Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well finish reading the sci-fi classics of le Guin now that I’ve started.
This one dates from the mid-sixties. Rocannon is another exiled alien, stuck this time on a low-gravity planet populated by a group of divergent humanoid species that end up kind of suspiciously like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. There are the dwarf-like Claymen, the elf-like Gdemiar and a bunch of others who are a bit like leprechauns and goblins. This allows le Guin to tell what is essentially a tale of heroic odessey set in a fantasy world, but have a scientific basis for everything. Nice.
Rocannon himself is an anthropologist who has arrived to study the various intelligent life forms. The ship that holds his team is unexpectedly blown up and he realises the planet is the base for a hostile war with the League of worlds for which Rocannon works. He loses all his weapons and his communication devices. That leaves him, without any of his usual techologies or tools, to undertake a dangerous mission to find the aliens and steal their intergalactic fax machine in order to warn the League of what is going on before the danger spreads.
This book has quite a charming feel for colonisation from the aboriginal peoples’ point of view. The dismay and incomprehension of the feudal, elf-like Gdemiar as their castles and keeps are blown up must be something like the feelings of nineteenth century Afghan tribesmen as the colonial powers played their Great Game across the Panshijr valley.
The book is exciting and fairly short, although in places it strayed a bit too much into the ‘fantasy’ genre for my taste. It was a reasonably fast paced read though, and well worth the four or five hours I put into it.
If this book was a person, it would be Charles Darwin dressed in a wizard costume.
In a nutshell: An alien is trapped on a fantastic world of dwarf- and elf-like species – but a sinister presence from beyond the galaxy is invading.
Rocannon’s World scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, mostly M & Ms which I gulped down all at once.
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