City Of Illusions is the first Science Fiction of Le Guin that I have read, and it captivated me. The story envisages a far future Earth, it's once cohesive people shattered into a thousand strange fragments (including a rather clever cameo appearance of 'The Bee-Keepers', Christians whose honour of life has turned to a worship of Death). The only thread of knowledge that runs though all of these peoples is the Law: Take no Life, and a knowledge of the Shing, the Aliens of the city of Es Toch, who told the Lie that ended the League of All Worlds so many hundreds of years before.
And of that, some is true and some is not, much is half-truth and nearly all the rest equivocation - as any plot outline must be, but in this case it well describes the book as well - mind games within mind games. By the end of the book, I was starting to doubt my own existence.
The tribes of this far-future Terra resemble the multitudinous peoples Larry Niven's Ringworld, and their characterisation has many of the same flaws - entire peoples are defined by a single trait, and taboos are rife. Not that it detracts from the story all that much.
The main theme of the story, a full grown man with no memories, seeking his lost history from a race of beings, possibly malignant, possibly benign, resembles Isobelle Carmody's Scatterlings almost to the dots on the is. Falk, the mindrazed one, is a sympathetic protagonist, if a bit cold (although that is the Le Guin style), and his story comes to a satisfying, if abrupt, conclusion.
The below forms a pretty large spoiler for the story, so if you intend to read this book, go no further.
Spoiler: show
