- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (22 May 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575601752
- ISBN-13: 978-0575601758
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11.2 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 721,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Four Ways to Forgiveness
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Product Description
Product Description
A collection of four linked novellas. Two planets - Werel, a slave-owning oligarchy and Yeowe, its colony - are destined for revolution after contact with the sophisticated Ekumen civilization. But one form of oppression can too easily give way to another, and so a new fight for equality begins.
About the Author
Ursula Le Guin is one of the finest writers of our time. Her books have attracted millions of devoted readers and won many awards, including the National Book Award, the Hugo and Nebula Awards and a Newbury Honor. Among her novels The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the six books of Earthsea have already attained undisputed classic status; and her latest series, the Annals of the Western Shore is joining them. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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First Sentence
"On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years," she read, "and on Gethen there has never been a war." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
"On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years," she read, "and on Gethen there has never been a war." Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Over the past threethousand years the dark people of the planet Werel have surpressed and enslaved the lighter peoples. Even the colonisation and exploitation of the neighbour planet Yeowe was carried out with reckless usage of assets (the ligth skinned people). But things have come to a change lately. The assets on Yeowe started an uprising and finally won a long and bloody war and their freedom. And while things are changing slowly on Werel under the influence of Yeowe, the society on Yeowe itself is being rearranged dramatically. Still there's a similarity between the two social systems: the surpression of women.
The story is the story of six different humans: four of them are members of the Werel/Yeowe society and two are aliens from the Ekumen of the Hainish universe. Everyone of them tries hard to find his/her place in this world of change. And this is how they do it.
This is how to do. Mrs. Le Guin gives us a very realistic picture of human feelings and human behaviour. The paralleles between the society in the book and the society of real planet earth are fascinating. Mrs Le Guin proves once again, that she's a real artist, a painter of feelings and realities. At the end of the book there's a chapter with notes on the plot. For a better understanding I recommend to read this one first. The entire book is like a lecture on how to be human. And still it is very thrilling, a real pageturner. I loved it and so will you.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Le Guin, with her masterful use of seemingly simple and fluent prose, tells us the stories of how four very different people find hope after terrible ordeals. The background to the stories --and also the main source of hope-- is the need to fight: against slavery, against enormous social inequalities and brutal sexual segregation... in short, against most of the worst injustices that we can find in our world, but that Le Guin transports to the imaginary planets of Yeowe and Werel. We see in these two planets, thanks to the author's mastery, an example of nightmarish distopias whose consequences are analysed in the four main characters. However, Le Guin is always more convincing when describing a society with defects (any kind of defect), and the reactions these defects provoke in the individual, than when describing highly evolved, almost perfect societies. These latter may be better to live in, but they sure are more boring to read about, since the author has to keep within the limits of the politically corect, and that shows.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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18 reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
In black and white
16 April 2005
Format:Paperback
Four Ways to Forgiveness is what sf writer LeGuin calls a "story suite"--four interconnected short stories, one of which takes up nearly half the book. All four stories are set on the planet Werel and its colony of Yeowe, where a dominant black-skinned race holds a primarily white-skinned population in slavery. Werel and Yeowe have both been contacted by the Ekumen, the interplanetary federation of LeGuin's future history, but neither can join until the problems of slavery and gender imbalance have been solved. In "Betrayals", two old people find tenderness together after long and difficult lives; in "Forgiveness Day", the brash young Envoy of the Ekumen is kidnapped, together with the stiff-necked bodyguard she despises, and falls in love with him. "A Man of the People" is the story of Havzhiva, born to the pueblo culture of Hain, the parent world of all human races and cultures. Feeling out of place, he goes off to become a historian and winds up as the Envoy to Yeowe, the colony world where the slaves have successfully revolted and become free. It is mirrored by "A Woman's Liberation," the memoir of Rakam, born a slave, used sexually by her mistress as a child, used by men at another plantation in her adolescence, who escapes to Yeowe with the help of another Hainish envoy, the mysterious Esdardon Aya (whose name means Old Music) and becomes a teacher and, eventually, the lover of Havzhiva.
I love this book and have read it repeatedly. While I don't like all of LeGuin's work equally well, some of her books I have re-read many times and been deeply influenced by--the Earthsea books, The Dispossessed, this one, and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, which I am now reading yet again. LeGuin writes science fiction based on sociology, anthropology, biology; she's not interested in shiny spaceships or the technology that runs them, and if she writes about conquering colonists, it's usually from the viewpoint of the conquered. Plus, she can do so much with her rich, spare language. If you like unconventional sf, try LeGuin.
I love this book and have read it repeatedly. While I don't like all of LeGuin's work equally well, some of her books I have re-read many times and been deeply influenced by--the Earthsea books, The Dispossessed, this one, and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, which I am now reading yet again. LeGuin writes science fiction based on sociology, anthropology, biology; she's not interested in shiny spaceships or the technology that runs them, and if she writes about conquering colonists, it's usually from the viewpoint of the conquered. Plus, she can do so much with her rich, spare language. If you like unconventional sf, try LeGuin.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Science Fiction literature
17 Dec 2004
Format:Hardcover
Fine SF explores the nature of the human condition under special circumstances--with observations of lasting import. LeGuin does that in her works. While this one, a collection of 4 interrelated novellas, is not her best work (see The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed), it is very fine work nonetheless. I like it much better than her short story collections (e.g. Orsinian Tales). This book is about the relationships between politics and people. It also speaks of the differences and similarities between the internal and the external such that changing external circumstances may not have much lasting effect if the internal circumstances (within the people) don't change. There is an interrelationship here too. There are several pithy quotes for my collection in it as well:
Love of God and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. p.57
To live simply is most complicated. p. 90
The right use of knowledge is fulfillment. p.117
Loquacity is half of diplomacy ... The other half is silence. p.127
Ignorance defends itself savagely. p.197
Love of God and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. p.57
To live simply is most complicated. p. 90
The right use of knowledge is fulfillment. p.117
Loquacity is half of diplomacy ... The other half is silence. p.127
Ignorance defends itself savagely. p.197
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Just Okay
12 Aug 2001
Format:Hardcover
Readable, but that's about it -- this book lacks the energy and complexity of previous brilliant LeGuin works. It is mostly a much less rigorous reworking of the extraordinary novel "The Dispossessed", with an inadequte attempt to address the issue of Ekumen superiority vs."native" wisdom -- the question which formed the center of the astonishingly brilliant "Left Hand of Darkness." All the conflicts here drift away, not only unresolved but unfaced in the rigorous way I expect from LeGuin. Never gets to the main issues, either those between the twin planets or regarding their relations with the Ekumen. Derivative and disappointing -- read "Left Hand," or LeGuin's neglected masterpiece "Malafrena" for sustained thought, not vagaries.
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