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."
Read more about this topic: Hainish Cycle
Famous quotes containing the word worlds:
“The ideal of men and women sharing equally in parenting and working is a vision still. What would it be like if women and men were less different from each other, if our worlds were not so foreign? A male friend who shares daily parenting told me that he knows at his very core what his wife’s loving for their daughter feels like, and that this knowing creates a stronger bond between them.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)