and carried her away from the ruined towers and windy halls of her childhood to his own high home. In Hallan on the mountainside there was no comfort either, though splendor endured. The windows were unglassed, the stone floors bare; in coldyear one might wake to see the night’s snow in long, low drifts beneath each window. Durhal’s bride stood with narrow bare feet on the snowy floor, braiding up the fire of her hair and laughing at her young husband in the silver mirror that hung in their room. That mirror, and his mother’s bridal-gown sewn with a thousand tiny crystals, were all his wealth. Some of his lesser kinfolk of Hallan still possessed wardrobes of brocaded clothing, furniture of gilded wood, silver harness for their steeds, armor and silver-mounted swords, jewels and jewelry—and on these last Durhal’s bride looked enviously, glancing back at a gemmed coronet or a golden brooch even when the wearer of the ornament stood aside to let her pass, deferent to her birth and marriage-rank.

    Fourth from the High Seat of Hallan Revel sat Durhal and his bride Semley, so close to Hallanlord that the old man often poured wine for Semley with his own hand, and spoke of hunting with his nephew and heir Durhal, looking on the young pair with a grim, unhopeful love. Hope came hard to the Angyar of Hallan and all the Western Lands, since the Starlords had appeared with their houses that leaped about on pillars of fire and their awful weapons that could level hills. They had interfered with all the old ways and wars, and though the sums were small there was terrible shame to the Angyar in having to pay a tax to them, a tribute for the Starlords’ war that was to be fought with some strange enemy, somewhere in the hollow places between the stars, at the end of years. It will be your war too, they said, but for a generation now the Angyar had sat in idle shame in their revelhalls, watching their double swords rust, their sons grow up without ever striking a blow in battle, their daughters marry poor men, even midmen, having no dowry of heroic loot to bring a noble husband. Hallanlord’s face was bleak when he watched the fair-haired couple and heard their laughter as they drank bitter wine and joked together in the cold, ruinous, resplendent fortress of their race.

    Semley’s own face hardened when she looked down the hall and saw, in seats far below hers, even down among the halfbreeds and the midmen, against white skins and black hair, the gleam and flash of precious stones. She herself had brought nothing in dowry to her husband, not even a silver hairpin. The dress of a thousand crystals she had put away in a chest for the wedding-day of her daughter, if daughter it was to be.

    It was, and they called her Haldre, and when the fuzz on her little brown skull grew longer it shone with steadfast gold, the inheritance of the lordly generations, the only gold she would ever possess.…

    Semley did not speak to her husband of her discontent. For all his gentleness to her, Durhal in his hard lordly pride had only contempt for envy, for vain wishing, and she dreaded his contempt. But she spoke to Durhal’s sister Durossa.

    My family had a great treasure once, she said. It was a necklace all of gold, with the blue jewel set in the center—sapphire?

    Durossa shook her head, smiling, not sure of the name either. It was late in warmyear, as these Northern Angyar called the summer of the eight-hundred-day year, beginning the cycle of months anew at each equinox; to Semley it seemed an outlandish calendar, a midmannish reckoning. Her family was at an end, but it had been older and purer than the race of any of these northwestern marchlanders, who mixed too freely with the Olgyior. She sat with Durossa in the sunlight on a stone windowseat high up in the Great Tower, where the older woman’s apartment was. Widowed young, childless, Durossa had been given in second marriage to Hallanlord, who was her father’s brother. Since it was a kinmarriage and a second marriage on both sides she had not taken the title of Hallanlady, which Semley would some day bear; but she sat with the old lord in the High Seat and ruled with him his domains. Older than her brother Durhal, she was fond of his young wife, and delighted in the bright-haired baby Haldre.

    It was bought, Semley went on, with all the money my forebear Leynen got when he conquered the Southern Fiefs—all the money from a whole kingdom, think of it, for one jewel! Oh, it would outshine anything here in Hallan, surely, even those crystals like koob-eggs your cousin Issar wears. It was so beautiful they gave it a name of its own; they called it the Eye of the Sea. My great-grandmother wore it.

    You never saw it? the older woman asked lazily, gazing down at the green mountainslopes where long, long summer sent its hot and restless winds straying among the forests and whirling down white roads to the seacoast far away.

    It was lost before I was born.

    The Starlords took it for tribute?

    No, my father said it was stolen before the Starlords ever came to our realm. He wouldn’t talk of it, but there was an old midwoman full of tales who always told me the Fiia would know where it was.

    Ah, the Fiia I should like to see! said Durossa. They’re in so many songs and tales; why do they never come to the Western Lands?

    Too high, too cold in winter, I think. They like the sunlight of the valleys of the south.

    Are they like the Clayfolk?

    Those I’ve never seen; they keep away from us in the south. Aren’t they white like midmen, and misformed? The Fiia are fair; they look like children, only thinner, and wiser. Oh, I wonder if they know where the necklace is, who stole it and where he hid it! Think, Durossa—if I could come into Hallan Revel and sit down by my husband with the wealth of a kingdom round my neck, and outshine the other women as he outshines all men!

    Durossa bent her head above the baby, who sat studying her own brown toes on a fur rug between her mother and aunt. Semley is foolish, she murmured to the baby. Semley who shines like a falling star, Semley whose husband loves no gold but the gold of her hair.…

    And Semley, looking out over the green slopes of summer toward the distant sea, was silent.

    But when another coldyear had passed, and the Starlords had come again to collect their taxes for the war against the world’s end—this time using a couple of dwarvish Clayfolk as interpreters, and so leaving all the Angyar humiliated to the point of rebellion—and another warmyear too was gone, and Haldre had grown into a lovely, chattering child, Semley brought her one morning to Durossa’s sunlit room in the tower. Semley wore an old cloak of blue, and the hood covered her hair.

    Keep Haldre for me these few days, Durossa, she said, quick and calm. I’m going south to Kirien.

    To see your father?

    To find my inheritance. Your cousins of Harget Fief have been taunting Durhal. Even that halfbreed Parna can torment him, because Parna’s wife has a satin coverlet for her bed, and a diamond earring, and three gowns, the dough-faced black-haired trollop! while Durhal’s wife must patch her gown—

    Is Durhal’s pride in his wife, or what she wears?

    But Semley was not to be moved. The Lords of Hallan are becoming poor men in their own hall. I am going to bring my dowry to my lord, as one of my lineage should.

    Semley! Does Durhal know you’re going?

    My return will be a happy one—that much let him know, said young Semley, breaking for a moment into her joyful laugh; then she bent to kiss her daughter, turned and before Durossa could speak, was gone like a quick wind over the floors of sunlit stone.

    Married women of the Angyar never rode for sport, and Semley had not been from Hallan since her marriage; so now, mounting the high saddle of a windsteed, she felt like a girl again, like the wild maiden she had been, riding half-broken steeds on the north wind over the fields of Kirien. The beast that bore her now down from the hills of Hallan was of finer breed, striped coat fitting sleek over hollow, buoyant bones, green eyes slitted against the wind, light and mighty wings sweeping up and down to either side of Semley, revealing and hiding, revealing and hiding the clouds above her and the hills below.

    On the third morning she came to Kirien and stood again in the ruined courts. Her father had been drinking all night, and, just as in the old days, the morning sunlight poking through his fallen ceilings annoyed him, and the sight of his daughter only increased his annoyance. What are you back for? he growled, his swollen eyes glancing at her and away. The fiery hair of his youth was quenched, gray strands tangled on his skull. Did the young Halla not marry you, and you’ve come sneaking home?

    I am Durhal’s wife. I came to get my dowry, father.

    The drunkard growled in disgust; but she laughed at him so gently that he had to look at her again, wincing.

    Is it true, father, that the Fiia stole the necklace Eye of the Sea?

    How do I know? Old tales. The thing was lost before I was born, I think. I wish I never had been. Ask the Fiia if you want to know. Go to them, go back to your husband. Leave me alone here. There’s no room at Kirien for girls and gold and all the rest of the story. The story’s over here; this is the fallen place, this is the empty hall. The sons of Leynen all are dead, their treasures are all lost. Go on your way, girl.

    Gray and swollen as the web-spinner of ruined houses, he turned and went blundering toward the cellars where he hid from daylight.

    Leading the striped windsteed of Hallan, Semley left her old home and walked down the steep hill, past the village of the midmen, who greeted her with sullen respect, on over fields and pastures where the great, wing-clipped, half-wild herilor grazed, to a valley that was green as a painted bowl and full to the brim with sunlight. In the deep of the valley lay the village of the Fiia, and as she descended leading her steed the little, slight people ran up toward her from their huts and gardens, laughing, calling out in faint, thin voices.

    Hail Halla’s bride, Kirienlady, Windborne, Semley the Fair!

    They gave her lovely names and she liked to hear them, minding not at all their laughter, for they laughed at all they said. That was her own way, to speak and laugh. She stood tall in her long blue cloak among their swirling welcome.

    Hail Lightfolk, Sundwellers, Fiia friends of men!

    They took her down into the village and brought her into one of their airy houses, the tiny children chasing along behind. There was no telling the age of a Fian once he was grown; it was hard even to tell one from another and be sure, as they moved about quick as moths around a candle, that she spoke always to the same one. But it seemed that one of them talked with her for a while, as the others fed and petted her steed, and brought water for her to drink, and bowls of fruit from their gardens of little trees. It was never the Fiia that stole the necklace of the Lords of Kirien! cried the little man. What would the Fiia do with gold, Lady? For us there is sunlight in warmyear, and in coldyear the remembrance of sunlight; the yellow fruit, the yellow leaves in end-season, the yellow hair of our lady of Kirien; no other gold.

    Then it was some midman stole the thing?

    Laughter rang long and faint about her. How would a midman dare? O Lady of Kirien, how the great jewel was stolen no mortal knows, not man nor midman nor Fian nor any among the Seven Folk. Only dead minds know how it was lost, long ago when Kireley the Proud whose great-granddaughter is Semley walked alone by the caves of the sea. But it may be found perhaps among the Sunhaters.

    The Clayfolk?

    A louder burst of laughter, nervous.

    Sit with us, Semley, sunhaired, returned to us from the north. She sat with them to eat, and they were as pleased with her graciousness as she with theirs. But when they heard her repeat that she would go to the Clayfolk to find her inheritance, if it was there, they began not to laugh; and little by little there were fewer of them around her. She was alone at last with perhaps the one she had spoken with before the meal. Do not go among the Clayfolk, Semley, he said, and for a moment her heart failed her. The Fian, drawing his hand down slowly over his eyes, had darkened all the air about them. Fruit lay ash-white on the plate; all the bowls of clear water were empty.

    In the mountains of the far land the Fiia and the Gdemiar parted. Long ago we parted, said the slight, still man of the Fiia. Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.

    Mine leads neither down nor up, kind host, but only straight on to my inheritance. I will go to it where it is, and return with it.

    The Fian bowed, laughing a little.

    Outside the village she mounted her striped windsteed, and, calling farewell in answer to their calling, rose up into the wind of afternoon and flew southwestward toward the caves down by the rocky shores of Kiriensea.

    She feared she might have to walk far into those tunnel-caves to find the people she sought, for it was said the Clayfolk never came out of their caves into the light of the sun, and feared even the Greatstar and the moons. It was a long ride; she landed once to let her steed hunt tree-rats while she ate a little bread from her saddle-bag. The bread was hard and dry by now and tasted of leather, yet kept a faint savor of its making, so that for a moment, eating it alone in a glade of the southern forests, she heard the quiet tone of a voice and saw Durhal’s face turned to her in the light of the candles of Hallan. For a while she sat daydreaming of that stern and vivid young face, and of what she would say to him when she came home with a kingdom’s ransom around her neck: I wanted a gift worthy of my husband, Lord… Then she pressed on, but when she reached the coast the sun had set, with the Greatstar sinking behind it. A mean wind had come up from the west, starting and gusting and veering, and her windsteed was weary fighting it. She let him glide down on the sand. At once he folded his wings and curled his thick, light limbs under him with a thrum of purring. Semley stood holding her cloak close at her throat, stroking the steed’s neck so that he flicked his ears and purred again. The warm fur comforted her hand, but all that met her eyes was gray sky full of smears of cloud, gray sea, dark sand. And then running over the sand a low, dark creature—another—a group of them, squatting and running and stopping.

    She called aloud to them. Though they had not seemed to see her, now in a moment they were all around her. They kept a distance from her windsteed; he had stopped purring, and his fur rose a little under Semley’s hand. She took up the reins, glad of his protection but afraid of the nervous ferocity he might display. The strange folk stood silent, staring, their thick bare feet planted in the sand. There was no mistaking them: they were the height of the Fiia and in all else a shadow, a black image of those laughing people. Naked, squat, stiff, with lank black hair and gray-white skins, dampish looking like the skins of grubs; eyes like rocks.

    You are the Clayfolk?

    Gdemiar are we, people of the Lords of the Realms of Night. The voice was unexpectedly loud and deep, and rang out pompous through the salt, blowing dusk; but, as with the Fiia, Semley was not sure which one had spoken.

    I greet you, Nightlords. I am Semley of Kirien, Durhal’s wife of Hallan. I come to you seeking my inheritance, the necklace called Eye of the Sea, lost long ago.

    Why do you seek it here, Angya? Here is only sand and salt and night.

    Because lost things are known of in deep places, said Semley, quite ready for a play of wits, and gold that came from earth has a way of going back to the earth. And sometimes the made, they say, returns to the maker. This last was a guess; it hit the mark.

    It is true the necklace Eye of the Sea is known to us by name. It was made in our caves long ago, and sold by us to the Angyar. And the blue stone came from the Clayfields of our kin to the east. But these are very old tales, Angya.

    May I listen to them in the places where they are told?

    The squat people were silent a while, as if in doubt. The gray wind blew by over the sand, darkening as the Greatstar set; the sound of the sea loudened and lessened. The deep voice spoke again: Yes, lady of the Angyar. You may enter the Deep Halls. Come with us now. There was a changed note in his voice, wheedling. Semley would not hear it. She followed the Claymen over the sand, leading on a short rein her sharp-taloned steed.

    At the cave-mouth, a toothless, yawning mouth from which a stinking warmth sighed out, one of the Claymen said, The air-beast cannot come in.

    Yes, said Semley.

    No, said the squat people.

    Yes, I will not leave him here. He is not mine to leave. He will not harm you, so long as I hold his reins.

    No, deep voices repeated; but others broke in, As you will, and after a moment of hesitation they went on. The cave-mouth seemed to snap shut behind them, so dark was it under the stone. They went in single file, Semley last.

    The darkness of the tunnel lightened, and they came under a ball of weak white fire hanging from the roof. Farther on was another, and another; between them long black worms hung in festoons from the rock. As they went on these fire-globes were set closer, so that all the tunnel was lit with a bright, cold light.

    Semley’s guides stopped at a parting of three tunnels, all blocked by doors that looked to be of iron. We shall wait, Angya, they said, and eight of them stayed with her, while three others unlocked one of the doors and passed through. It fell to behind them with a clash.

    Straight and still stood the daughter of the Angyar in the white, blank light of the lamps; her windsteed crouched beside her, flicking the tip of his striped tail, his great folded wings stirring again and again with the checked impulse to fly. In the tunnel behind Semley the eight Claymen squatted on their hams, muttering to one another in their deep voices, in their own tongue.

    The central door swung clanging open. Let the Angya enter the Realm of Night! cried a new voice, booming and boastful. A Clayman who wore some clothing on his thick gray body stood in the doorway beckoning to her. Enter and behold the wonders of our lands, the marvels made by hands, the works of the Nightlords!

    Silent, with a tug at her steed’s reins, Semley bowed her head and followed him under the low doorway made for dwarfish folk. Another glaring tunnel stretched ahead, dank walls dazzling in the white light, but, instead of a way to walk upon, its floor carried two bars of polished iron stretching off side as far as she could see. On the bars rested some kind of cart with metal wheels. Obeying her new guide’s gestures, with no hesitation and no trace of wonder on her face, Semley stepped into the cart and made the wind-steed crouch beside her. The Clayman got in and sat down in front of her, moving bars and wheels about. A loud grinding noise arose, and a screaming of metal on metal, and then the walls of the tunnel began to jerk by. Faster and faster the walls slid past, till the fire-globes overhead ran into a blur, and the stale warm air became a foul wind blowing the hood back off her hair.

    The cart stopped. Semley followed the guide up basalt steps into a vast anteroom and then a still vaster hall, carved by ancient waters or by the burrowing Clayfolk out of the rock, its darkness that had never known sunlight lit with the uncanny cold brilliance of the globes. In grilles cut in the walls huge blades turned and turned, changing the stale air. The great closed space hummed and boomed with noise, the loud voices of the Clayfolk, the grinding and shrill buzzing and vibration of turning blades and wheels, the echoes and re-echoes of all this from the rock. Here all the stumpy figures of the Claymen were clothed in garments imitating those of the Starlords—divided trousers, soft boots, and hooded tunics—though the few women to be seen, hurrying servile dwarves, were naked. Of the males many were soldiers, bearing at their sides weapons shaped like the terrible light-throwers of the Starlords, though even Semley could see these were merely shaped iron clubs. What she saw, she saw without looking. She followed where she was led, turning her head neither to left nor right. When she came before a group of Claymen who wore iron circlets on their black hair her guide halted, bowed, boomed out, The High Lords of the Gdemiar!

    There were seven of them, and all looked up at her with such arrogance on their lumpy gray faces that she wanted to laugh.

    I come among you seeking the lost treasure of my family, O Lords of the Dark Realm, she said gravely to them. I seek Leynen’s prize, the Eye of the Sea. Her voice was faint in the racket of the huge vault.

    So said our messengers, Lady Semley. This time she could pick out the one who spoke, one even shorter than the others, hardly reaching Semley’s breast, with a white, powerful, fierce face. We do not have this thing you seek.

    Once you had it, it is said.

    Much is said, up there where the sun blinks.

    And words are borne off by the winds, where there are winds to blow. I do not ask how the necklace was lost to us and returned to you, its makers of old. Those are old tales, old grudges. I only seek to find it now. You do not have it now; but it may be you know where it is.

    It is not here.

    Then it is elsewhere.

    It is where you cannot come to it. Never, unless we help you.

    Then help me. I ask this as your guest.

    "It is said, The Angyar take; the Fiia give; the Gdemiar give and take. If we do this for you, what will you give us?"

    My thanks, Nightlord.

    She stood tall and bright among them, smiling. They all stared at her with a heavy, grudging wonder, a sullen yearning.

    Listen, Angya, this is a great favor you ask of us. You do not know how great a favor. You cannot understand. You are of a race that will not understand, that cares for nothing but windriding and crop-raising and sword-fighting and shouting together. But who made your swords of the right steel? We, the Gdemiar! Your lords come to us here and in Clayfields and buy their swords and go away, not looking, not understanding. But you are here now, you will look, you can see a few of our endless marvels, the lights that burn forever, the car that pulls itself, the machines that make our clothes and cook our food and sweeten our air and serve us in all things. Know that all these things are beyond your understanding. And know this: we, the Gdemiar, are the friends of those you call the Starlords! We came with them to Hallan, to Reohan, to Hul-Orren, to all your castles, to help them speak to you. The lords to whom you, the proud Angyar, pay tribute, are our friends. They do us favors as we do them favors! Now, what do your thanks mean to us?

    That is your question to answer, said Semley, not mine. I have asked my question. Answer it, Lord.

    For a while the seven conferred together, by word and silence. They would glance at her and look away, and mutter and be still. A crowd grew around them, drawn slowly and silently, one after another till Semley was encircled by hundreds of the matted black heads, and all the great booming cavern floor was covered with people, except a little space directly around her. Her windsteed was quivering with fear and irritation too long controlled, and his eyes had gone very wide and pale, like the eyes of a steed forced to fly at night. She stroked the warm fur of his head, whispering, Quietly now, brave one, bright one, windlord.…

    Angya, we will take you to the place where the treasure lies. The Clayman with the white face and iron crown had turned to her once more. More than that we cannot do. You must come with us to claim the necklace where it lies, from those who keep it. The air-beast cannot come with you. You must come alone.

    How far a journey, Lord?

    His lips drew back and back. A very far journey, Lady. Yet it will last only one long night.

    "I thank you for your courtesy. Will my steed be well cared for this night? No ill must come to

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