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The Telling by Ursula Le Guin, Gollancz, £16.99, ISBN 0575072571

URSULA LE GUIN’s science fiction leans towards soft rather than hard
sciences, but her name for one imaginary gadget has been widely adopted by
fellow authors. A long-range instant communicator is an ansible.

Ansibles link the far-flung worlds of Le Guin’s loosely knit Hainish series
of fictions. The culture, or Ekumen, of Hain, three million years old, tries to
help relatively barbaric planets like ours. As The Telling opens, the
Unist coalition of religious fundamentalists controls much of Earth and soon
inflicts saturation bombing on the godless Library of Congress…

This is the background from which Terran heroine Sutty emerges. To escape
Earth she becomes an Ekumen observer studying the aftermath of a different
cultural revolution on planet Aka. They’ve buried their past, erased the old
language, and outlawed the network of stories, religion and philosophy known as
the Telling. Science is the only faith allowed on Aka. Why?

In obscure provinces, Sutty meets the culture that’s been driven underground.
Struggling to understand the infuriating complexities and simplicities of the
Telling, she can’t remain a dispassionate observer. It’s a richly imagined,
evocatively told piece of anthropological SF.