Rocannon's World

Rocannon's World is a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, her literary debut. Published in 1966, it appeared as an Ace Double, with an opening entitled "Semley's Necklace" that first appeared as the stand-alone story, "The Dowry of Angyar", in Amazing Stories in September 1964. The novel is one of several of Le Guin's works taking place in the same universe and with relationships of characters and history, works that have been termed the Hainish Cycle (a term rejected by the author herself). Its story presents many elements of heroic fantasy.

The novel's protagonist, "League of All Worlds" ethnographer Gaveral Rocannon, returns to planet Fomalhaut II after its quarantine to lead a further advanced survey of its "higher intelligence life forms" (hilfs). As the novel opens, a rebel faction of the League violently attacks his ship, taking the lives of all of his colleagues—and, in presaging invasion, endangers the future of the planet's sentient species. Rocannon engages with these, including the tall, feudal, aristocratic Angyar, and two shorter likewise intelligent species, the troglodyte technologists and makers, the Gdemiar, and the a-technological, colonially telepathic Fiia, to battle both harsh planetary elements and other sentients, to accomplish a quest—to beckon the distant League to thwart the invasion.

In developing the story, Le Guin introduces the term "ansible" as a key technology (and plot element), one that allows instantaneous communication across vast distances, a term that went on to much wider use in science fiction, including by novelist Orson Scott Card and others.