City of Illusions
by Ursula K. Le Guin · first published 1967
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He was a fully grown man, alone in dense forest, with no trail to show where he had come from and no memory to tell who — or what — he was. His eyes were not the eyes of a human. The forest people took him in and raised him almost as a child, teaching him to speak, training him in forest lore, giving him all the knowledge they had. But they could not solve the riddle of his past, and at last he had to set out on a perilous quest to Es Toch, the City of the Shining, the Liars of Earth, the Enemy of Mankind. There he would find his true self ... and a universe of danger.
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…thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie. (City of Illusions) In her later works in the same setting, Le Guin backed off from this, although she never explicitly retconned it out of existence: > I couldn’t use it in a story any more, because when I began to think…
on “Tomorrow people: For a century, it felt like telepathy was around the corner” ↗This past week I started Ursula Le Guin's "Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions" These are her earliest, published novels. The introduction is a bit odd as the author hasn't read much le Guin including her most popular, award winning books other than The Wizard of Earthsea. I'm…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024” ↗Missed chance, to fail to reference Le Guin's [patterning frame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Illusions#Objects) somewhere in there.
on “Glass Beads” ↗