Winter is Coming for the Colonists

Planet of Exile (1966) by Ursula K. LeGuin

“Most people doubted that there was still a League of All Worlds, and a few paradoxicalists liked to question whether there had ever in fact been a home. But the clocks, here in the Great Assembly and down in the Records Room underground, which had been kept running for six hundred League Years, seemed to indicate by their origin and their steadfastness that there had been a League and that there still was a home, a birthplace of the race of man. Patiently they kept the hours of a planet lost in the abyss of darkness and years. Patience, patience…” (p. 29)

When I was studying Classics as an undergrad, I spent most of my time on the literature and history of classical Athens. Most of the great works that survive are written in Attic Greek, and Western civilization has (rightfully) obsessed over the few hundred years between Homer and Alexander, and particularly between the Persian War and the death of Socrates. This is that brief moment when democracy flared in the agora, when art and poetry and philosophy shined at the center of civic life, an island of beauty in a vast ocean of violence and barbarism. The major city-states sent out colonists to Sicily and Asia Minor (Turkey) to further spread their visions of civilization to the fringes of the Greek-speaking world.

It’s easy to complicate this mythic picture of classical Athens, but let’s take this idea as basically true. I bought into it. I love Plato and Herodotus and Thucydides and Aeschylus. I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on an ill-fated, treacherous Athenian general as a character and historical figure in Plato’s Symposium and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. (Any other Alcibiades fans in the audience?) 

But, late in my degree, I took a class on Late Antiquity, roughly defined as the time between the “fall” of Rome in 476CE and the Muslim Conquests of the 7th-8th centuries CE. It was dizzying to reorient myself in a time period so far from what I saw as the stately progression of history amongst the Greek city-states between 600-300BCE. All the names were unfamiliar and hard to remember (I never learned Latin). It struck me as a wild, lawless period.

Beyond any of the particulars of late antique history and culture, what stuck with me was the impression of peoples living in a degraded state—of whole generations propagating in the ruins of a fallen civilization’s glorious past. What must it have been like to make use of Roman roads and aqueducts that your current engineering science is unable to replicate? To build your shabby home using stones pried from the carcasses of great crumbling halls and temples of gods you don’t recognize? It’s the kind of thing that I like to daydream about, really trying to grok how a peasant or minor noble in the post-classical world would interact with the tangible evidence of a now-lost superior civilization. 

Sometimes I think about all the grand, crumbling infrastructure America built in the throes of its post-War productivity and feel that we are living in those same conditions as the European peasants after the Fall. The soaring overpasses, the pure will required to push through a project as grand as constructing the interstate highway system; does anyone have the stomach for anything but marginal repairs anymore? Where are our great works now? But that’s another story, another book.

Because of this little obsession of mine, I was primed to adore Planet of Exile. A planet with unusually long season cycles is inhabited by two groups of people: the native humanoid population who live a simple, hunter-gatherer level existence in primitive villages, and the technologically advanced “farborn”—descendants of colonists from Earth. The farborn call the natives ‘hilfs,’ for ‘high-intelligence life forms,’ a technical (but somewhat pejorative) term from the star-faring civilization’s anthropological study of alien worlds. Both are human or humanoid, but are distinct enough as species that they can’t interbreed. The farborns lost touch with their parent civilization 600 years prior and live in an uneasy state of mutual contempt with the surrounding hilf villagers. Now, both groups are facing a common threat of a 15-year-long winter and impending siege from a band of murderous nomads. 

(Coincidentally, this idea of a group of colonists flailing after becoming isolated from their parent civilization was also explored by the subject of last week’s review, The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany.)

The farborns cling to a sense of superiority, and in some respects this is earned. They have a strong education system and put their faith in science, rather than myth and superstition. Their dwellings are solid houses built of stone, with tall stone walls, compared to the hilfs’ village of wood and thatched roofs. But over the centuries, they forgot much of the wisdom that allowed their ancestors to traverse the stars and settle on this planet. They have no spacefaring capabilities. They are unable to complete simple repairs in their once-great halls. Their prejudice against their neighbors reeks of simple tribalism. 

What follows is an exciting and straightforward tale of survival against the elements and the barbarians at the gate—plus a little forbidden love. But the element of a marooned colony adapting culturally to its surroundings over the course of centuries brings a special spark to the story. LeGuin’s prose is beautiful here, as one would expect if you’ve read any of her other work.

This year, I read LeGuin’s first two novels: Rocannon’s World (1966) and Planet of Exile (1966). Both are entries in a loose series of books and stories that occupy the same universe, known as the Hainish Cycle. The most famous works in that universe are the very excellent books The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974). I highly recommend both, and particularly the latter for anyone interested in revolutionary politics or political philosophy. The Dispossessed is a subtle and thoughtful exploration of anarchism in a practical sense, as well as a condemnation of Cold War politics, capitalism, totalitarian communism, and the revolutions that seek to topple each of these systems of governance and oppression. In addition to being these things, it is also a tender and searching Bildungsroman of a single man caught between two worlds. 

Rocannon’s World was a little rough; a thin sci-fi premise (human spacefaring coalition sends anthropologists into the field to document new alien civilizations) creates an excuse to build a feudal-heroic society complete with swords and giant flying cats. It’s an enjoyable bit of juvenilia and appropriately short. Planet of Exile, on the other hand, is similarly short but contains a depth that I would have happily spent many hundreds more pages exploring. Luckily, I still have a handful of books and stories in the Hainish Cycle that I have yet to read. It’s a fertile future history that leaves room for a diverse set of stories and settings. There’s room enough for my non-canonical daydreams, too.