Essay Questions

What can we learn from the novella about the author's own feelings about war?

Le Guin was a well-known anti-war protester, and she specifically opposed the Vietnam war. The novella mirrors what she felt was happening in Vietnam; she felt that America had no place becoming involved in the country's internal difficulties and conflicts. She also felt that the Vietnamese people were more peaceful than their western counterparts and that the Americans taught them a violence that they had not been aware of before, forever changing the country and its people.

She also felt that the American soldiers were showing more violence to the Vietnamese people than was necessary in order to win the war. However, her allegorical portrayal of the soldiers was incredibly blinkered and unfair, because she did not take into account the mental and emotional effects on them that the war was taking; her experiences of war were entirely theoretical and therefore not always fully translatable to real life.

Both Terrans and Athsheans are misogynistic cultures. How does this manifest itself?

Neither culture covers itself in glory when it comes to their treatment of women. Davidson exemplifies the way in which Terran men view women as existing entirely to pleasure men. The colony is predominantly male, and occasionally women are sent to Centralville so that they can offer sexual pleasure to the men. They do not seem to have any more advanced role in the colony at all. Davidson also sees women as his to use and abuse as it suits him; he is a rapist and is known to have raped the wife of one of his slaves, Selver, which is actually that catalyst for the uprising at Smith camp.

The Athsheans exterminate the entire female population of the colony. This is because they feel that if there are no women, the Terrans will be unable to procreate and advance the growth of their race; however, it also shows that they, too, view the primary purpose of women to be bearers of children.