I’ve been on a huge Ursula Le Guin binge for the last six months or so. Culminating last Sunday when I bought what I thought were the four remaining books in the Ekumen cycle. but let’s start fromt he beginning…

When I read this I was totally unaware it was part of a broader series of books. Nothing on the back says anything like “Volume 3 of the Hainish cycle!” and that’s kind of understandable as Le Guin herself has said they aren’t a cycle or a saga. They do not form a coherent history. I like that, It really irks me when stories get bent out of shape to accommodate earlier inventions out of some misguided idea that a sense of reality in fiction comes from absolute and perfect consistency rather than an understanding of how people work. The Cities in Flight series, as currently collected, has lots of this kind of post rationalising, with Blish going as far as to re-write protions of earlier books and whilst the whole is still great I think it’s weaker for this fiddling.

So anyway, this is the second copy of this book that I owned the first one was a gloriously retro bantam paperback but it fell out of my pocket as I was walking into work on the day of the London tube bombings. I like this cover better though. Not sure about the colour scheme though. Virago have a tendency to kind of feminise their covers as they’ve done here with the colour scheme, not that I have anything against that per-se just that the population of the planet Winter in the book are androgynous and to support the amazing balancing act Le Guin pull off in the text in making the culture believable I think a more neutral cover would have been appropriate.

The first edition cover is absolutely brilliant. It seems to me to captures a lot of the ideas in the books with out being overly literal. Book covers should really avoid being overly literal, they need to avoid populating the readers imagination before the author can get in there.

Just a few months after I finished “Left Hand…” Kate gave me this book. I’d been a bit reticent about buying stuff from the SF Masterworks series without recommendation having been bitten by a string of mediocre Phillip K Dick novels that they released. The book is not in anyway mediocre. It’s right up there with the best of Le Guin’s work. The cover is dreadful though. It kind of corresponds with the story a bit I suppose, but it’s so packed with cliche and has a kind of action adventure feel which totally misrepresents the book, technically it’s bad too. At somepoint in the late 60’s early 70’s someone decided that airbrushing was where it’s at, as with any technique some people can pull it off some people really can’t, but still 90% of sci-fi books have to be furnished with dreadful airbrushed covers, preferably showing a woman in a metal bikini or something.

Luckily Gollancz, by far the largest, most influential sci-fi publishers in the UK are finally doing something about it. Their range of beautifully re-branded SF Masterworks includes, among other things, a really nice simple black edition of The Disposed. Their new range of ‘Futre classics’ have some really great covers.

This book contains the 3 earliest of the novels set in the Ekumen universe (Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions), the writing is notably clunkier than in ‘Left Hand…’ or ‘The Dispossessed’ but the stories are strong, you can see the authors confidence and ability increasing dramatically over the set, and the way the prologue to Rocannon’s World, ostensibly a fantasy romance which turns out to be a story about interstellar travel, provides a mythology against which the rest of the book is set is a really great setup for the series. The time spans and distances involved and the character’s partial understanding of their situations shown in microcosm.

The cover’s not bad but a bit generic. Given that Rocannon’s World orbits Formalhaut, which looks like this they should have maybe been able to come up with something a bit more interesting.

I’ve been trying to get hold of this one for ages, it’s out of print in the UK (and the US I think) and all the copies on amazon marketplace are pretty expensive. In the end I paid £12 for a decent condition second edition paperback, not too bad. Unfortunately I then went and ordered all the subsequent books on this page (they were all nice and cheap, I love Amazon Marketplace). The cover is a good example of early airbrush style, strongly influenced by Chris Foss. They should have cut the spaceship and stuck with the misty forest landscape.

I’ve nearly finished it, so far it’s good but not amazing. As Ms. Le Guin says in the foreword the Novel is a slightly blunt attack on the Vietnam war and this sort of bends the story. Having said that Davidson is a spectacular character, just a complete bastard on every level, that he remains totally believable and almost sympathetic is a brilliant example of why Ursula Le Guin is in a totally different league from most people writing in the genre (Maybe China Mieville manages it too). Ian Watson’s essay about the book suggests that some of it’s themes are worked out better in other stories from the same period. Having said that the politics of the book seem perfectly relevant now, especially in the light of our recent Middle Eastern adventures.

Haven’t read this yet but I really like this series of books, I think they were some anniversary thing or something, reprinting the books 30 years after their original publication date or something. Unlike the aforementioned masterworks series you get some real oddities and some unexpected gems (Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp is a pulp classic), and the typography is directly from the original, which really pleases people like me. OK, the cover design is slightly spazzy (the scan doesn’t even begin to capture the lurid tones of the physical object) but the cover is sturdy and the binding excellent.

Yikes! That’s a really bad cover. Havign said that, given how amazing the final two Eearthsea were I fully expect these relatively recent works to be outstanding.

Just discovered today, one more collection to get.