In City of Illusions, the third novel written in Le Guin’s Hainish universe, the earth may or may not be besieged by mysterious aliens known as the Shing. The human survivors live small, isolated, and occasionally comfortable lives. But they live in fear. What they know of the Shing they know only through rumor and innuendo—that they have spies among the humans; that they can lie in mindspeech; that any technology that exceeds some unwritten threshold will be destroyed along with the people who created it. No one has ever seen a Shing; no one knows for certain that the Shing exist; nonetheless, the Shing rule their lives completely.
One day, a man appears at the border of a household. He’s naked and filthy, and doesn’t respond to words; his mind seems absent or empty. He looks entirely human, save for his eyes, which are the color of egg yolks and oval, like a cat. The family debate what to do with him. Some think he must be a Shing and that they should kill him or send him back to the forest. Others think he may be a victim of the Shing, his mind razed to hide some knowledge—in which case, killing him would be to do the Shing’s work for them. They decide to take him in, and to try to teach him, to see if his mind returns. They name him Falk, which means yellow, for the color of his eyes.
Over the years, he learns quickly, and soon becomes a part of the family, a lover to one of the daughters of the house, a son to the eldest. But he never remembers the time before his arrival, and the mystery of his past lingers as a question wanting attention.
After some time, the eldest, a man named Zove, invites Falk to come sit with him. There, Zove asks when Falk will go in search of that question, will go looking for where he came from and how his memory was lost. With compassion, Zove explains that while Falk is welcome to stay with them, he also believes that the mystery of his arrival could hold the key to the future of the people of the earth. And whether or not they even have a future worth hoping for.
Zove says—
“We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man’s work.”
After another silence Zove went on, looking up into the bright, November sky: “Consider the worlds, the various men and beasts on them, the constellations of their skies, the cities they built, their songs and ways. All that is lost, lost to us, as utterly as your childhood is lost to you. What do we really know of the time of our greatness? A few names of worlds and heroes, a ragtag of facts we’ve tried to patch into a history. The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what’s left. They slipped in the Lie, as always. We aren’t sure of anything concerning the Age of the League; how many of the documents are forged?…There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them.”
Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion, page 228
There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them. Is there a better phrase to describe the internet today, with the myriad of lies and forgeries slipped in among the real? With the enormous scale of disinformation, of knowledge subverted to consumption? They killed knowledge, Zove says. Are we not witnessing the same murder, day by day, one banned book, one ad, one fake search result at a time?
Not long after this talk, Falk sets off from the only home he can remember. He takes a great and terrible risk, in both body and spirit, to seek the truth of his life. But to continue to live in ignorance, to let the murder of his childhood and of knowledge of the world go unanswered, would be the greater risk. For him, and for all of us.