Kelson Reads reviewed The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
Thoughtful tale of culture vs monoculture
5 stars
The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.
Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.
We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few …
The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.
Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.
We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the one she left.
It's largely a story of discovery: Sutty, frustrated and depressed, trying to figure out what the heck "The Telling" actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he's trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there's also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.
Well worth the read!
(Slightly condensed from my website.)
