Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Three early novels share one future, in which human worlds are scattered across the stars and cut off from one another. Each opens with someone stranded far from home.

In Rocannon's World, a fleet from the stars invades a planet shared by three humanoid peoples: the cavern-dwelling Gdemiar, the elvish Fiia and the warrior clan Liuar. Rocannon, an Earth scientist on the planet, watches his friends die and his spaceship burn. Alone among alien peoples, he leads the fight to free the world, and legends begin to gather around him.

Planet of Exile follows the Earth colony of Landin, left on Werel for ten years, which amounts to more than 600 Earth years. The settlement is shrinking and under strain. In the fifteen-year winter, nomadic hilfs camp nearby and distrust the colonists, whom they call farborns and take for witches. Gaals and snow ghouls threaten both groups.

In City of Illusions, a man with inhuman eyes wakes in a dense forest with no memory. Forest people raise him and teach him speech and woodcraft, but they cannot explain where he came from. His search leads him to Es Toch, the city of the Liars of Earth, where the truth about himself waits among greater dangers.

The three novels, published in 1966 and 1967, belong to the Hainish universe. This edition collects them in one volume.