Vaster Than Empires And More Slow

Ursula K. Le Guin

Another one for my year of reading about alien plants (along with Overgrowth, Interference and Usurpation)!

It also looks at a different corner of the Hainish universe than usual. Too far for instant communication. Centuries of time dilation instead of decades. Completely cut off from anyone you might have known back home. What kind of person would willingly go so far beyond the known worlds that they could never even talk to anyone back home?

Much as Larry Niven suggests only someone who doesn’t need social interaction can be a solo ramjet pilot, Le Guin suggests only someone who can’t deal with society would be willing to take what’s effectively a one-way trip.

A crew made up of people with varying neuroses and phobias finds a planet full of plant life, but with no sign that animals ever evolved there. The center of it all is one crewmember who’s an empath, able to feel others’ emotions, but who doesn’t get along with anyone.

It’s an interesting psychological exploration of the crew, the relationship between empathy and fear, how they deal with each other and the planet, how they break down individually and as a group, how that changes from the confines of the ship to life on a forest planet, and how the planet reacts to them. And it’s an interesting take on large-scale plant (and planet) sentience, predating works like Bios (or Avatar) by decades and contemporary with the development of the Gaia hypotheis.

Wait, Autism?

But it’s hard to read it today because the empath’s abilities hinge on him having been “cured” of “autism,” and he’s also a complete a–hole when he’s around other people.

On the plus side, it’s probably the oldest thing I’ve read that posits autism can be a form of hyper empathy, with people withdrawing into themselves because they’re overwhelmed. In this case, he’s always been science-fiction-level empathic, but he no longer withdraws into himself as a defense against overstimulation.

On the minus side, his being so hostile aligns with an actual stereotype of autistic people that still causes prejudice against them (and gives some genuinely awful people a disingenuous excuse: “oh, I’m not really racist/sexist/whatever, I just have Asperger’s!”) And the term is consistently used in the old, extremely-withdrawn sense. Language changes, and the meaning has broadened since 1970, which is why we talk about an autism spectrum these days.

Reading in 2025, though, with RFK Jr. putting conspiracy theories about “autism” front and center in government health policy? It’s hard to ignore that this old sense of the word is what he’s pretending is on the rise (even though there isn’t) so he can blame vaccines, or Tylenol, or whatever supports his goals this week. Instead of accepting that there’s just a wider variety of human neurology than we used to be willing to admit, and that we’re getting better at recognizing it.

So it’s kind of like reading the “wicked as a woman’s magic” parts of early Earthsea, only without follow-up works to reconsider it.

Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Buffalo Gals, and The Found and the Lost.