City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

About 18 months ago I made my first visit to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle since I [mis?]read The Dispossessed a decade ago and hated it.

In the time between those two reads, I opened my mind (and bookshelf) to genre fiction (“opening my mind” is not a reference to hallucinogens, thank you very much), mostly inspired by finding a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea in the street when I needed it most, i.e. I was very mentally ill.

Then again, you could conversely argue that Ursula K. Le Guin (and genre fiction as a whole) found me when I was vulnerable and took advantage, and so I’ve now spent years shamefully diluting my library and consciousness with books featuring non-realistic things and events and now I think they’re normal and acceptable when (perhaps to a stronger mind?) I never would have come to believe such a thing? Was my previous contempt a wiser position?

No, probably not. Because if I still exclusively read books about depressed masculinised alcoholics (don’t worry I still read some!), then I would miss out on something like City of Illusions. Which is (maybe?) one of the best-constructed novels I’ve ever read, and I’m saying that as someone who has read a hell of a lot of novels about depressed masculinised alcoholics (the best kind of book?).

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So so so so so so this is a sequel of sorts to Planet of Exile, which I read while on holiday about 18 months ago.

That book, set on a distant alien planet where seasons last for lifetimes, is an also flawless/flawless-adjacent adventure text about adversarial nature and the dangers of misinformation (or something like that, I don’t remember, I read it while I was having a good time!)

Despite the thematic connections, that novel’s plot, characters and settings have little influence on or relation to City of Illusions, which – although set in the same fictional universe and containing some of the same fictional technologies and histories (and – of course – conversational references to a planet far far away with lifetime-length seasons) it is not a response to, or a response after, or, necessarily, even in conversation with, the earlier novel.

The similarities and connections between the two texts are not necessarily central or significant to this, though… or are they? I don’t know. Maybe I missed something and they are more, but I don’t think so. (I know how to read‽)

What I do definitely know, though, is that City of Illusions is fucking brilliant, and its increasingly complex plots and situations wake up a reader and scream in that reader’s face: Le Guin knew what she was fucking doing with words and stories.

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City of Illusions is a brilliant, twisting, exciting and super atmospheric novel that opens with a man who might be an alien waking up, without memory, in a small forest town on the edge of a continent on far future Earth, at a time when we (as in “humans” (should I have said “you”?)) have abandoned the stars and live, knowledgeably but simply, under the thumb of an alien oppressor called The Shing, who will not allow us to gain the technology and numbers to ever, well, ever do space colonialism ever again…

Falk – this is the possible ¿alien?man’s name – makes a life for himself amongst the simple people of the forest, before eventually deciding to journey to the planet’s one remaining city and find out who he is, where he came from and just what the hell is going on on this shitty future Earth?

For a hundred pages or so, this is a gripping adventure novel as Falk deals with human and natural friends and foes, encounters talking animals, various competing world views and ideologies as he crosses the ravaged ruins of the former continental United States, before finally reaching the city, from which point Le Guin’s novel becomes one of the most exciting, niftyest, trickiest, tricksiest, fun and – somehow, in spite of having more plot on each page than most novels manage in their entirety – emotionalest novels you’re likely to find.

The characters and the narrative fly and flip and it’s fuuuuuuuuucking brilliant.

I would emit an edified, impressed and overwhelmed “oomf” at the end of every paragraph, and after each chapter I’d need to breathe & reset.

City of Illusions is a fucking masterful example of the joy, the pleasure, the fun and the power found in a well-constructed novel.

I fucking loved it. And I’m very very very depressed and take little joy in anything. 🤠

Highly recommended. Go find it, go read it, go love it.