Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2: The Word for World Is Forest / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling / Stories

The Hainish Cycle

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian Attebery (Editor)

This second volume of Le Guin’s complete Hainish novels and stories opens with the Hugo Award–winning The Word for World Is Forest (1972), set on the colony planet of Athshe, where Terrans have arrived to strip its rich natural forests for a depleted Earth. To do so, they enslave the peaceable indigenous population, until the Athsheans rise up in a desperate act of defiance that will leave them and their planet forever changed.

Of the seven stories gathered here, three concern the invention of a new technology for instantaneous interstellar travel—an advance that brings with it unforeseen dangers—and three explore the complex matrimonial arrangements on the planet O, where unions consist of four individuals in both same and opposite sex pairings.

Five Ways to Forgiveness presents for the first time the complete story suite previously published as Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). These five linked stories tell the history of the planet Werel and its slave planet Yeowe as their peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain revolutionary future.

In The Telling (2000), Sutty, an observer of the interplanetary confederation known as the Ekumen, has been sent to Aka to investigate why the planet has almost entirely lost its vital oral traditions and spiritual beliefs in the span of a single generation. Sutty’s quest for traces of Aka’s original religion causes her to reexamine her own childhood growing up amidst a repressive religious regime on Earth.

Also included are Le Guin’s 1977 introduction to The Word for World Is Forest and her provocative 1994 essay “On Not Reading Science Fiction.” The volume’s endpaper features a planetary chart of the known worlds of the Hainish descent.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Short Stories, Novels, Fantasy, Collections

789 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2017

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Reviews

[Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽]

After a break (after finishing Volume 1 of this collection) that was probably too long, I'm deterined to finish Volume 2 this month - all 800 pages of it. This volume contains two novels (The Word for World is Forest, which I've separately read and reviewed, and The Telling, which I haven't read yet), some twelve short stories, and a number of essays and notes.

This two-volume collection of Le Guin Hainish works is a must-read for any fan of Le Guin or classic SF generally. The list price is $80, but for that money you're getting something like six novels, a bunch of short stories, and some really fascinating notes and commentary from Le Guin herself. So you're getting a lot of bang for your buck.

I received a copy of this collection from the publisher for review. Thank you!!

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic collection of the rest of the Hainish story cycles. I reviewed each story and novella separately here on GR, but I recommend this particular packaging because it is a nice compact book with loads of background material at the end and the quality of the stories is exception as always in this series.

Fino's Reviews of Ursula Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven: Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Hainish Cycle
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 1: Rocannon’s World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories: Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2: The Word for World Is Forest / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling / Stories Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Rocannon's World Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Planet of Exile Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...#
City of Illusions Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Left Hand of Darkness Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Word for World Is Forest Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Five Ways to Forgiveness Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...#
The Telling Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Earthsea Cycle
A Wizard of Earthsea Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Tombs of Atuan Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Farthest Shore Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Tehanu Fino Review:
The Other Wind Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Short Stories
Unlocking the Air and Other Stories Fino Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought it was a good collection throughout, with The Word For World Is Forest being the highlight. The Five Ways To Forgiveness story suite with its loosely-connected stories showing the times after, before and during revolutions on two planets against a slave-owning society had a wide variety of perspectives on the events and was at various times both harrowing and hopeful. The Telling was a quieter story but although the society on Aka might not have some of the horrific excesses of Werel it was dystopian in its own way with the world's traditional culture being almost completely erased by the government. Sutty's efforts to slowly puzzle out what has been lost and what fragments of it might still be preserved did become an increasingly compelling story as it progressed. The various short stories in the collection were also good.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the first volume of this excellent set was themed "journeys", then this second volume is themed "revolution". Technological or ideological, the novels and stories in this volume dealt with how cultures and people react to change, either to resist and foster. The settings and peoples are amazing and the stories Le Guin tells are simply beautiful.

[Robert]

The Word for world is Forest

Short and bitter-sweet. Le Guin's tale of abuse of technologically iron-age forest dwellers by space-faring Earthlings captures the horrors and of colonial rule and their causes. The technological disparity is easily understood as necessary and widely recognised but another essential factor is isolation. In Le Guin's case there's a 54 year communications turn-around, making the colony commander an effective despot. As soon as technology reduces this turn-around time to nil, the colonial system colapses because there is effective oversight. Looking instead to actual history, the Viceroy of India could do as he pleased, because the Empress Victoria was months away by the fasted communication method and therefore orders and policy were always behind reality. Add in assumed cultural superiority and the recipe for extreme abuse is complete.

Now, why do I say the book is bitter-sweet? After all the conclusion is that the colony is completely withdrawn and the natives are left to themselves. All is as it was before the arrival of men from Earth, or will be when the trees grow back. But not really - the cultural contact has changed the native people forever - they know what murder and war are now. Cultures can't come into contact without being changed - and in the case of colonial rule, one might be severely damaged or utterly destroyed.

[Matt Finley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning sci-fi. Refined prose, stately pacing, well-constructed worlds and characters, and compelling, timely ethical/social/political/religious questions—everything you want in this genre. READ LE GUIN!

[bunting]

6 stars

[eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

okay disclaimer i didn't actually finish, i'm stopping midway through five ways to forgiveness bc my brain needs a break. so i'll come back to this another time. but for now:
-all the churtening stories were so beautiful and complicated and cool <3<3
-the first story of five ways to forgiveness really struck a chord with me too, especially in how the story blended w the environmental descriptions
-the rest were entertaining enough if not riveting

[Martin Hernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

El segundo tomo de la excelente recopilación publicada por la Librería de América de las novelas del Ciclo de Hain de Ursula K. Le GUIN abarca los trabajos publicados desde 1972 hasta 2000. En general, creo que me gustaron más las obras del Tomo 1, aunque este volumen contiene verdaderas joyas de la Ciencia Ficción:

The Word for World is Forest (5/5) fue escrita en 1968, según la introducción incluida en el apéndice de este tomo, y publicada en 1972 como parte de la segunda antología de las famosas "Visiones Peligrosas" de Harlan ELLISON. Una historia muy interesante, con muchas connotaciones sobre el papel de los sueños en la realidad, la ecología, el colonialismo, etc. Resulta bastante obvio que en buena medida es una crítica a la Guerra de Vietnam. La novela, que ganó el Premio Hugo en 1973, ganó aún más notoriedad cuando se le asoció con la película "Avatar". Al respecto, la misma Le GUIN admite que "existen similitudes con «una película de alto presupuesto y altamente exitosa» pero ésta revierte completamente la premisa moral del libro, presentando el problema central y no resuelto del libro, la violencia de masas, como una solución" y afirma "Me alegro de no tener nada que ver con esto". Ciertamente, hay demasiadas similitudes entre la película y el libro pero, en mi opinión, la película le debe más a la imaginería visual de Roger DEAN que a esta novela.

Después viene una serie de historias, de las cuales tres se refieren a la invención de una nueva tecnología para el viaje interestelar instantáneo, un avance que trae consigo peligros imprevistos, y tres exploran los complejos arreglos matrimoniales en el Planeta O, donde los matrimonios consisten de cuatro individuos, dos parejas de sexo opuesto, donde cada individuo tiene relaciones sexuales con el otro individuo del mismo sexo y con únicamente uno de los dos individuos de sexo opuesto (si, suena complicado!). Estas historias me parecen las menos interesantes desde el punto de vista de la Ciencia Ficción, pues son más bien exploraciones de las diferentes implicaciones sociales y psicológicas que generaría una institución matrimonial de dos parejas:
The Shobies’ Story (3/5)
Dancing to Ganam (4/5)
Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (4/5)
Unchosen Love (3/5)
Mountain Ways (2/5)
The Matter of Seggri (2/5)
Solitude (2/5)

La Suite "Five Ways to Forgiveness" presenta por primera vez el conjunto de historias completo previamente publicado como "Four Ways to Forgiveness" (1995) más una historia posterior y un breve apéndice. Estas cinco narraciones están ambientadas en el Planeta Werel y su planeta esclavo Yeowe:
Betrayals (3/5)
Forgiveness Day (2/5)
A Man of the People (3/5)
A Woman’s Liberation (4/5)
Old Music and the Slave Women (3/5)

The Telling (4/5), publicada originalmente en el año 2000, está inspirada en "El Gran Salto Adelante" y la Revolución Cultural de la China Comunista, hechos que toma como punto de partida para explorar cómo es posible que una sociedad puede perder casi por completo sus tradiciones orales y creencias espirituales vitales en el lapso de una sola generación.

Una vez más, me alegra que The Library of America haya reunído todas las obras del Ciclo de Hain en estos dos tomos. Vale mucho la pena conseguirlos y, obviamente, leerlos!. Espero que entre los planes de los editores de la Librería también se incluya hacer algo similar con el Ciclo de Terramar, de la misma escritora.

[Blake Altman · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOTE: This book is a collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle novels and stories. Having written separate reviews for THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST, FIVE WAYS TO FORGIVENESS, and THE TELLING, this review will focus on the short stories collected here.

With that, I have now read every single story in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle! In all eight novels and 15 short stories, the narrative centered around the idea of shared humanity across vast distances. Even after different evolutionary cycles, humans on multiple worlds still strive for the same things, and that's a beautiful sentiment to build a universe around. I've written about the novels in this collection already, so I'll focus on the short stories in this collection instead. Here they are:

The Shobies' Story: After the events of THE DISPOSSESSED, the Ekumen has begun experimenting with instantaneous space travel. Their very first test of the prototype engine involves putting a full crew aboard, including children and multiple species of humans, in order to determine the engine's effects on different physiologies. When they fire up the engine, SOMETHING happens, and I'll tell you, it's REALLY HARD to describe what happens. Though the engine does work, the crew members find themselves untethered from shared reality, causing them all to experience something different upon arrival. A truly unsettling example of space-based horror, with a very creative solution at the end. I loved this one a lot!

Dancing to Ganam: The prototype instant-travel engine is deployed again by a smaller crew, led by a famed Terran general who has no problem putting himself at risk. They travel to a planet that has only been visited once by a deep-space exploration crew, and find themselves treated as gods by the locals. As with the Shobies, unfortunately, the experience of shared reality is once again undone, and this time it has disastrous consequences for one of the crew members. This one was a little weirder than the previous one, but its implications were frightening. A decent story!

Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: One of three stories set on the planet O (just the letter O, that's its full name). On this planet, humans are farmers and engineers, and live in two separate castes depending on the shifts they work on their farms. These castes form sedoretus, bizarre four-way marriages in which two couples move in with each other, building a massive family while also enjoying both heterosexual AND homosexual relationships with their fellow housemates. It's not actually that complicated, but it's important to understand how the relationships on O work.

Anyway, in this story, an Ekumen scholar shares a story about his own research into instant space travel. He is so devoted to his work that he must leave O to continue it, leaving behind the loves of his life and his family. He becomes determined to perfect instant travel so he can visit his family again, knowing that if he fails, decades will pass on his homeworld while years only pass for him. He even begins carrying out successful trips across space. But one day, he travels back to his homeworld, only to discover that he has also traveled BACK in time as well. This story is sweet and a little sad, and I think it builds up the world of O nicely.

Unchosen Love: Another O story, this one following a young man who is pulled into a sedoretu by his overbearing boyfriend, only to discover that he is unhappy in the relationship. His partner loves him passionately, but he feels like he has no control over his own life. When contemplating his dilemma on the roof of the sedoretu's massive household, he speaks to a woman from another group who helps him see that he can take control of his own life. He later finds out that no such woman lives there, or at least, doesn't live there anymore. A spooky little ghost story that feels like a story that would be told on O, very effective!

Mountain Ways: A comedy of errors set on O, where two women only want to be with each other despite caste differences. They hatch a plan to form a three-woman sedoretu, tricking a man into joining when one of the women pretends to be male. It leads to all sorts of misunderstandings, like a sort of alien Twelfth Night. Great story all around, I love that Le Guin can build up a world enough that she can write literature FOR it, not just SET in it.

The Matter of Seggri: A chronicle of the history of Seggri, a planet in which women are the dominant gender while men live in a sort of militaristic sports league. While women live their lives independently, men are raised and live in massive castle estates that are run like military camps. There, they work to excel at sports and other events. Those that do well are allowed to leave the castles to help women get pregnant, but aren't allowed to remain outside the castles for any other reason. This story primarily follows the ways in which this system gradually undoes itself, and how men live with all sorts of prejudice due to their lack of education and real-world skills. Fascinating, though lengthy. I love seeing these anthropological breakdowns of alien worlds; Le Guin has always excelled at that.

Solitude: A girl who lives on the primitive world of Eleven-Soro recalls how she came to live on this ruined planet. Eleven-Soro used to be a massive civilization of high-tech cities, but a cataclysmic war has left the cities ruined and uninhabitable, and the descendants of those citizens live in remote villages in the wilderness. They do not share anything with outsiders, least of all their history, so an anthropologist gets the idea to raise her young children on this world, allowing the children to learn the stories and history of the tribes. Her daughter (the narrator) then finds herself deeply ingrained in the culture, and unable to relate to her scholarly mother. A wildly sad story brought about by a mother's pride; this story felt so painful after so many stories with happy endings. I guess this one still has one, in a way.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed Le Guin's work here. It got me to check out even more of her books, and some of the things I've read have become all-time favorites. She has more than earned all the praise she gets, and if you haven't read anything from her before, I STRONGLY encourage you to remedy that!

[Rob Marney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le Guin's late period involves a lot of trying too hard and a lot of reusing familiar themes, but these stories are still emotional, inventive, and thought-provoking. Think of this as Season 4 of your favorite TV series: not as good as Season 3, but still well worth watching.

[Mona Mehas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Ursula K Le Guin. Like Vol. 1, read the introductions first as they do open the reader's eyes to the author's insights. The first story, The Word for World Is Forest was hard to read but The Telling, the last story, was beautiful. I believe Le Guin was a genius.

[WadeofEarth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I like the idea of the Hainish cycle even more than I like the individual stories; which between us, is saying something, because these are some great stories!

[Rashid Yasin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le Guin is incomparable. There's so much in these pages. This second volume of "Hanish novels" is just as meandering as the first in that there's no clear throughline to a story, but they are all investigations into social relationships, which, I suppose, almost all of Le Guin's work focuses on in some way or another.

The subject matter varies pretty broadly:

"The Word for World Is Forest" is a semi-pacifist predecessor to "Fern Gully" or "Avatar". She notes in the introduction that a "highly successful film resembeled the novel in so many ways that people have often assumed I had some part in making it. Since the film completely reverses the book's moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution, I'm glad I had nothing at all to do with it." I say "semi-pacifist" because violence is presented and used as a tool in the story by it's protagonists, but it is clear that doing so has consequences for the future and moral character of the people who perform such actions. I'm very grateful for the introductory/concluding remarks that add some interesting flavor to the text - I enjoyed this story, but it's clear that Le Guin was dissatisfied with some of its overly moralistic flavor, cheapening her perception of its literary quality.

There are a few short stories on faster-than-light travel but also about our subjective interpretations of events and how (or indeed whether) a universal truth can be agreed upon. They're fun stories that play with narrative and structure.

It feels cheap to shorten the next set of stories "about gender and race" because their investigations are deeper and more particular and have more specific narrative structures than that. But, as an anthology of multiple works, it's a long book to review, so I don't want to go into too many details. Each does have some key sociological lynchpin, but are also investigations into the naturalness of how particular social relations can feel: the hubris of the slaver, the reduced expectations and desparation of the enslaved, the inability of the masculine revolutionary to see the need for equality of subjugated women, the defitional nature of a 4-way marriage on the planet O with 2 homosexual, 2 heterosexual, and 2 non-sexual relationships. Each of these are played with and investigated from different perspectives.

The throughline of all of these is an insistence that the way things are now does not have to be the way things will be forever. That we are the product of history and contingency and that humans have the power to change those situations if we so choose.

"The Matter of Seggri" stands out for its uniqueness in the investigation into a society with very few men born to a given woman. So, for the continuation of the species, each man is a treasure to be revered but also protected. Men are therefore shut away behind both literal and figurative walls where they compete in sports and play. They never work, aside from in reproductive labor, but neither do they achieve anything. They are shut off from all productive elements of society, and are only used for reproduction. The arts, the sciences, the humanities, all these are feminine activities in Seggri for which men are not needed, expected, or even allowed to take part.

The final story "The Telling" is similarly an allegory, this time about fanaticism and belief, but not in opposition to anything in particular other than conservatism and rigidity. It's about the depth or how ways of knowing the world are structured and the need to keep an open mind and a flexible set of beliefs. But it's also about the trauma of war and loss, the desire to find meaning, and the time it takes to truly understand another people.

Some of these stories are a little more on-the-nose than others, but for the most part nothing feels like it's an overly hamfisted allegory for one particular set of relations on our world. Le Guin sets up interesting thought experiments and then picks them apart piece by piece to see what a different set of social relations might entail. The fact that those starting points when summarized might feel trite (a society where all marriages are both hetero and homosexual involving 4 people, a pair of planets where one is a slave society and the other is a society of now-free slaves, a planet where an authoritarian science-first government has prohibited all historical and cultural knowledge), does not detract from her ability to tell meaningful human stories within these settings. Due to the focus on setting and sociology, most characters are not particularly dynamic, but they are still well-developed and feel real. Le Guin is a great writer and I'm always happy to be reading whatever she's written.

This second volume of Hanish stories does not have standout novels like "The Dispossessed" or "The Left Hand of Darkness", but in the stories' persistent pulling at threads of various narrative and thematic elements, I think it's not a lesser volume than the first, despite having fewer standout peaks.

[Kaiju Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

This second volume is weaker than the first but still well worth the read. Part of this has to do with how Le Guin chose to write her Hainish cycle. Volume one ends with the knockout punches of Left Hand of Darkness and the Dispossessed (and some knockout punch stories), while this one opens with the weakest and most heavy handed of the novels in The Word for World is Forest.

The individual stories here are excellent though, but Le Guin is a slow burn read, and these long stories may pose some difficulties for casual readers (as if casual readers would be tackling volume 2 of the Hainish Novels and Stories). I found them to be very enjoyable, but often taxing on my intellectual stamina. Taking notes helped.

Unchosen Love introduces the 'sedoretu' of Planet O and continues with Mountain Way; my two favorite stories in this volume. If Le Guin were alive today, I'd write her a letter beginning for an O novel. (Not to be confused with Oprah, though an O novel would almost certainly get an O seal of approval.) The sedoretu are complicated, believable, somehow functional, and an absolute joy to read about.

Forgiveness Day is wonderful, and the 5 stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness (yes, one was added) are all very good as well, but very political. I don't necessarily mean political in terms of references to here on Earth (though certainly there's some commentary on our human behaviors), but political within the actual stories themselves. They are, ultimately, stories about a way of life being overthrown, and are handled in a very realistic manner.

The final piece, The Telling, didn't hold up to the earlier novels. While Word for World is Forest had an adventure element to it that made it 'fun', the Telling is a very serious novel with very important and fascinating ideas, but I felt disconnected from the protagonist, and as such, the novel felt more like an exercise in invented sociology.

I still wholeheartedly recommend reading these two volumes, and reading them together.

[Arthur B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aside from the incendiary The Word For World Is Forest and a few of the short stories in here, the bulk of the material in this collection hails from Le Guin's revisiting of the Hainish setting in the 1990s as part of her more general reassessment of her early works (she'd go back to Earthsea at around the same time too).

In consequence it is, perhaps, not as groundbreaking as the material collected in the first volume of this collection, but equally this is a gorgeous presentation of the material, brings together the five parts of the Werel/Yeowe story-cycle at last, and in finds Le Guin continuing to find new things to do in the Hainish setting.

The cycle concludes with Five Ways To Forgiveness, one of the most emotionally visceral works Le Guin has ever devised, and The Telling, one of her most calm and detached, showing the impressive range of tones and atmospheres she could muster at this stage of her career. After this she would be done with the setting, but between this and the first volume, what more could we possibly ask for?

[Nickolas Segura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am utterly emotional and grateful. I told myself that I would finish the Hainish novels volume 2 by time of my first day as a student teacher for my single subject teaching credential in social studies. Now here I am. At my peak in life. After: a long day of patrolling my neighborhood, via my trusty 2015 beat down white Prius named SKON (silent killer of the night), to alarm my community that ICE is active in the area, preparing for my first day of teaching, and a wonderful leg day, I had to privilege to finish “The Telling” on my front porch—under a cotton candy sky with neighbors walking and riding by. Never have I ever cried and held a book tightly to my chest; until now. It was an honor and a privilege to experience and learn from your beautiful writing and stories. I’ll be sure to tell your stories in my classroom. Thank you Ursula Le Guin.

With love and solidarity,
nicky A segura-romero

[Shyam Kalaria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, after about 2.5 years I finished The Tales of Earthsea collection, Hainish Novels & Stories Vol. 1, and now Vol. 2. It took me longer than expected but alongside Dune these books were the first I've read with vigor in years.

Ursula Le Guin's books, made me feel like high school me reading books again. It didn't matter if it was a short 10 paged story or a full novel, I somehow ended up fully invested in the characters, the world, and the story she created. I'm not much of a critic and don't know much about writing to really provide an objective review but I can at least say that Ursula Le Guin's words including the ones in Vol. 2 always left me longing for the next time I would sit down and read.

[Rob Hermanowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This second volume of all the collected "Hainish Cycle" works of Ursula K. Le Guin is, like all of the Library of America volumes, beautifully created. Thankfully, all the shorter stories and novellas are collected here (plus relevant essays and introductions that Le Guin added later) in addition to the major novels. I read this book gradually, attempting to fill in the gaps between novels with the chronologically appropriate shorter works. I've posted in individual reviews of the various novels how wonderful these works are - truly one of the greatest science fiction cycles that I've encountered.

[Erika RS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not as strong as volume 1, this second volume of Le Guin's complete Hainish novels and stories was still a worthwhile read. The works in the second volume were just as strong as in the first on world building and exploring alternate ways of living and being. However, I tend to like a good dose of character development and plot even when I read more speculative fiction, and those aspects were not as strong as in the works of the first volume. That said, both collections have some works that are excellent, others which are merely good, and all of which benefit from being read in the full context of the other Hainish novels and stories.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: My review of the "Stories" section of this book, as I could find no other listing for them here. The rest of the books here will be or are reviewed on their appropriate pages.

Le Guin's "Stories" expand upon her unique four-person marriage concept, exploring the unique impact that this would have on those involved. As always, her poetic voice remains strong and consistent, the stories engaging and memorable, and the prose flawless in execution.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this contains stand-alone novels that I have read, it also has a collection of short stories set in the Hainish universe as well as another short story added to the "Ways to Forgiveness" series.
Ms. Le Guin is excellent as usual in addressing social issues in the guise of Science Fiction.
Her writing is rather dense and does take some thought and concentration, but well worth the effort.

[Florent Alexandre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll just write my thoughts about the whole Hainish Cycle part 1 and 2 here: I can’t quite put into words how these books have changed me but they have. There’s so much humanity in them that I truly feel like I lived a few more lives after finishing those stories. They transported me to different worlds, cultures, ways of being. They taught me the importance of observing and listening, of being open to change and new ideas. I can’t recommend reading those enough. I will read them again.

[Groucho42 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Le Guin, but this collection isn't good. It's five Hainish novellas interlinked in the history of two planets, Werel and Yeowe. While she's always had a strong message, these are passed with a sledge hammer and haven't aged well. They're tales of misogyny, business and slavery that are unrelentingly heavy handed.

[John Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good collection, mostly showing Le Guin's more mature explorations of worldbuilding: a couple interesting takes on gendered relationships, a chilling characterization of human evil, a deep dive into the ongoing struggles of a formerly slave-based society, and a nifty take on narrative and technology.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le Guin has been one of my favorite authors since I was a kid reading the Earthsea trilogy. I especially loved Five Ways to Forgiveness in this collection. Such rich world-building, characters and language.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the Le Guin I've read, the Hainish novels are my favorite. They may be the most compassionate, revolutionary science fiction stories ever created. Every word in this book is top notch.

[Lorraine McCleary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this authors creative look at relationships in different planet settings. This is her collection of short stories.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

this rating is for the stories, several of which were great. The rest were tedious.