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History of the Hainish worlds
Several of Le Guin's book take place in the Hainish
series. This is some background information that might make it easier
to follow what's going on in them.
Trying to weave a coherent history of the Hainish worlds is inherently
difficult. We have but a few fragments - some loose threads - which we
will attempt to tie together. Perahps we can even make some sort of sense
of the patterns they make.
The Hainish Expansion 
The known history dates back to the first Hainish Expansion. Little
is known about this, but it is believed that all highly intelligent life
forms, including all sorts of human populations on all planets, are descendants
of the Hainish. Listen to this conversation, between lord Mobile Axt from
the Ekumen and king Argaven XVII in Erhenrang, Karhide, on the planet
known as Gethen, or Winter:
"Once you said, lord Axt, that different as I am from
you, and different as my people are from yours, yet we are blood kind.
Was that a moral fact, or a material one?"
Axt smiled at the very Karhidish distinction.
"Both, my lord. As far as we know, which is a tiny corner of dusty
space under the rafters of the Universe, all the people we've run into
are in fact human. But the kinship goes back a million years and more,
to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient Hainish settled a hundred worlds."
"We call the time before my dynasty ruled
Karhide 'ancient.' Seven hundred years ago!"
"So we call the age of the Enemy 'ancient,'
and that was less than six hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks;
changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse
itself - or repeat."
"The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore
that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all the peoples of all the
worlds at one hearth?"
Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. "To weave
some harmony between them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to
its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference
is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the
minds and lives and bodies on them - together they would make a splendid
harmony."
"No harmony endures," said the young
king.
"None has ever been achieved," said the
Plenipotentiary. "The pleasure is in trying."
(Excerpt from Winter's King, a short story which appears
in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.)
Now, Winter's King is not dated, but according to The
Left Hand of Darkness, the first Mobile of the Ekument, Genly
Ai, arrived at Gethen in Ekumenical Year 1490. Counting back less than
six hundred years places the age of the Enemy at approx EY 900.
But wait - I'm rushing ahead. We were still discussing the Colonization.
Let us accept then, that all the hilfs on all worlds have a common origin.
Then what happened? Well, remember, the ansible had not yet been invented,
so there was no way of achieving fast interplanetary communication. NAFAL
ships, travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light, would still
take many years to reach their destination. (Even if any travelers would
not experience the passage of time, outside of the ship time would of
course pass as time always does.)
New forms of life
The Hainish populated space, but they failed to maintain an interplanetary
civilization. And all the people on all the worlds began to change. Gradually,
but inevitably, new forms of human life began to emerge. Presumably, life
was sometimes hard living on distant soil.
Listen again, if you will, to the voice of one of the men contemplating
the diversity of life. This is the voice of Ong Tot Oppong, Investigator
of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen / Winter:
It seems likely that they were an experiment. The thought is
unpleasant. But now that there is evidence to indicate that the Terran
Colony was an experiment, the planting of one Hainish Normal group on
a world with its own proto-hominid autochtones, the possibility cannot
be ignored. Human Genetic engineering was certainly practiced by the Colonizers;
nothing else explains the hilfs of S or the degenerate winged hominids
of Rokanan; will anything else explain Gethenian sexual physiology?
Genetic engineering, then, combined with good old natural selection,
created wildly different shapes of humans. Note that the "Terran
Colony" mentioned above is not a colony from Terra on another
planet, it is a colony on Earth - from Hain. And that's us.
People were all busy trying to adapt to their new homes. And so a silence
settled over the galaxy...
The Terran expansion
The terrans, after countless millenia, started their own colonization.
We know of at least two such planets: Werel (in Planet
of Exile) and Athshe (in The
Word for World is Forest). When the Terrans arrived, the planets
were already populated, by their long lost and no longer recognized siblings.
The League of All Worlds
Yes. Well, in Rocannon's World there is no talk of the Ekumen, but of
the League of all Worlds. This seems to be a precursor to the Ekumen -
a friendly League of worlds trying to rediscover planets and tie them
together (This was after the invention of the Ansible). But, trouble is
brewing, there is talk of a Faradayan revolt, and of an inevitable war
coming up.
In an e-mail Michael Driussi (who also pointed out some things that were
just plain wrong) helps out: he suggests that we see the Age of the Enemy
as a period separating the League of all Worlds from the Ekumen. This
seems to make sense.
The Age of the Enemy
Then there was the Enemy. Or was there? Some say they came from the voids
of space, others say they were rebels from some of the colonized worlds,
yet others claim there never was an Enemy. The Shing, the Enemy,
may have been little but a name, a myth, a rumor. Monsters engendered
by the sleep of reason. Surely there was fighting; but perhaps this was
just between humans - as futile and pointless as, say, the local wars
on Terra.
Anyway, there was a belief in the Enemy. And what little communication
there had been between the worlds stopped altogether.
The Ekumen
Now, with the invention of the ansible, an interplanetary civilization
is feasible. The Ekumen, the League of Worlds. Once again, Hain is the
Prime World, and people are again setting out to explore new worls. This
time, not to colonize them, but to rediscover them, to know the people
on them, and, maybe, to find out that strangers really are nothing but
friends you do not know.
Some dates
Notes
This history mockup is of course a little forced. (Not only in the voice,
but in the actual contents as well...)
Presumably, Mrs. Le Guin simply changed her mind a little as she went
along. The Shing, which are mentioned in earlier stories (The
Left Hand of Darkness, City of Illusions,
Planet of Exile) are not mentioned
at all in later stories. The instantaneous Churten drive was similarly
abandoned.
Still, there are remarkably few contradictions in all the different stories.
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of the Hainish worlds