The Power of Emptiness

Ursula Le Guin's "Planet of Exile"

It is incredible how, in the 1970s, people could buy and read a book with such an ugly cover. And yet, I did. Rereading it, some 50 years later, I am shocked by how deep and how relevant it is for us, today.

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

The Tao Te Ching — Translated by Ursula Le Guin

Let me start by saying that there is no novel by Ursula K. Le Guin that is not the best novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. All her novels are her best novels, and all are masterpieces. It is an incredible series of stories, each one different, and each one surprisingly insightful, deep, interesting, and prophetic.

It is true for this fantastic novel: Planet of Exile, written in 1966, her second novel, written at 37. Look, this is such a masterpiece that I don’t know where to start in telling you about it. But maybe I could start from what led me to reread it. It was because I am writing a book titled “The End of Population Growth” (or perhaps “Population Collapse” and it somehow re-emerged in my mind that Le Guin’s novel was about the same subject: the decline of the humans of planet Werel, the “Farborn,” mainly caused by infertility. Which is exactly what is happening now on planet Earth.

Note that with this novel, Le Guin was the first in the history of Science Fiction to describe a depopulation problem caused by infertility. I can find many novels in the 1960s and later that dealt with overpopulation, but the only one that matches Le Guin’s theme is “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. But it arrived nearly 20 years later, in 1985, and it was by far not as good. The problem of population decline was absent not just in Science Fiction but also in the general scientific literature and fiction as far back as I can search.

Being the first to create a theme is, in itself, a remarkable feat. But let me tell you why it is a masterpiece. And for that, I should start by telling you what is needed to create a literary masterpiece. It is, first of all, the capacity of creating universes. Not an easy feat, but some authors can do that — Le Guin is one of the great masters in this area. The second characteristic is that the author must respect his/her characters. The consequence is that the characters become “alive” and do things independently of their creator’s will.-

This is what happens with Planet of Exile, it is, first of all, a full universe, but what makes it the masterpiece it is are the characters. And the most wonderful of them is Rolery of Wold’s Kin, the Tevaran girl. It is an incredible feat of mastery how Le Guin can have this character do and say very little in the novel, but at the same time be the central point of it. She is the perfect application of the Taoist principle of emptiness. “The pot is useful where the pot is not.” Rolery is the wonderful woman she is in the novel because she is empty, and being empty, she can accept love, as a pot can accept food. She is, simply, the definition of “hope,” which the ancient personified into a female deity Spes. And most of all, we need hope in this difficult moment in the world. May the Goddess help us, because we desperately need that.

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Note that a novel can be a masterpiece and, at the same time, have defects. Nothing is perfect in this universe, and a perfect masterpiece wouldn’t belong in the real universe. And this is true for Le Guin’s Planet of Exile. Apart from the many horrible front covers in which the book was sold, it has several shortcomings: the “Gaal”, the barbarians, are never really described with the same detail and humanity as their co-residents of planet Werel, the Tevarans. The siege of Landin is a little too long and too bloody. And sometimes, Le Guin’s writing is a little clumsy and old-fashioned. But, as I said, perfect perfection would be an unacceptable imperfection.