Powers
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Summary
Gavir is a slave in the city state of Etra, which is modelled closely on the Roman Republic: a household of educated slaves, treated well by their own account, trained as tutors and secretaries, and legally unable to keep their own children or claim any ancestry.
He has two gifts. He remembers everything he reads or hears, exactly, which is why he is being trained to teach the family's children. And he sometimes sees things that have not happened yet, which he has learned to keep to himself.
He is content, which is the uncomfortable thing about the first third of the book, and Le Guin lets him be content until his sister Sallo is killed by the sons of the house in an evening's entertainment and nobody is punished, because nothing has been damaged that the law recognises.
So he runs. What follows is a journey through several kinds of unfreedom: a forest camp of escaped slaves run by a charismatic man who has recreated the same arrangement with kidnapped women, a village of marsh people, a city with a university, and finally a poet who can tell him what he is.
Around five hundred pages, quiet, measured and never sensational, with Le Guin's usual refusal to let a good cause be simply good.
The forest camp is the sharpest section. Barna is generous, charismatic and genuinely freed people from bondage, and he has also built a settlement where the women were taken, and Le Guin lets Gavir take a long time to notice, because he has been trained not to.
It closes the Annals of the Western Shore and can be read alone. Best for readers who want a novel about how a person raised inside a system learns to see the system, told without a single speech about freedom.
Historical Context & Significance
Powers won the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the sixth Nebula of Ursula K. Le Guin's career and her last in the novel category.
It completes the Annals of the Western Shore, following Gifts in 2004 and Voices in 2006, three loosely linked books published as young adult fiction, linked by their setting and by recurring questions of power, justice and what literacy is for.
She was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 2003, received the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2014, and used the speech to attack the commercial pressures on publishing. She died in 2018 in Portland, Oregon, where she had lived for most of her adult life.