Rocannon’s World

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★☆☆

Le Guin’s first novel is a serviceable quest story that maps fantasy tropes to a science-fiction setting. It’s engaging enough, but I’d only recommend it to someone who’s already read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. You can see the beginnings of a lot of the themes she explores more thoroughly in later works: Colonial exploitation, proxy wars, breaking racial stereotypes, interactions between cultures.

The prologue, “Semley’s Necklace,” was originally a stand-alone story (one night in the faerie mound becomes one night of space travel at relativistic speeds), and still works well on its own. It’s also collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.

Fun fact: Le Guin invented the word ansible for this book.