Four Ways to Forgiveness#Contents

The stories in the book are set on two planets in a distant solar system, Werel and Yeowe, inhabited by humans placed there by the ancient Hainish. (This 'Werel' is not the same as the world called Werel in Le Guin's Planet of Exile and City of Illusions.) Werel has a long history of institutional enslavement of its lighter-skinned ethnic groups by its darker-skinned ethnic groups (the latter's derogatory term for the former is "dusties"). When the Ekumen recontacted the Werelians, the shock spurred one of the Werelian nations, Voe Deo, to develop a space program and settle the other inhabitable planet in the system, Yeowe, transporting a primarily slave population to do so. Eventually the slaves on Yeowe conducted a successful revolt and gained their independence, an event that occurred in the fairly recent past of the four stories. The nations of Werel are nervous that the "assets" on that planet might attempt the same thing for themselves.

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1. "Betrayals" – The story of Yoss, an elderly, retired science teacher who lived through Yeowe's War of Liberation, and her neighbour Chief Abberkam, a disgraced leader from that war and an opponent of contact with the Ekumen, both living in a desolate area of the planet. Abberkam rescues Yoss's pet cat from an accidental fire which destroys her hut; Yoss then moves into Abberkam's house.
2. "Forgiveness Day" – Solly, a woman of half-Terran ancestry and space-travelling parents, faces problems as Envoy to the small sexually repressive kingdom of Gatay on Werel.
3. "A Man of the People" – Havzhiva is a man who grows up on Hain, is educated there and then works for the Hainish embassy on Yeowe. It contains the most extensive description of Hain's environment and culture in Le Guin's work.
4. "A Woman's Liberation" – Rakam, a woman born as a slave on Werel, tells of her life and her growing self-awareness. Also published in the anthology A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women (2001).
5. "Old Music and the Slave Women" focuses on Esdardon Aya, also known as 'Old Music'. It is set somewhat later in time than the other four stories. Le Guin writes, "the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last."{{cite book |last1=Le Guin |first1=Ursula K. |title=Five Ways to Forgiveness |date=5 September 2017 |publisher=Penguin Random House |isbn=9781598535716 |edition=Ebook |url= https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567018/five-ways-to-forgiveness-by-ursula-k-le-guin/9781598535716/ |access-date=24 January 2018}}

The last story, "Old Music and the Slave Women", appears only in the volume Five Ways to Forgiveness, and not in Four Ways to Forgiveness.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} That story was also published earlier, in the collection The Birthday of the World.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}}

The book ends with "Notes on Werel and Yeowe", giving details of the two planets and their solar system.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}}

The second, third, fourth, and fifth stories have some characters in common. Havzhiva from story "A Man of the People" works for Solly from "Forgiveness Day".{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} He is also the lover of Rakam in "A Woman's Liberation", who is mentioned but not named in "A Man of the People".{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} Both of them know the character, Dr Yeron, and also Esdardon Aya, called "Old Music",{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} who is a minor character in "Forgiveness Day", and the protagonist in Old Music and the Slave Women.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}}

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The common themes of the stories revolve around the concepts of freedom and slavery. For thousands of years, the dark-skinned owners of Werel held the light-skinned assets in slavery. However, in recent years, following the colonization of the second planet, Yeowe, things have begun to change on Werel. The Yeowans have gained freedom and are struggling to establish their own government and identity, and gain admittance into the Ekumen of worlds.

Gender relations are another area examined by the stories. In its initial years of settlement, only male slaves were transported to Yeowe, leading to a hypermasculine culture and formalized homosexual relationships among them, both of which had a strong impact on later gender relations on Yeowe. In the second story of the book, Solly associates with a Werelian member of a class of traditional transvestite entertainers, and the fourth story features Rakam reflecting on how her new experience of freedom from formal slavery is conditioned by her position as a woman in a still-sexist society.

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The collection was first published by Harper Paperbacks (a division of HarperCollins Publishers) in 1995.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} Betrayals first appeared in 1994 in Blue Motel.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} The others appeared in the science fiction magazine Asimov's in 1994 and 1995.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}}

Four Ways to Forgiveness was published in 1995 in a leather-bound, signed edition by Easton Press,{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} which described itself as releasing "works of lasting meaning, beauty and importance."{{quote without source|date=January 2025}}

Five Ways to Forgiveness was first published in 2017 as a Library of America eBook Classic.{{citation needed|date=January 2025}} The Library of America included Five Ways to Forgiveness in the collection Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two as well.{{cite book |last1=Le Guin |first1=Ursula K. |title=Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two |date=5 September 2017 |publisher=Library of America |location=New York, NY |isbn=9781598535396 |edition=Hardcover |url= https://www.loa.org/books/553-hainish-novels-stories-volume-two/ |access-date=2 December 2018}}

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Four Ways to Forgiveness has been referred to as a story-suite by critics, based on Le Guin's own use of the term to describe her deliberate inclusion of linked short stories in book form.{{cite book | title=Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults| last=Cadden | first =Mike| publisher=Routledge| location=New York, NY | edition =1st | year=2005 | isbn = 0-415-99527-2}}{{rp|30}} Le Guin has remarked that the collections of stories could have been a novel had she focused on a few characters; instead she decided to focus on a work with many voices.{{rp|155}}

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• {{ISFDB title|id=2254071|title=Five Ways to Forgiveness}}

{{Ursula K. Le Guin}}

Category:1995 short story collections

Category:Short story collections by Ursula K. Le Guin

Category:Hainish Cycle

Category:HarperCollins books

Category:Novels set on fictional planets

Category:1990s science fiction works