Book Review: Rocannon's World (Leguin)

Leguin U. Rocannon's World (1966) A story very much of its time, with light-speed ships, FTL robots, and a slew of humanoid aliens, some of whom are telepaths. A rebel force attacks the anthropological team on an unnamed planet. Rocannon, the sole survivor, enlists the Angyar, a warrior people, to help him find the rebel base, where he use the "ansible", an FTL communications device, to call in the robot bombs that will destroy the rebels. By the time the League force arrives, he's dead, but the planet has been named for him. That's the plot, and simple enough it is, just the kind that John Campbell liked to publish in Analog Magazine. But Leguin makes of this simple material a complex and nuanced story of the varieties of human experience.
     There's a frame: a visit by one of the Angyar many years earlier to retrieve a necklace, which ended up in a museum on another planet. When she returns, only a few days older subjectively, it's many "objective years" later, her husband is dead, her daughter a grown woman. Rocannon eventually receives the necklace from that daughter, and finally gives it to the Angyar woman with whom he spends his last years.
     What keeps us reading is Leguin's skill at advancing the plot: she tells the story as a quest, which allows for all kinds of surprises, hair's breadth escapes, and so on. It also allows for revelation of both the planet itself as a beautiful and varied ecology and topography, and of the cultures of the several tribes and nations. Through Rocannon we get "our" p.o.v., that is, that of an experienced reader of SF.
    The Angyar are somewhat Norse, their serfs the Olgyior (of the same species) are presented as rather too loyal to be believe. The Gdemiar, a species of troglodyte, recall H. G. Wells's Molochs, the Fiia (a telepathic/empathic species descended from the same species as the Gdemiar) recall the Eloi. A devolved species of predatory bird-like humanoids round out the catalogue. Leguin has the knack of making them real, and their interactions plausible. The book could have been more complexly plotted (and bigger), which would give even more scope for character and cultural nuances, but it is a finished work as is. It's an early work, and it seems to me like a trial run of the themes and motifs that would occupy Leguin in her later, mature works. Very good of its kind. ***