City of Illusions
Ursula K. Le Guin
 The story starts as a man is found by a small community (housed in one building) in a forest area in eastern North America. He is naked except for a gold ring on one finger, has no memory except of motor skills at a level equivalent to that of a one-year-old and has bizarre, amber, cat-like eyes.  The villagers choose to welcome and nurture him, naming him Falk (Yellow).  They teach him to speak, educate him about the Earth, and teach him from a book they consider holy, which is Le Guin's "long-translated" version of the Tao Te Ching. Also they teach him about the nature of the never-seen Shing. After six years, Falk is told by the leader of the community that he needs to understand his origins, and as such sets off alone for Es Toch, the city of the Shing in the mountains of western North America. He encounters many obstacles to learning the truth about himself and about the Shing, along with evidence of the barbarism of current human society.  Along the way, it is sometimes suggested to him that the image he holds of the Shing is a distorted one; that they respect the idea of 'reverence for life' and are essentially benevolent and non-alien rulers. This suggestion comes from both telepathic animals who remind him for their own self-defense, and from Estrel, a young woman whom Falk meets after being captured by the Basnasska tribe in the great plains. Falk escapes this violent community with Estrel, to reach the city under her guidance. Falk finally reaches Es Toch, where Estrel betrays him into the hands of the Shing and laughs as she does so. He is told that he is part of a crew of a starship of alien/human hybrids from a planet called Werel and meets a young man, Orry, who came with him in the ship. At this point it becomes clear that Estrel is a human collaborator working for the Shing, and that she had been sent to retrieve him from the wilds of so-called Continent 1. The Shing tell Falk that * they are in fact humans; * the conflict between the League and an alien invader never occurred: on the contrary, the League self-destructed through civil war and exploitation; * the "enemy" is an invention of the Shing rulers themselves to try and ensure through fear that world peace endures under their benevolent, if misunderstood, rule; * Falk's expedition was attacked by rebels who then erased Falk's memory of his previous self; * and the Shing, who managed to save only Orry from the rebel attack, now want to restore Falk's previous identity. Falk however believes that the Shing are non-human liars and that their true intent is to determine for their own purposes, the location of his home-planet. Seeing no other way forward, Falk consents to have his memory erased. The mind of the original Werelian, Agad Ramarren, is restored and the Falk personality is apparently destroyed. He emerges as a new person with pre-Falk memories and vastly greater scientific knowledge. Ramarren's first name, Agad, recalls Jakob Agat, one of the chief protagonists of Planet of Exile: of whom he is a descendant. However, thanks to a memory triggering mnemonic device Falk had left for himself (an instruction, through young Orry, to read the beginning of the book he travels with, his translation of the Tao Te Ching), the Falk personality is revived. After some instability Falk's and Ramarren's minds come to coexist. By comparing the knowledge given to them before and after Ramarren's reemergence, the joint minds are able to detect the essential dishonesty of the Shing's rule and the fact that the alien conquerors can lie telepathically. It was this power that had enabled the not very numerous Shing: "exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star", to overthrow the League of All Worlds twelve centuries before. The Werelians' mental powers are significantly greater than those of their human ancestors. The Shing are inhibited by a cultural dread of killing or being killed and would have no effective defense against any expedition that came forewarned. Still ignorant of the survival of the Falk persona, the Shing hope to send Ramarren back to Werel to present their version of Earth as a happy garden planet prospering under their benign guidance and in no need of outside help. Falk/Ramarren, now fully aware of the brutalized and misruled reality, pretends to accept this, postponing the return journey. Eventually, while on a pleasure trip to view another part of the Earth, the Shing he is with takes telepathic control of Ramarren but is then overcome by Falk, operating as a separate person. Now controlling the Shing, he makes his escape, manipulating his prisoner to show him where to find the ship that would take him home, and how to program it. (He discovers here that the Shing use a totally alien system of mathematics, quite different from the Cetian mathematics used by all human worlds.) Falk/Ramarren finally leaves for his planet, with Orry and the captive Shing who he has used. He can go back home and organize the liberation of the Earth, but this means cutting himself off from his friends there. While City of Illusions concludes at this point, Falk/Ramarren's mission apparently succeeds in bringing freedom to the home world of Terra. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai comes from Earth and remembers the 'Age of the Enemy' as something dreadful but now past. He also knows of the Werelians, now called Alterrans. The fate of the Shing is not mentioned, either there or in any later book.