City of Illusions (Ursula la Guin)

Now THIS is, for my money, the best of the le Guins I’ve read lately. What an awesome premise! A naked alien emerges from the forest. He has no memory of who he is. The local people – a simple-living bunch – take him in and teach him to speak and read. They call him Falk.

It turns out the local people are simple-living for good reason. The planet Earth is ruled by the Shing. The Shing are liars. They are not to be trusted. They let humankind live, but not do anything too technological. If humans start getting uppity, building vehicles and the like, the Shing come by on an airship and raze the place. So humans live in insular, disparate little communities and no one really knows who to trust.

Falk heads off on a quest to find out what is really going on. Now to explain any more would give away the fantastic plot of this book, so I won’t, but it’s great! Really fascinating. Because no one has ever seen a Shing. Maybe there ARE no Shing. But maybe the Shing WANT people to THINK there are no Shing because it makes it EASIER for the Shing…etc.


If this book was a person, it would be a cold-eyed alien who looked exactly like you, but who might not be an alien at all...

In a nutshell: an alien with no memory sets out to find his true identity – but to do so he must enter the City of Illusions.

City of Illusions scores nine chocolates out of a possible ten…or does it? Perhaps they are carob drops, perhaps they really are chocolates, but one thing is certain: they are delicious.

Planet of Exiles (Ursula le Guin)

I was on a le Guin bender for a few weeks there. But like last month’s pub crawl, now that I come to think about the details, I find it’s all a bit hazy. Which establishment’s toilets did I throw up in? The Retreat? The Napier? Which aliens were in this book? The barbarians? The weird dwarves? Weird barbarian dwarves?

Flicking through the book again is a bit like checking the gallery in my mobile phone for the photographic evidence. Ah yes, the barbarians, with their high-falutin’ speech. The settlers from another, more sophisticated, planet. The love between an alien and a local – forbidden, naturally.

So yes, a dwindling colony of aliens stuck on a barbarian world. They came, they saw, they settled, they got the phone cut off. Fifteen year seasons, a sixty year year. A very long winter ahead. Threats from the north (or was it the south?) from even MORE barbarian aliens. Loads and loads of fighting with sticks and swords.

If this book was a person, it would be dressed as Conan the Barbarian holding a ray gun with a big ghostbusters symbol around it.

In a nutshell: a shrinking group of alien colonists are forced to work alongside the local barbarians to defeat an attack from the even more barbarian locals.

Planet of Exiles scores five chocolates out of a possible ten, but I can’t remember which ones.