Book Review
The Telling (2000)
by Ursula Le Guin
The Telling is the last full length novel of the Hainish Cycle. The Cycle also includes two collections of short stories, one published before and the other published after The Telling- both of those compilations are included as volumes in the over-all cycle. The Telling reprises the most familiar narrative structure of the Cycle: An observer, here from Earth just after it joined the Ekumen, travels to a prospect planet and gets involved in the local scene, giving Le Guin to work out some of her anthropological/sociological ideas.
The further the Cycle progressed, the more obvious the comparison to current events. For example, The Word for World is Forest appears to reflect the American experience in Vietnam. The Dispossessed mirrored the struggle between Capitalism and Communism in the 20th century. Here, the reference point is the Cultural Revolution in China, with the protagonist attempting to discover the "real" culture of the visited planet.
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