Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume—Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions

By: Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Alyssa Bresnahan

Three remarkable journeys into the stars

Worlds of Exile and Illusion includes Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions.

These three spacefaring adventures mark the beginning of grand master Ursula K. Le Guin’s remarkable career. Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s groundbreaking classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these first three books of the celebrated Hainish series follow travelers of many worlds and civilizations in the depths of space.

The novels collected here are the first three ever published by Le Guin, a frequent winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards and one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time.

“What an immense imagination, what a strong and trenchant mind.”—Margaret Atwood

©1966, 1994, 1964, 1967, 1995 Rocannon's World ©1966 by Ace Books, Inc., ©1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Part of this novel appeared in Amazing Stories, September 1964, as a short story, and is ©1964 by Ziff-Davis Publications, Inc. / Planet of Exile ©1966, 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin / City of Illusions ©1967, 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin (P)2024 Recorded Books

Pretty good.

Pretty good story. Got a little hard to follow / dream sequencey at times but wrapped up nicely

A Masterpiece

I expected to enjoy this, because I like this author, but I did not expect to absolutely love this. Thoroughly enjoyed. Excellent narratives and narrations.

If you’re skeptical because of the relatively short lengths of the included books, I would encourage you not to worry about that. This is one of those authors who does not use more words than artfully necessary - as a result, it *feels* like a much longer novel than it is. I’ve listened to novels several times the length of this one which could be summarized in a fraction of the time it would take to summarize these.

There is a singular minor mistake in the audio editing which occurs in the 3rd book, but I found it kind of endearing rather than annoying. Michael Crouch says one of the lines, and then you hear his voice more muffled say “I think we can keep that one,” which honestly I thought was a funny little mistake hinting, just barely, at all the work that went into making this production. 5/5 all categories.

My First Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I have known for years that Ursula K. Le Guin is a highly regarded science fiction and fantasy writer. But I just haven't gotten around to listening or reading one of her books. These three stories are the first that I have read or listened to, and I found them absolutely outstanding. She is able to create a tone in her stories which is marvelously engaging. Although a lot of very outlandish things happen, as often does in science fiction, the stories unfold in a plausible way. I enjoyed them very much.

Tao in SciFi

As all great fiction does, these books reflect the eternality of life and the human condition. How can one know what one should do? How one shoukd act? When met with adversity will you overcome it, survive it? What of your friends and loved ones? In a grand winding tale of a war beyond comprehension, won as it is lost, Leguin carves a tale from the cosmos which brings high fantasy to science fiction, and peoplehood to many worlds.

Also in Chapter 9 of City of Illusion there is a remnant narrator comment that didn't get edited out.

Narration is overly dramatic

While the narrator excels at dialogue, their delivery of the descriptive prose makes it difficult to stay engaged. Without peaks and valleys in the delivery, the narration becomes a hypnotic drone that is easy to tune out. This is because the performance suffers from a lack of prosody—the natural rise and fall of speech. This constant, unvarying intensity ultimately flattens the emotional landscape of the prose, making it hard to distinguish between minor details and major plot points.