Planet of Exile
What if Game of Thrones was only 120 pages long?
That's flip, and LeGuin and Martin are two very different authors, but I can't help but feel like this novella was an influence for GRRM's much longer (and unfinished) series. Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with a much larger orbit than Earth - one Year lasts for sixty Earth-years, meaning that winter lasts for 15 years. We're the aliens on this world, though the human settlement as been there for 600 years (or 10 Years) and is more of a city than a settlement now.
As winter begins, several nomadic tribes begin their journey south, raiding as they go. But this year, they're banding together to become a larger threat. The humans and the locals need to figure out how to work together if they're going to survive the sacking and have enough supplies to make it through winter.
It's a much more plausible scenario than the hand-wavey magic in A Song of Ice and Fire, and it's still packed with political machinations, ill-conceived marriages, new friends, betrayals, and change coming more rapidly than anyone is prepared for. A cynical part of me thought that maybe the humans had allied with the wrong tribes if they wanted to come through this and get back to something like the life they left behind on Earth. But this is a LeGuin story, not a Martin one, so there's only so much darkness allowed.
This one wasn't quite as thought-provoking as I've come to expect from LeGuin. Reading one of her books is often more akin to having an argument than to relaxing with a fun story. But I did enjoy this one. The world was neat, and I especially like that one of the point of view characters was incredibly old and beginning to suffer from cognitive decline. It made for an interesting source of conflict among people who are really trying to work together.
That's flip, and LeGuin and Martin are two very different authors, but I can't help but feel like this novella was an influence for GRRM's much longer (and unfinished) series. Planet of Exile takes place on a planet with a much larger orbit than Earth - one Year lasts for sixty Earth-years, meaning that winter lasts for 15 years. We're the aliens on this world, though the human settlement as been there for 600 years (or 10 Years) and is more of a city than a settlement now.
As winter begins, several nomadic tribes begin their journey south, raiding as they go. But this year, they're banding together to become a larger threat. The humans and the locals need to figure out how to work together if they're going to survive the sacking and have enough supplies to make it through winter.
It's a much more plausible scenario than the hand-wavey magic in A Song of Ice and Fire, and it's still packed with political machinations, ill-conceived marriages, new friends, betrayals, and change coming more rapidly than anyone is prepared for. A cynical part of me thought that maybe the humans had allied with the wrong tribes if they wanted to come through this and get back to something like the life they left behind on Earth. But this is a LeGuin story, not a Martin one, so there's only so much darkness allowed.
This one wasn't quite as thought-provoking as I've come to expect from LeGuin. Reading one of her books is often more akin to having an argument than to relaxing with a fun story. But I did enjoy this one. The world was neat, and I especially like that one of the point of view characters was incredibly old and beginning to suffer from cognitive decline. It made for an interesting source of conflict among people who are really trying to work together.
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