Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin.
To be accompanied by Toolmen from Mandy Brown.
Highlights
All these things were part of the house, built into it or along with it, made in it or in another of the forest houses. The machinery weas heavy and simple, easy to repair; only the knowledge behind its power-source was delicate and irreplaceable.
The work of the house and farm was light, no hard burden to anyone. Comfort did not rise above warmth and cleanliness, and the food was sound but monotonous. Life in the house had the drab levelness of communal existence, a clean, serene frugality. Serenity and monotony rose from isolation.
Solitude is soul’s death: man is mankind. So our saying goes.
He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.
He did not even know what questions to ask; he could neither believe nor disbelieve all he had been told. There seemed to be no standard to judge it all by.
He was fluent, incoherent, childish. Did he know his own loneliness, orphaned and alien, living out his childhood and entering adolescence among these people who held themselves apart, who would not touch him, who stuffed him with words but left him so empty of reality that, at fifteen, he sought contentment from a drug?