Stse is an almost-island, separated from the mainland of the great south continent by marshes and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gather to mate and nest. Ruins of an enormous bridge are visible on the landward side, and another half-sunk fragment of ruin is the basis of the town’s pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest of the landscape.
Ursula K le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Gollancz 1995.
Le Guin’s galaxy was long ago colonised by humans from Hain. Indeed this is so buried in history’s layers that humanity’s first origins are forgotten, and people on Earth believe themselves aliens. After that great expansion and genetic manipulations by the ancestral Hainish, peoples in each system developed in isolation for a thousand millenia. Time dilation during near-light-speed travel and cold-sleep means that your left-behind children and grandchildren grow old and die before you make your new start on another planet. In the last few thousand years, which might be only a few lifetimes for space-farers, the Hains have sought to bring all humanity back into a loose community called the Ekumen.
This positioned le Guin as a galactic social anthropologist. The underlying framework for each story is that of Ekumen observers exploring and falling foul of variations of kinship, politics, religion and economics. Her most recurring themes are variations on gender and sex, and the power relationships which spring from these. The Left Hand of Darkness, her novel written nearly fifty years ago, to me seems fresh and challenging in its deconstruction of our assumptions about humanity, encapsulated in the sentence “The king was pregnant”. The four novellas which comprise Four Ways to Forgiveness offer perhaps a more conventional take on sexuality, shockingly so, for it is tied into power dynamics, slavery, rape and oppression. It took me a second reading to confirm that her gentle writing style was, in each narrative, capturing a love-story.
The throw-away description of the enormous bridge, the ancient vast ruin present but ignored, gives to me the feel of le Guin’s universe.
I drew this listening to the hypnotic rhythms of Canto Ostinato (Simeon ten Holt) weaving a tapestry of sound from four pianos.
kestrelart 
The colours are rich in this. Looks like a professional illustration to me
Thanks
But backlit images viewed on a screen always flatter the picture. It is also conditioned by the light I photograph it in. Here I used indoor lamp light which gives warmth. I also shot it in just daylight. The blues bleached the image.
Still, I worked this up first in watercolour pencil then in layers of conte crayon. They do add heft to the colours.
Far from an attempted book illustration, this is a personal feeling triggered by her writing and captured on paper.
You sound a bit like my daughter here – ‘thank you for the compliment, but here are 10 reasons why It’s not as good as you think’. Only joshing, it is a problem when we can see the original but visitors only see the photo. There’s a photo with a faint shadow across the picture that I’ve posted before, I think the shadow makes it. If I ever hang it on the wall I’ll have to recreate the shadow!
You know you are right
Actually I can say back, you sound like my son, telling me off for putting myself down or down-playing a compliment. 🙂
So I apologise for coming across as ungracious.
Still, that’s not how it plays in my head. I take your comment seriously not as a compliment but as more than that, as something deserving of a serious answer about technique and style. So I don’t mean to reject a compliment, more I don’t spot it as such. Still, it’s a pain, not taking a compliment makes conversation as difficult as demanding them.
So thanks again, and this time without a “but”!
I’m a massive fan of Le Guin so this resonates and it’s definitely high time for me to re-read her. At present I have a copy of her essays that I am dipping into. It was interesting to read her views on what she thought about Left Hand of Darkness some years along the track. I also found her book Always Coming Home quite moving.
Thanks for the tip. What essays?
Dancing at the Edge of the World. I see the copyright is 1989, so I think my copy is a reprint/ remainder, I can’t really remember.
Also, I agree about her thoughts on Left Hand of Darkness. Apparently she came in for criticism and was herself self critical. Unjustly I feel. Our approach say to pronouns for gender has moved on perhaps, but that book still seems imaginative, humane and revolutionary to me in its approach to gender, and for 1969, strikingly so.
I agree. It remains my personal favourite.
Wonderful sense of depth…foreground and background distinct and yet merging. (K)
Now I see the height of the bridge that you were thinking of in your earlier illustration – this is really great!
I had to play with the perspective!
Thanks