Rocannon’s World

Rocannon’s World is Le Guin’s debut, and you can sense the bones of greatness trying to poke their way out of the body of a conventional romantic adventure.

The novel begins with a prologue centered on Semley, a woman of the aristocratic Bronze Age warrior Angyar, who seeks a lost necklace that once belonged to her ancestors. The necklace rests in a distant museum, in fact one orbiting a planet seven light years away, belonging to the high tech League of All Worlds. Semley retrieves her necklace and comes back to a land she barely recognizes after time lag.

Rest-frame decades later, League ethnographer Rocannon arrives to complete the survey of the planet called Fomalhut II. His mission to the warrior Angyar, technological troglodytes Gdemiar, and fey Fiia, is interrupted when a rebel faction of the League arrives and destroys his ship and the other 14 expedition members in a sneak attack. Now alone, Rocannon must make a dangerous journey to find the enemy base and get a message back to the League.

The science-fiction gloss covers what is basically a fantasy adventure. The most notable elements are that Fomalhut II’s light gravity and high-oxygen atmosphere allow for large flying animals, including mighty windsteeds, which are something like winged great cats. Rocannon’s last bit of high technology is a transparent and nearly indestructible survival suit, which saves him from being roasted alive by fearful midmen, a serf race to the Angyar. Rocannon’s journey takes him to strange places, including a cave where he learns the secret of mindspeech, a key element in later “Hainish” cycle books.

This is Le Guin, so even weak Le Guin is a good book, but she’s finding her feet. Characterization is thin, pacing is uneven, the imaginative elements are more sleight of hand than solid extrapolation, and we learn frustratingly little about the League or mindspeech, given how important both things are later.