he young and beautiful Lady Semley is descended from the first kings of the Angyar, yet she is too poor to bring a dowry to her handsome young husband, Durhal, the Hallanlord's heir. So the Lady
Semley travels to the underworld of the dwarvish Clayfolk and demands the return of the legendary jewel of her ancestors, the Eye of the Sea. The Clayfolk take her on a long night's journey, to the city at the end of the night, and there she reclaims her inheritance. Yet when she returns home in the morning, Semley finds that her husband died years ago.
Unknowing, the Lady Semley traveled at light speed from the backwater, medieval planet Fomalhaut II to the planet New South Georgia, an advanced colony of the League of All Worlds. Here she encountered Rocannon, an ethnologist surprised to discover that the League brought advanced technology to the underground-dwelling Clayfolk instead of Semley's species, the fully human Angyar. Fomalhaut II has three confirmed intelligent species, and possibly more. Inspired by Semley, Rocannon leads the First Ethnological Survey to her world, where he finds Semley long dead, and her full-grown grandson the Lord of Hallan.
Semley's death is not unexpected, but a genuine surprise awaits Rocannon on Fomalhaut II. Rebellion is brewing against the League of All Worlds, and the rebels are hiding unsuspected on this remote, low-tech world. They destroy the Survey starship and kill every Survey member—except Rocannon. He turns for help to the Clayfolk, but they refuse him. Now he has no way to escape Fomalhaut II. But he still has one chance to warn the League about the rebels' secret base. The rebels don't know Rocannon survived, so he may be able to use their interstellar communicator. But to do so he must journey from Hallan to a distant continent by the Angyar's slow, primitive technology, then sneak into the rebels' high-tech encampment and avoid capture long enough to find and use their interstellar communicator. It's an insanely slim chance.
A first novel by a future master
The most important SF author of the second half of the 20th century, Ursula K. Le Guin, maintains her preeminence in the 21st. She has received the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Sturgeon Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement; in 2003, the Science Fiction Writers of
America named her a SFWA Grand Master. She is also the SF/F author best known outside the genre (not always for SF/F). She has been a finalist for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and has received the National Book Award, the Kafka Prize, the Newbery Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Pushcart Prize and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ms. Le Guin's greatest and most important SF work is her Hainish series, set in a galaxy seeded by the planet Hain with a variety of human species, including that of Earth. Appearing across five
decades, the Hainish novels and stories include some of modern SF's best and best-known works: The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," The World for World Is Forest. The first novel of the Hainish
sequence is Le Guin's debut novel, Rocannon's World.
As SF fans would expect, Le Guin's first novel is impressive. It is not, however, flawless. Rocannon's World is too short; it is not sufficiently developed. Though the prose is as measured as it is strong, Rocannon's character remains sketchy, and the events pass too quickly. Readers may find themselves re-reading a critical scene in which Rocannon mystifyingly gains
telepathy. The climax itself is over mighty fast. Still, many readers, wearied by the bloat typical of first SF/F novels at the turn of the millennium, may find the brevity of Rocannon's
World a virtue.
