Earth, like the rest of the Known Worlds, has fallen to the Shing. Scattered here and there, small groups of humans live in a state of semi-barbarism. They have lost the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth's in the golden age of the League of Worlds, and whenever a colony of humans tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, with their strange, mindlying power, crush them out. There is one man who can stand against the malign Shing, but he is an alien with amber eyes and must first prove to paranoid humanity that he himself is not a creature of the Shing.Review''Le Guin writes in quiet, straightforward sentences about people who feel they are being torn apart by massive forces in society--technological, political, economic--and who fight courageously to remain whole.'' --New York Times Book Review''As good as any contemporary at creating worlds, imaginary or our own . . . Le Guin writes with painstaking intelligence. Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.'' --TimeAbout the AuthorUrsula Le Guin was born in 1929 into an academic family. She was educated at Radcliffe and Columbia, taking degrees in Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She began publishing sf stories in the early 1960s and is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, two of the most celebrated novels in sf.