Thursday, June 20, 2013

2013 read #80: Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin
147 pages
Published 1966
Read from June 19 to June 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

It was both interesting and a little disconcerting to read a pre-feminist Le Guin novel, full of 1960s men of action and submissive, servile women, but Le Guin herself, in the rambling introduction to the 1978 edition, describes Planet of Exile with a hint of dismissiveness as an "easy-going adventure story," and I think I agree with her. A product of its period, this was a bit of sci-fi fluff without the underlying structure of Big Ideas that would support Le Guin's subsequent Hainish novels, and ultimately nonessential.

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