Hainish Cycle - Post-technological Worlds

Post-technological Worlds

The idea of post-technological societies and social collapse comes into several of these stories:

• In City of Illusions, Earth has suffered some sort of collapse in a distant future, losing contact with the stars.
• In "Another Story" in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, it is mentioned that Earth still suffers badly from pollution.
• Eleven-Soro had a high technology and then a massive crash, as is told in the short story "Solitude" in The Birthday of the World.
• Hain itself has gone back to a simpler life with high technology only where it is justified, as is told in the first part of "A Man of the People" in Four Ways to Forgiveness. This also seems to apply to planet Ve.
• Orint and Kheakh are mentioned in passing as worlds that have totally destroyed themselves.
• In The Left Hand Of Darkness, the planet Gde is described as extremely hot rock and desert, the result of a technological society that "wrecked its ecological balance" some millennia previous, and "burned up its forests for kindling."