This is a short story focused around colonialism and exploitation, and seems to have originated from Le Guin's exasperation about the morality of exploitation in the U.S's foreign politics, such as the Vietnam war and atomic weapon testing. It takes place in her universe of the Hainish Cycle, and tells a story of humans trying to colonize a planet with other pre-existing native humanoids. It is definitely worth a read at its measly 100 pages.

This book has a fantastic foreword by Le Guin, where she in parts discusses the driving force of artists. Is it really to achieve honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women, as Freud asserted, or is it in the pursuit of liberty, as Emily Brontë wrote? Le Guin seems to think liberty should be the answer of the pure artist, but says that the allure of power can cause writers to "forget about liberty, then, and instead of legislating in divine arrogance, like God or Shelley, they begin to preach". In this book, Le Guin admits to losing sight of this liberty, allowing too much of her real world beliefs to influence the story. This manifests itself partly in a very flat bad guy character, which is a step back from the complex characters in The Left Hand of Darkness, but is something I think works in such a short story as this. On the flipside, it becomes quite interesting to see what feelings these wars invoked on Le Guin, especially now, 50 years later.

I think the most interesting part of the story is what trauma can be left by successful acts of self defense. I think these last two sentences from the book might also be my favorite:

Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.