Old Music and the Slave Women
Fed up with a civil war on Werel which has trapped him in the embassy of the Ekumen, he leaves to meet with the leaders of the revolution, but is captured and taken to an old slave estate.
The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Earth and Gethen, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels.
[4] "Old Music and the Slave Women" is set after the four previous stories in the internal chronology of the universe, and tells of a civil war on Werel.
[8] Le Guin stated that the story was inspired by a visit to a large plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, that had used slave labor.
[9] He is intercepted by government forces as he attempts to cross into rebel territory, roughed up, and imprisoned on a large slave estate,[10] where he is tortured.
[18] Later that day he hears sounds of fighting, and is released from his room by members of the liberation army, who have stormed the estate and killed the government soldiers holding it.
[29] The 2016 Le Guin collection The Found and the Lost included three of the four stories from Four Ways to Forgiveness alongside "Old Music and the Slave Women".
Tor.com described the four stories, clustered in the middle of the volume, as focusing on "different experience[s] of a crumbling society", and as the "collection's clearest instance of Le Guin’s ongoing literary project of intersectional justice".
[1] Scholar Warren Rochelle states that the five interconnected stories set on Werel and Yeowe describe a society that has the potential to build a "truly human community", and the possibility of utopia.
When he attempts to escape in order to refute propaganda that the Ekumen has taken the side of the government, he is captured, and in captivity realizes that his safety lies in silence and circumspection.
[33] Scholar Sandra Lindow writes that "Old Music and the Slave Women" continued Le Guin's exploration of peaceful responses to violence and war.
He realizes that he has to put aside his "pure idea of liberty" and take part in a slow process of shifting individual opinions to create cultural change.
Scholar Alexis Lothian wrote that in Le Guin's world, social change was a gradual process: despite the slave revolution, the ideology of the slave-owners was still a powerful force.
[34] Though the slaves wait for utopia in the form of the freedom brought by the revolution, they find that they are caught in the "insanity, the stupidity, the meaningless brutality" of the actual liberation.
[31] Le Guin instead suggests that utopia or liberation is found equally in the small acts of kindness and comfort which Esdan and the slave women share.
[37] Referring to Le Guin as usually being a "a movingly lyrical writer", Atwood stated that the story didn't "[shy] away from necessary gore".
"[38] The science fiction magazine Strange Horizons stated that "Old Music and the Slave Women" was a "middling" Le Guin story, which made it a "fine [work] by most authors' standards.
"[1] It praised the four stories set on Werel in particular, stating that the "richness of the culture Le Guin depicts is painfully real, at once beautiful and deplorable.
"[1] The review concluded that Le Guin's "ability to make not only her outsider-protagonists at home in this degraded world, but her "enlightened" readers, is a feat that should not be overlooked.
"[1] Science fiction critic John Clute wrote that the story was less substantive than some of the other works of the Birthday of the World collection, saying that it occupied "radically more space than it needed".
He was more positive about Le Guin's writing, stating that Esdan was a "wise and deeply attractive man" and the culture of the slaves was "acutely anatomized", while "every sentence is balanced, [and] laid out with high inconspicuous craft".
