cover

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Format: Hardcover

The City of Illusions is the third book in Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, set after Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile (I learned only after finishing this book that I possibly should’ve read those first ooops). The novel follows Falk, a human-like person (the key distinguishing feature is that he has ‘cat-like’ yellow eyes) who appears in a forest with his memory wiped and is subsequently taken in and re-raised by the local community. As it turns out, Falk has appeared in a post-apocalyptic North America, whose residents are deathly afraid of their mysterious overlords called the Shing. Eventually, Falk decides that he must travel to the city of Es Toch, home of the Shing, to figure out who he truly is. The rest of the book follows Falk on his trek through a mostly-abandoned continent and his experiences with the remaning inhabitants.

I enjoyed the book - despite its length (only ~150 pages), Falk is a pretty compelling character overall (though there are various 1970’isms thrown in ofc). Le Guin’s examination of ‘humanity’ is a fairly bog-standard portrayal of ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ humanity that becomes much more interesting when explicitly framed as a result of the rule of the Shing, though the entire novel grapples with the issue that, until Falk reaches Es Toch, no one truly knows what the Shing exactly do to oppress humanity. The central question of the novel, then, is whether or not the Shing (whoever they are) are responsible for the backwards state of humanity, or if the current state of the world is inherent to human nature. I don’t have many thoughts tbh it’s a nice little package of a book, and apparently ties well into the earlier Hainish cycle books which I’ll read soon…