The Telling

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★★

If I wanted to boil The Telling down to just one word, I’d choose “thoughtful.”

Reading it was a different experience from reading Le Guin’s other science fiction. Most of what I’d read up to this point was written in the 1960s and 1970s. This was published in 2000 – and the era it comments on is one I lived through.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it’s not the technology that’s the problem. It’s the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs, sequels and formulaic feel-good Hallmark specials…

We see it first in Sutty’s* memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she’s trying to understand, one that’s undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the technology of the one she left, as thoroughly and insistently as China transformed itself during and after the Cultural Revolution.**

She’s frustrated and depressed, and when she starts finding hints of the world banished in the name of modernity, she’s confused trying to piece together all the disparate and contradictory pieces.***

It’s largely a story of discovery: Sutty trying to figure out what the heck “The Telling” actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he’s trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there’s also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

Notes