Name: City of Illusions
ISBN: 9780824014223

City of Illusions

He was a fully grown man, alone in dense forest, with no trail to show where he had come from and no memory to tell who — or what — he was. His eyes were not the eyes of a human. The forest people took him in and raised him almost as a child, teaching him to speak, training him in forest lore, giving him all the knowledge they had. But they could not solve the riddle of his past, and at last he had to set out on a perilous quest to Es Toch, the City of the Shining, the Liars of Earth, the Enemy of Mankind. There he would find his true self... and a universe of danger.

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marijnAug 2024

Missed chance, to fail to reference Le Guin's [patterning frame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Illusions#Objects) somewhere in there.

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teraflopJun 2024

An interesting counterpoint to this is the use of telepathy in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle, which is generally considered as more "soft" sci-fi. Several of the early books in the series revolve around "mindspeech", which is a form of telepathy in which it's impossible to knowingly lie:

> Mindspeech between two intelligences could be incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie. (City of Illusions)

In her later works in the same setting, Le Guin backed off from this, although she never explicitly retconned it out of existence:

> I couldn’t use it in a story any more, because when I began to think seriously about the incalculable effects mutual telepathy would have on a society, I could no longer, as it were, believe in it. I’d have to fake it.

https://reactormag.com/introduction-from-ursula-k-le-guin-th...

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jkmcfFeb 2024

This past week I started Ursula Le Guin's "Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions"

These are her earliest, published novels. The introduction is a bit odd as the author hasn't read much le Guin including her most popular, award winning books other than The Wizard of Earthsea.

I'm not much of a critical reader, but these definitely do not have the philosophical depth (or I don't have the philosophical depth to pic up on it) of The Dispossessed and friends, but they are interesting and well written.

https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Exile-Illusion-Rocannons-Illus...

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