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Ursula K. Le GuinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Captain Don Davidson awakes, thinking about how “the new shipload of women had arrived” (9) at Centralville, which is twenty-seven light years from earth on the planet of Athshe. There were 212 of them. Davidson’s duty in New Tahiti, as the Earth humans call their colony on Athshe, is to tame it: “Can’t keep us down, we’re Men. You’ll learn what that means pretty soon, you godforsaken damn planet” (10). When he goes outside, a “creechie” (the derogatory term Earth humans have given to the Athsheans) named Ben is preparing hot water for the captain’s shave (10). Davidson decides to go to Centralville to see the women for himself: “He intended to be first in line with at least one of them this time” (11).
Ben brings Davidson’s breakfast. Ben is one meter tall and covered in white fur. Davidson knows that once he can get enough humans and machines here, they won’t need the creechies anymore, which pleases him: “This world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men” (11). He knows he will get what he wants because he always does. A “spesh” (anthropologist) named Kees Van Sten approaches with news that loggers have been poaching in an area called the Strips (11). Davidson tells him that he is there to care for the men, not for the wildlife, and the men need recreation.
Kees turns red and argues that there is already recreation for the men, and they don’t need to exterminate an endangered species for entertainment. Davidson says they are there to collect wood and to make the new planet in Earth’s image. When Kees leaves, Davidson thinks, “He didn’t see that you’ve got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man that wins, every time” (14).
New Tahiti is mostly water, and what is not water is dense and dark forest. “Men were here now to end the darkness” (15) because back on Earth, wood has become a luxury. Alien forests are now being cut to supply wood to Earth. Davidson knows that everyone on New Tahiti was brought there from Earth over a million years ago. This is proof that it is intended for human use.
Someone calls his name, and Davidson turns to see Oknanawi Nabo, his logging foreman, known as Ok. Ok says he wants to get rid of the creechies, who are annoying him. He says he can’t get them to do what he wants, even when he tries to starve them. Davidson reminds him that the creechies don’t feel pain like humans do. They have more primitive nervous systems. He tells Ok to pick out the leader and say that he’s going to give them a shot of a hallucinogen, which the creechies are afraid of for reasons Davidson does not understand. “‘Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones,’” he says (21).
In Centralville, Davidson walks down the streets. It reminds him of a frontier town. He smiles at the women lining the road, goes into a bar to eat a steak, and then flies back to camp. A man named Jumu arrives with two of the “new Collie girls” (24), specifically imported to be part of the Recreation Staff. Davidson enjoys a “long, hot afternoon” (24). From the air on the way back to camp, he sees fire and smoke. The camp and the equipment have been destroyed. As he walks through the ruin, he believes it must have been an alien invasion. He hears voices. Four wild creechies walk by, and he hides behind a shed. One of them is the pet of a man named Lyubov, and Lyubov hates Davidson.
Davidson orders the creechies to stop and explain what happened. Their leader, who has a scarred face, tells him that they burned the camp and that the humans are all dead. The scarred creechie says that it took 900 creechies to kill the more than 200 humans who were there. He says that his wife showed him how to do it, then lunges at Davidson. He and the other creechies pin Davidson down as the scarred leader sings an unfamiliar song. He instructs Davidson to leave and tell his superiors that the humans are dead. Davidson notices that one of the creechies pointing a gun at him is Ben. Davidson remembers that the scarred creechie’s name is actually Selver.
Davidson turns and runs. He makes it to his small ship and thinks that some good will come out of the massacre because “[n]ot even Lyubov could stop them from rubbing out the creechies now, not when they heard it was Lyubov’s pet creechie who’d led the massacre!” (31).
Selver is walking up a path. He sees “an old man dreaming” (36) and stops to ask the old man if he can come to his Lodge. The old man asks if Selver is “of the dream-time or of the world-time?” (36). Selver says that he is of the world-time. The old man’s name is Coro Mena, and the town Selver has come to is called Cadast. Selver introduces himself as being from the Ash.
They go together into a Men’s Lodge. Selver lies down on a cot and “slipped, with great relief and gratitude, into the great darkness” (37). In the night, the people in the lodge, including a healer named Torber, watch him and care for a wound in Selver’s arm. They wonder about the scars on Selver’s face. Coro Mena feels a fear he does not understand. He enters a dream in which giants walk in front of massive iron machines that crawl across the earth, felling trees. Coro Mena exits the dream and tells Torber that Selver must have come from Sornol, because that is where the giants are.
That evening, Coro speaks with Ebor Dendep, his sister. She wants Coro to wake Selver up so that they can hear his story. When Selver wakes, he tells them about humans arriving to begin harvesting the forest. They raped his wife, Thele, and she died. Selver left the city for another town called Penle, but the humans—he calls them “yumen” (38)—came there as well and imprisoned 100 of them. Selver escaped without being caught. One night he crawled among the cages holding his people and learned that the man who raped his wife was there. The next day Selver and his people burned the camp and killed the humans, “[b]ut that one had gone away” (40). Selver’s wound came from one of the man’s weapons, which Selver shows them, because he picked it up after Davidson dropped it.
Selver says he left no trail and does not believe the giants can follow him. But he does worry that they will find them and try to kill them all, since he helped kill them: “‘There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death’” (43). He says that they dream only in sleep, like children, and “[n]one of them are trained, or have any skill in dreaming” (44). Selver falls asleep again, and Coro says that he is a god, and Torber nods with relief.
Coro adds that Selver is “‘not like the others […] Not like the Pursuer, nor the Friend who has no face, nor the Aspen-leaf Woman who walks in the forest of dreams. He is not the Gatekeeper, nor the Snake” (45). He says they have been dreaming of Selver for years, and now Selver has left the dream-time. He is “a god that kills and is not himself reborn” (45).
The town of Cadast is put on alert, and all families prepare to leave quickly, if needed. Ebor takes Selver into the town and makes him tell the story about how he killed the humans, so that her people will know it is possible and take courage from him. She also sends runners to other towns to spread the story. Their world is split between Forty Lands, and there are more languages than lands. Women run all of the cities and towns, and each municipality has a Men’s Lodge. In the Lodges, the “Dreamers spoke an old tongue” (46). Most writing is in the Lodge-tongue, so the messages must be carried from Lodge to Lodge and then interpreted by the Dreamers to the Old Women, for “[i]t was always the Old Women’s choice whether to believe or not” (46).
Selver sits in a room with Davidson’s gun in his belt. He sees him coming and shoots at him, then wakes from the dream. He has been at Cadast for fifteen days. He keeps having dreams of attacking Davidson and of being attacked by him. Ebor is sitting with him when a young girl comes with a message: A runner has returned from the coast. The messenger arrives and tells them: “There are new giants in the great city of the giants in Sornol, and many of these new ones are female” (53). She also says that some of the Dreamers report visions of a time when there are more of the giants than there are trees.
Selver tells Ebor about Lyubov, who saved him from Davidson once, healed him, and set him free. Lyubov was curious about Selver’s people, and they shared information with each other freely. Selver tries to make sense of what Lyubov told him: The yumens come from a place outside the forest, and their sun is a star. He relates a time when he saw a yumen kill one of Selver’s people with as little thought as one might give before stepping on an ant. “They are men unfit or untaught to dream and to act as men” (56), and Selver says he must go back to his people and leaves.
Coro goes with Selver, and they talk as they walk. He tells Selver that “‘the fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it’” (59). He says that he saw Selver in a vision once, walking, as young trees grew behind him. They say goodbye, and Selver keeps walking. It starts raining, and he lies down and sleeps on the ground.
Chapter 1 uses Davidson’s narrow viewpoint to sketch out the realities of the logging camps on Athshea. The Athsheans—as well as the slur by which they are known—are introduced. The extent of their enslavement is not obvious until the confrontation with Selver, because Davidson does not view the coercion of the natives as enslavement. But his history with Selver shows the depravities that men like Davidson have subjected the Athsheans to. As Chapter 1 ends, Davidson looks forward to the coming conflict eagerly. He does not know why the Athsheans have spared his life, but he now believes that the humans will have no choice but to exterminate them.
Davidson’s astonishment at the attack on Smith Camp show that, whatever his views of the natives, until then they have been almost completely pacific. The exception is when he and Selver fought after his wife’s rape.
Chapter 2 begins explaining the purpose of dreaming among the Athsheans, something that will be elaborated upon further in chapters with Lyubov. Their dreams serve as a combination of visions, prophecies, and warnings. However, even though the Old Men dream the dreams, it is the Old Women who interpret what they say. There is an assumption that the Old Men tell the truth when saying what they dream about, but it is made clear that the Old Women have no obligation to believe them. The discussion of gods shows that the natives have a spiritual facet to their lives, but it is not obvious whether the gods are to be taken as literal truths, or as metaphors, until it is proclaimed later that Selver has become a god. By the end of Chapter 2, the foundation for the conflict comprising the rest of the story has been laid.
By Ursula K. Le Guin