Winter’s King by Ursula K. Le Guin (Orbit #5, 1969)1 gets off to an unclear and confusing start with the androgynous “King” Argaven of Karhide (referred to as “she” rather than “they” for some mysterious reason2) apparently having a breakdown or delusional episode. Argaven repeatedly says to the surrounding figures, “I must abdicate.”
It is only much later in the story (for those that are lucky; myself, I had to go back a reread it after finishing the piece) that it becomes apparent that Argaven has been kidnapped and is being mindwashed.3
The story then cuts to the point where it should probably have started, with a harbour guard challenging a drunk figure and, after administering half second of stun gun, inspecting the body:
Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the finger joint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone.
Argaven wakes up in the palace (the real one this time), and starts a period of recovery. During this it becomes apparent that, due to the limitations of Karhidian technology, no-one local can determine what changes the mindwashers have wrought, or what they have programmed Argaven to do. Argaven abdicates, and arranges with Mr Mobile Axt, the Ekumen ambassador on Gethen, passage off-planet in one of the their near-lightspeed spaceships. Argaven later visits their firstborn, and leaves the royal chain in the baby’s crib before departing.
The second act of the story sees Argaven travel to Ollul (Earth), a trip that only seems to last a day but, because of the relativistic effect of travelling at near-lightspeed, has her land on Earth twenty-four years later. On arrival Argaven is given a summary of events in Karhide (the regency of Lord Gerer was “uneventful and benign”) before commencing treatment for the mindwashing episode. The doctors discover that Argaven’s mind was changed to make them become, over time, a paranoid tyrant. After the treatment is completed, Argaven subsequently decides to attend Ekumenical School on Earth (“She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert”).
As the years pass, the Ekumen train the ex-King to be of use to them in the future, and this time comes (spoiler) when the current King of Karhide (Argaven’s child) terrorizes and fragments the country. This eventually sees Argaven return to Karhide sixty years after their original departure—but only a twelve years older—and, on arrival, meet children who are now older than them.
After learning of the country’s further deterioration over the last twenty four years, and the revolt of some Karhiders, Aragaven leads a rebellion, and the story finishes with the ex-King standing over the body of their child, who has committed suicide.
This story has a poor start, good middle, and perfunctory ending (the idea of a parent standing over a child who is chronologically older than them is a good one—but there is no development or confrontation, just the image). I’m not sure that this piece is much more than an intermittently well-written gimmick story.
** (Average). 8,000 words.
1. I read a revised version of this—apparently there are differences between the original Orbit version and those in subsequent publications (or perhaps just post the author’s collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters). Rich Horton has written an article about the differences at Black Gate.
2. This piece is a “Hainish” story, and one set on Gethen, the same planet that featured in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. In that work the Gethians were referred to as “he”. There is more about the pronoun switch at Wikipedia.
3. Apart from the cloudiness of the first two pages, I couldn’t work out if the palace scene that follows (after the guard discovers Argaven’s body) was a continuation, or not (not, as I concluded later).
I would also suggest this is a terrible first paragraph:
When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sublightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.
I’m not sure starting with whirlpools and moving smartly on to snapshots is a winning opening sentence. Then we get a data dump about radios and spaceships. And who is Plenipotentary Axt? (He turns up pages later, by which time I had long forgotten his name.)
Winner of the 1969 Random Musing Award.