Five Ways to Forgiveness

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★☆

A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath. (Originally collected as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and then she wrote a fifth story.)

It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.

It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.

And of course, the depressingly familiar reminders of how often authoritarians work from a common playbook:

But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?

(From context, I gather that “neareals” are “near real” virtual reality experiences.)

The Hainish Perspective

Most of Le Guin’s stories in this setting at least mention the planet Hain, the world that colonized all the various human worlds (including Earth) in the distant past. But it’s usually just background. One story here is set partly on Hain, and two viewpoint characters come from there.

It’s a world with an odd perspective, because their history is so long that everything has been tried at some point by every society on the planet. “Historians” are no longer interested in classifying and cataloging the past, but are more like anthropologists figuring out how current societies work. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining their relatively hands-off approach, especially with Werel and Yeowe.