THE TELLING: BOOK REVIEW
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle effectively concluded with The Telling (2000), following over three decades of sci-fi stories and critical acclaim. By the time of its release, the Cycle’s seven preceding novels and collection of short stories had already left an indelible impact on the literary world and sci-fi genre as a whole.
A contemporary of Frank Herbert’s Dune that predated the rise of Star Trek and Star Wars, the Hainish Cycle arrived at the cusp of a modern, allegory-driven sci-fi movement. It formed the genre, creating popular tropes like the ansible. It won its first Nebula Award with The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and a Hugo the following year, going on to earn more awards for every novel. The Hainish Cycle’s cultural heavy-hitters, Left Hand and The Dispossessed (1974), still appear for analysis in academic settings.
So, why examine Le Guin’s The Telling, and why now? It may not stand out as a darling of the Hainish Cycle, but it tells a quiet and ever-relevant story. It concerns itself less with exploring a wondrous world and more on philosophizing about historiography, otherness, and grief. The Telling is also my favorite novel of the Hainish Cycle; it cemented the impact that Le Guin’s series left on me during my first reading last summer. It helped to spark my passion for the sci-fi genre as a whole, especially the parts of the genre with queer or feminist aspects, and it touched a deeper part of me than any other Hainish book. I find The Telling’s perspective immensely refreshing, even 21 years after its initial release, and I believe it deserves a broader reading — both as a brilliant deconstruction of sci-fi’s popular political allegories and as a heartbreakingly resonant exploration of queerness.
The Telling follows Sutty Dass, an Ekumen agent from Earth, as she struggles to record the history of the planet Aka after a bureaucratic, capitalistic takeover has intentionally erased all of its cultural vestiges. Frustrated by her dead-end mission and grieving the loss of her wife and family on Earth, Sutty feels trapped — until a fellow agent earns her permission to visit Okzat-Ozkat, a city on the far fringes of Akan society. With the help of its local people, Sutty begins to uncover the titular “telling,” a cultural tradition built on words and stories. She travels with her new guides to the Lap of Silong, a final stronghold of Akan history, and grapples with the impossible task of saving it for posterity. In the process, Sutty is forced to confront the vast failings of her own cultures and reevaluate her viewpoint on tradition and belief.
A primary purpose of the text is to examine and deconstruct three general, ideological frameworks: conservatism, progressivism, and spiritual faith. Le Guin concerns herself greatly with the human ramifications of “conservation” and “progress,” finding flaws in the absolute adoption of one ideal or the other. Spiritual faith, in The Telling, becomes a powerful tool that can demonstrably cement either a conservative or progressive ideology within a given group of people.
Le Guin establishes Earth and Aka as perfect foils, hinging on revolutions that defined their cultural landscapes in opposite ways. Earth, in the story’s lore, switched from a progressive society focused on technology and social freedoms to a conservative one under an absolutist religious group, the Unists. Aka, on the other hand, evolves from a conservative culture grounded in the spirituality of the telling to a mechanized, capitalistic society insistent on erasing the planet’s “backwards” history.
In all four cultural constructions, Sutty comes to recognize belief — whether in God, in technological progress, or in the telling — as the glue holding the people together. As a historian and academic, Sutty longs to understand the telling; as a Hindu and queer woman who suffered greatly under a conservative, neo-Christian regime, she simultaneously struggles with the idea of fighting for a purely conservative system. Le Guin never invalidates the human emotions that create bias, but she demonstrates that conservative or progressive ideologies without context are purely neutral. What she does advocate for is human connection beyond these impersonal systems, as Sutty is challenged to empathize both with the telling’s advocates and with the Monitor, a zealot of the Akan Corporation.
In this way, Le Guin manages to treat cultural systems at the same time with a thousand-mile philosophical lens and an individualistic human one. She also acknowledges how discussions of cultural relativity can make a deeper, more painful impact on marginalized groups, a fact which a more nihilistic sci-fi allegory would ignore. Le Guin intentionally makes the discussion of cultural relativity accessible to the “other” — women, people of color, queer and working-class people — in a way that I’ve never encountered before.
On top of its complex politico-human analysis, The Telling offers a compelling perspective on linguistic relativity. The narrative is obsessed with words: written words, spoken words, and non-words, in a highly Orwellian sense. In the earliest phases of the book, Le Guin eases readers into culturally specific (and dependent) words such as “welcome-my-roof-under” and “producer-consumer.” She allows Sutty to invent new words, and therefore produce new meanings, through the older language of Aka that the telling uses. The newer language, Dovzan, invents only non-words — “ZIL,” “individual/EX/HH 440 T 386733940,” and other meaningless acronyms or numeric sequences — in contrast.
However, Le Guin prevents a reading of language as inherently creative; in discussions of God and other religious subject matter, Sutty struggles immensely to bridge a linguistic and cultural gap with her guides. She is unable to articulate the concept of a demon or prayer through the Akan language, therefore stunting her communicative abilities.
Le Guin’s systemic and linguistic analyses, along with her other areas of exploration, serve the primary theme that runs through the Hainish Cycle: queerness. I mean that in the most literal sense. Le Guin’s compassion for and understanding of the “other” irrevocably shapes every Hainish novel, and The Telling is surely no exception. Her heroes and heroines are outsiders, cast adrift on lonely and alien planets. They are often assigned to observe foreign cultures for the Ekumen, an interstellar bureaucracy which discourages or forbids their assimilation. Many of her principal characters are queer in their gender or sexual expression, as well. Same-gender relationships make thematically relevant appearances, and several novels explore the relativity of gender as a cultural construct (notably The Left Hand of Darkness).
In The Telling, Sutty can only define conservative and progressive ideologies by her experiences as an outsider to both in different contexts. She can only understand linguistic limitations by speaking in Akan, which is not her native language. Sutty is Le Guin’s vehicle for exploring Aka expressly because she does not fit into it, but she finds comfort in her unique ability to connect different cultures and constructs intellectually as an observer. Sutty, like many of Le Guin’s protagonists, emblemizes the power of queerness through counterpoint.
Sutty uncovering the rich queer history of the telling, which the Akan Corporation has erased, mirrors the work of real-life queer historians who uncover such hidden history on Earth. It provides Sutty with some sense of comfort as she works through her grieving process within a universe that rejects her queerness on its surface. The fact that the conservative telling actively reveres queer people through its stories and its hierarchical structure (which employs a dual pronoun for bonded couples) is a clear subversion on Le Guin’s part, and it creates a culture that feels both alien and deeply realistic.
Fair warning: The Telling came out in 2000, and it does utilize several representational tropes that have been historically harmful to the queer community. Most notably, Sutty’s partner dies tragically — but it happens before the novel begins, it has no relation to her sexuality, and a variety of other openly queer women occupy the book’s pages without incident.
Despite its minimal length, The Telling is a dense and rewarding text with a developed anthropological perspective and a keen attention to the human condition. The Hainish Cycle follows no chronological order, so the novel’s position at the end of the series poses no impediment to new readers. For fans of sci-fi, particularly allegorical or feminist sci-fi, it’s a thought-provoking read that only returns more with each visit.