Very good collection where all four stories are loosely but tastefully interconnected. One of Ursula's most powerful themes remains the fight against slavery and patriarchy.
Or to be more precise, how the abolishment of slavery often causes women to be forced into the work that might have previously been done by enslaved people. Or how a formal ban on slavery doesn't end the suffering. Ursula explores the myriad of ways that the injustices can continue. And by exposing them so plainly, though on fictional worlds, criticizes our supposedely equal society.
These are themes throughout Ursula's work, but in the four stories on Werel and Yeowe they are particularly immediate and pungent. The first page of my edition has a few endorsements, with this one from Newsweek arguably capturing Ursula well:
Ursula K. Le Guin... wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication rarely seen in science fiction circles, and while science fiction techniques often buttress her stories they rarely take them over. What she really does is write fables; splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales about such mundane concerns as life, death, love, and sex.
What Ursula also does really well are stories that span a character's full life. Her interest doesn't only start when a character is mature enough for whatever heroic feats are really what a writer wanted to write about. No, Ursula's fascination might be on the exact opposite side, where humans have grown frail of body, but wisely mild of mind.
Betrayals
Ursula remains sublime in telling stories about older people. (Literally left behind on another world.) The immediate story is a simple one, but only possible by backdropping it with stories of their past lives, stories, and sins. The story of forgiveness isn't possible without having made mistakes in the past. The cold, the simple house, and life; all are told so beautifully!
Forgiveness day
Solly, the privileged, space-faring Ekumen emissiary, is posted with a society that is on its best behavior while trialing admittance to the intergalactic organization. But this society remains strangely separated between men and women, and owners and assets.
So the officials and courtiers and businessmen she talked to on the business of the Ekumen did the best they could: they treated her as if she were a man.
Solly moves as if immune or above this social regime, until she gets abducted and humbled, together with her security guard, who is a veteran from a completely different planet (Yeowe). The politics and the diplomacy and the bureaucracy all feel so real, much more so than regular bombastic space operas that might take an order of magnitude more pages only to never achieve a similar level of immersion.
A man of the people
So many different ways of inequality and how women remain slaves in society even after slavery itself is outlawed. It also remains fascinating how there are never "heroes", only flawed people, in Ursula's works. And they also meaningfully learn and change. And actually seem to live actual lives, even when they are privileged Ekumenical sub-envoys.
But I don't think we can win freedom for ourselves alone by ourselves alone. There has to be a change. The men think they have to be bosses. They have to stop thinking that.
A woman's liberation
The story that touched me the most. Incredibly well written, maybe more a novella than a short story. It's the story of Rakam.
I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes
I keep returning to this conclusion, but Ursula remains the best at telling the life story of a human, even though this one only goes until Rakam is thirty years old, and then tells the rest in a single page. The story is one very similar to the history of slavery in our world. From the abolition of slavery to further repression by plantation owners as sharecroppers. And then to women-led revolutions; understudied and underappreciated.
Everybody in the compound obeyed the council of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse's tongue would wither in her mouth. She said, "No. It won't get any shorter, because I don't let it get too long."
What I loved to learn was history. I had grown up without any history. There was nothing at Shomeke or Zeskra but the way things were. Nobody knew anything about any time when things had been different. Nobody knew there was any place where things might be different. We were enslaved by the present time.
"Teaching!" Dr. Yeron said. "A teacher! Oh, woman, you are rain to the dry land!" Indeed the first school I talked to wanted to hire me at once, to teach anything I wanted. Because I come of a capitalist people, I went to other schools to see if I could make more money at them. But I came back to the first one. I liked the people there.
Ignorance defends itself savegely, and illiteracy, as I well know, can be shrewd.
"Literacy is irrelevant," one of our group said sorrowfully. "The chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology." I brooded over that, hating her fancy words, irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was right.
I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it. That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let it under the covers. There it slept perfectly still all night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on me, chasing dust motes in a sunbeam. It made me laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that I had never laughed very much, and wanted to.
When he left I had to think about what he had asked me to do. That was to go to the University as a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for the editorship of the press. That all seemed so preposterous, for a woman of my background and my little learning, that I thought I must be misunderstanding him. When he convinced me that I had understood him, I thought he must have very badly misunderstood who I was and what I was capable of. After we had talked about that for a little while, he left, evidently feeling that he was making me uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and I did not feel uncomfortable, only a little as if I were crazy.
And finally, a phrase that's written in a science fiction story but is most definitely Ursula's criticism of late-stage capitalism:
cities of Corporation-owned assets who rented their own freedom