Review copy provided by the publisher.
What this book is, what it isn’t. Okay, first: I think this is one of the biggest upgrades in edition of any of the Tor Essentials reprints. My previous copy of an omnibus containing these three novellas/short novels bore the title Three Hainish Novels and a garish (though content-accurate) orange cover illustration of sword-wielding people riding flying cats. The previous title effectively appealed only to people who already knew they wanted to read something in this series, and the previous cover image drove away all but the most dedicated readers of Le Guin.
What it isn’t: I don’t actually think this is a great place to start reading Le Guin. She is just starting out here, writing planetary romance, more or less, in the telepathy-obsessed mode of the mid-1960s. Happily for humans, most of us get better as we learn our craft, and even more happily, there has been more room for women to be more than docile and gentle and obsessed with bearing sons to men in recent decades–and particularly in more recent Le Guin work. If you take this starting point as representative of where she wanted to be or where she would end up, you will underestimate Le Guin by a great deal.
What it is, again: it is an interesting representation of mid-1960s short adventure science fiction, and the telepathy focus is a mostly-lost trope that Le Guin pursues, particularly in City of Illusions, the last of these works, farther than most of the people who played with it went. And these are a beginning, and it is worth having them in print, worth seeing where someone whose voyage went the places hers went started. Worth seeing the first of her travelers through snow, the first of her characters pondering how to not harm other life, the first of her people looking around and trying to treat everyone else as people, and failing, and trying again.
That a book–in this case, three of them in one volume–is imperfect is so trite as to barely be worth stating. What is this imperfect book doing. It’s reaching out. It’s looking for what comes next. I think it will be more interesting to you if you’ve seen more of what comes next. But I’m glad that this edition is here once you have.