Who Goes There?

Ursula K. Le Guin made her genre debut in 1962, and for the next 55 years would stand as one of SFF’s most universally beloved writers. By 1970 she had started the two series that would cement her legacy: the Earthsea series and the Hainish cycle. The latter, when taken collectively, might be Le Guin’s crowning achievement, giving us such memorable novels as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, as well as some of her best short fiction, including “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” Le Guin put the series on hold in the latter half of the ’70s, and generally the ’80s saw her write only sporadically; but then in the ’90s she made a grand return, not just to the Hainish cycle but to Earthsea as well. “A Man of the People” is part of a quartet (or quintet, as I’ll explain in a moment) of stories set in the Hainish universe, and more specifically around two planets.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Has never been anthologized. It was then reprinted in the collection Four Ways to Forgiveness, which also includes the previously reviewed “Forgiveness Day,” although “A Man of the People” is not a direct sequel to that story. The Library of America, apparently with Le Guin’s approval, would expand the collection to make it Five Ways to Forgiveness, as part of the two-volume Hainish cycle box set. The expanded collection includes the novella “Old Music and the Slave Women,” which was published several years after the other stories.

Enhancing Image

The protagonist has a name that’s too long, so from now on let’s call him Havzhiva. Havzhiva grew up on Hain, in a town on a quasi-island called Stse, which is sort of isolated from the rest of the world both geographically and culturally. The local customs are a bit odd. One’s “father” is actually one’s uncle, while the biological father has nothing to do with the child’s upbringing by default, and in Havzhiva’s case his mother is also often absent, “always fasting or dancing or traveling.” Sexuality plays a big part in Stse life and people are put through a sort of rite of passage at a young age, with pairings between teenagers being the norm. Havzhiva’s first love interest is Iyan Iyan, a childhood friend, although their relationship doesn’t last too long. Growing up, it’s pretty clear that Havzhiva is a restless youth, one of those characters who can’t wait to come of age.

Coming-of-age narratives like this tend to have a scene early on where the protagonist’s eyes, through some chance encounter, are suddenly opened to the wonders (and perils) of the larger world. In this case the key that unlocks Havzhiva’s ambition is a female historian who comes to Stse on business, who informs Our Hero™ that there is even such a thing as a historian—indeed that there is such a thing as history. While the customs of Stse may be the be-all-end-all for the people who live there, these customs have no meaning for the larger world. As the historian says, “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.” It’s here that Havzhiva realizes that everywhere you look there’s history, and for Le Guin, history is both past and present; or to quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead.” All this inspired Havzhiva to leave his hometown—to leave behind his mother, his friends, Iyan Iyan, all of it.

Havzhiva flies off to the planet Ve to study, to follow the historian’s footsteps, which ends up being another eye-opening experience. It doesn’t take long for him for take on another partner, this time Tiu, who is kind and in many ways a good partner; they have a mutual understanding. This doesn’t last either. Last time it was because Havzhiva moved out of town, but this time it’s because Tiu wants to go to Earth, or Terra as they call it. Time dilation dictates that by the time Tiu gets to Earth Havzhiva (and indeed everyone she knew then) will have turned to dust. Something I like about this story, which covers a couple decades in someone’s life, is that relationships come and go, sort of fading in and out of focus, like how relationships in real life tend to be. You might be friends, or even lovers with someone, only for you to drift apart, sometimes not talking for years, sometimes never saying another word to each other. More than in most other short works I’ve read of hers, Le Guin focuses on the relationships between people here, making up for the lack of an urgent plot.

Something I’ve noticed about Le Guin in the ’90s is that she’s sort of like how Henry James was in the 1900s. Both writers, having long since proved their mastery of conventional narrative forms, reach a stage where they become less concerned with plot and with being “concise” in favor of exploring vast thematic and psychological landscapes through language; they also both took on a penchant for complicated sentence structures and paragraphs that take up entire pages. Read one of the stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness and then go back to The Left Hand of Darkness or The Word for World Is Forest. A few things have changed, in how Le Guin tackles storytelling, but also with what concerns her. Le Guin, in ’60s and ’70s, wasn’t what you’d call a Feminist™ writer in the sense that her stories were not, with a few exceptions, chiefly concerned with women’s liberation; rather she put forth a utopian anarchist egalitarianism that some deemed inadequate. “A Man of the People,” by contrast, is overtly a feminist narrative.

Having a man as the protagonist for such a narrative is a bit odd, but it does complement the other two novellas that were published in Asimov’s and which make up the collection, given the dual male and female protagonists of “Forgiveness Day” and the apparent female protagonist of “A Woman’s Liberation.” It’s also worth mentioning that while he is undoubtedly the hero, Havzhiva’s life, with only one or two exceptions, is shaped by the women he knows, from his mother to his partners to the historian who inspired him in the first place to, finally, Yeron, a nurse on the planet Yeowe, which itself had recently gone through a slave revolt. Right, some backstory is in order. The stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness focus on the planets Werel and Yeowe, the former having until recently owned the latter as a slave planet. There’s a lot to touch on, but to avoid repeating myself I suggest reading my review of “Forgiveness Day” to get more filled in on the details.

Speaking of which, if you’ve read “Forgiveness Day” then you may notice a recurring character in Old Music, the enigmatic Hainish man who acts as Havzhiva’s contact once the latter becomes an envoy. For a second it looks like we might get a repeat of that story, what with the protagonist also being an envoy (although in “Forgiveness Day” it was on Werel), but Le Guin takes Havzhiva’s story in a different direction. The action of the slave revolt was kept offscreen in that story and is kept equally so here, this time because Havzhiva space-jumps past it. “At the time he left Ve, Werel’s colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.” Now, when he takes a flight to Yeowe, a planet where the war has been fought and won, Havzhiva will surely get a warm welcome as a peaceful employee of the Ekumen from the recently freed natives, right?

Wrong.

There Be Spoilers Here

So how does an envoy meet a nurse? By getting knifed in the gut by some xenophobic cretin and left to bleed out, of course. It tooks all of two minutes upon landin on Yeowe for Havzhiva to be subjected to an assassination attempt, which is the closest this story has to a high-tension; otherwise it’s mostly people talking. It’s how we’re introduced to Yeon, a nurse but formerly a doctor who laments living as a second-class citizen, despite having been freed from slavery. The brutal reality Havzhiva discovers on the planet is that even thought the men are free, the women are still treated as little more than animals. There’s a rather lengthy reason given for this (Le Guin the social anthropologist coming out), involving the history of the culture and how, due to the slave colony being male-exclusive at first, there’s a deep-rooted patriarchy that has to be overcome.

Latter day Le Guin knows how to deliver real walls of text while often making such a style work, and my favorite instance of this in “A Man of the People” comes when Yeon throws a behemoth of a monologue at Our Hero™, basically telling him what work is to be done. It’s thought-provoking, in no small part because of how it ties into what must’ve been an increasing concern for Le Guin, which is the autonomy of women in society and how even rebels can be slaves to misogyny. This isn’t even the whole paragraph, by the way, just the dialogue:

“I am your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When I heard you’d been hurt, forgive me, but I said, ‘Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!’ Because I had not known how to bring my message to you, and now I knew how. […] I ran this hospital for fifteen years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings here. […] I’m a messenger to the Ekumen, […] from the women. Women here. Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance with you… I know, the government already did that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To us? It means nothing. Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren’t generals, they aren’t chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it’s some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we’re what we always were. Property. I don’t think that’s what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr. Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to make. We have to finish the job.”

Back to Le Guin’s beliefs, because having at least a cursory knowledge of them is important to understand her work and how it retains its cohesion across half a century. Le Guin is a lot of things. She’s an anthropologist, a feminist, a humanist, a compulsive storyteller, and a utopian anarcho-pacifist. Her anti-capitalist sentiments are more pronounced at some times than others, but with the Five Ways to Forgiveness stories these sentiments are at the forefront, alongside feminism. But let’s not forget that pacifist aspect. Violence, in a Le Guin story, is always something to be avoided. Arguably the only irredeemable character in a Le Guin story, Don Davidson in The Word for World Is Forest, is a man who subsists on seemingly nothing but violence and conquest. Thus, while the work of a revolution has been done, there’s another—much quieter—revolution that’s to take place. This second revolution will not involve guerilla warfare but the changing of men’s minds, a project that will of course take many years.

And that’s where Havzhiva comes in.

Having accepted the people of Yeowe, even with their faults, Havzhiva becomes a hero by understanding the people he wants to help without condescending to them. Although he may be revolted by the rabid misogyny of those in charge, he doesn’t write them off as lost causes. As we meet a middle-aged Havzhiva and an elderly Yeon at the end of the story, we’re reminded that Yeowe, culturally, remains a work in progress—but there’s hope. For Le Guin there’s almost always hope, but even more so than usual this story presents a ray of hope for the future.

A Step Farther Out

I liked “A Man of the People” as I was reading it, which didn’t take long since it’s a short novella (only about 18,500 words), but reflecting on it for a day has made me like it considerably more. Whereas “Forgiveness Day” struck me as being a bit at odds with itself, a bit undisciplined for a novella, “A Man of the People” reads more like a compressed novel, with only the most important scenes kept in. Structurally I think this is a tighter venture, no doubt partly benefitting from having one protagonist instead of two, and ultimately I found there was more to chew on. Of the three novellas that originally made up Four Ways to Forgiveness, “A Man of the People” got the least amount of awards attention and got reprinted the fewest times—which isn’t saying much, as these are all acclaimed stories. But I dare say this one might be a touch underrated.

See you next time.