The issues of slavery and female subjugation, so central to any moral history of real humankind on real planet earth, are treated with Ursula's characteristic compassion and humanity, in the context of an imaginary planet and its colony-satellite.
The characters of these stories, their acts of bravery cowardice revolt submission, are so familiar from earth's own history of colonizations and exploitations! As always I marvel at how LeGuin, White American and presumably priviledged, knows so well the hearts of the enslaved and the colonized.
How familiar to see the lives of slaves who go on century after century without thinking to revolt!
How familiar to see the slave who, at the moment of choice, remains on the side of the master and sticks to the familiar, instead of striding into the unknown world of freedom!
And how familiar to see oppression and war and famine continuing, in different form, after freedom from the external oppressors.
(Former colonies of the European oppressors will remember sorely how brown/black bosses promptly took over the former_roles of the white masters after liberation.)
And how familiar to see, the lonely and driven activist, the former slave who wants all enslavements to end, the few moral beings in an often immoral world.
The cry of slave peoples on Werel -- "Oh, Oh, Ye-o-we" -- so mournful, so similar to the bittersad poetry of colonized peoples everywhere.
Actually, the four ways have now become five ways, as LeGuin has written one more story set in Werel, in the collection "The Birthday of the World".
At the far end of our universe, on the twin planets of Werel and Yeowe, all humankind is divided into "assets" and "owners," tradition and liberation are at war, and freedom takes many forms. Here is a society as complex and troubled as any on our world, peopled with unforgettable characters struggling to become fully human. For the disgraced revolutionary Abberkam, the callow "space brat" Solly, the haughty soldier Teyeo, and the Ekumen historian and Hainish exile Havzhiva, freedom and duty both begin in the heart, and success as well as failure has its costs.
In this stunning collection of four intimately interconnected novellas, Ursula K. Le Guin returns to the great themes that have made her one of America's most honored and respected authors.