Planet of Exile

I'm always surprised when a scifi book turns out to be decently written, but I should know better now with Le Guin.

This is another great short novel from the Hainish series, which just means it's set against a background of some kind of universal empire. In Planet of Exile, our hero is part of a colony planted on a remote world, and then abandoned for centuries. The locals are stone-age village tribes, and over dozens of generations the colony has been slowly contracting, assimilating, and otherwise devolving without technological help from the empire. It's another fascinating spin on the 'expansion of the empire' idea.

The immediate plot is actually very similar to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Our hero is drawn into a focused military engagement with the locals, where has to get them to work together to achieve a limited goal over a crisis point. And that goal is complicated by our hero falling in love with one of the locals.

Noted on September 2, 2013