The Found and the Lost

I love almost everything LeGuin every wrote, and this book is full of things I fully love. Especially “Paradises Lost,” which I had never read before. Four thousand people on a ship, making a six generation journey to a possibly habitable planet. One group, the “Angels,” get all religiousy and doesn't belief in the mission or the world outside the ship. All of existence is just being on the ship, doing what they are doing, seeking “bliss.” The rest of the folk are more sane than that. But what struck me as interesting is how the “religious” group more accurately mirror real world materialists who do not believe in anything outside the closed system of the material world, while the group that might be called the nonreligious are aware that their existence on the ship has its meaning from a larger unseen context that includes before the mission, after the mission, and outside the ship on a planet no one has ever seen.

I doubt that this is what LeGuin intended, but who cares? The text now exists apart from her, and that is how I read it. She frequently upends our expectations, so this flip is perfectly normal for her.