and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.Ītro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains. In the afternoon, when he cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. It didn't really click with me at first, but I've been thinking of it ever since, and I think it has actually become one of my favorites. My friend had me read this, as it was her favorite book. One place felt very dated to me: the overt sexism of Urras seemed drawn straight from1950 pulp fiction and advertising and lacked the subtlety of the arguments about economics and social structure that occupy the rest of the novel. While there are long passages debating the issues, as befits a book in the Utopian mode, this is also a book with a strong emotional core and character development. The main character is a brilliant physicist Shevet, so wrapped up in theory, that most of the novel is his slow learning of how Annares has drifted from Odo's teachings, but also how Urras for all its comforts was worse and why it would breed revolutionaries. Annares is the ambiguous Utopia of the subtitle. Annares is a large desert moon of Urras, settled by a self-titled anarchist group called the Odonians, after the revolutionary Odo, seen in the short story The Day before the Revolution.
Though set in the future, the people of Urras and Annares are not future Earthlings, but, like us, descendant of the Hainish. This is a transition novel, where Le Guin is beginning to move from straight SF and fantasy, to a mix of literary, philosophical, and sociological concerns.
0 kommentar(er)
