The book I’d picked to review this week is taking a lot longer to read than planned. And the one-two punch of gloomy weather and the complete inability of anyone in North Carolina to deal with winter storms (anyone including me) (and storms in this case meaning even the rumor of ice) has meant a lot of days stuck inside. I’ll need to switch over to come comfort-food reading if I’m going to keep my sanity. Another short-story collection? Don’t mind if I do.
There are a lot of ways to travel to another plane of existence, from magic or demonic pacts, to the TARDIS and the Bifrost. The method that Ursula Le Guin created for Changing Planes has to be the most unusual; it’s super fast (you can take an entire vacation in another dimension and come back to this one a few seconds after you left), elegantly simple, and available to just about anyone. All you have to do is relax into the apocalyptic boredom that comes from waiting though yet another delayed connector flight at the airport and boom, you’re in another world with a whole new civilization and a brand new set of rules.
“In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.”
I’ve only read a couple of Ursula Le Guin’s full-length novels, so most of what I’ve experienced of her writing has been her short stories. Which I love. I don’t think any two of her stories I’ve read so far have been set on the same world; Le Guin is one of those authors with a talent for world-building, creating new planets and aliens, each with their own customs and religions and genetic makeup. The tales in this collection follow the unnamed narrator (narrators? It’s not always clear if it’s the same person in each chapter) through several different “vacations” on a wide variety of different worlds (the term “vacations” is used loosely, since a few of these places are either mildly unpleasant or downright dangerous.)
A few of the stories feel like they’re pushing a morale of some kind. Porridge on Islac and Wake Island talk about the dangers of genetic experimentation, and how the average person is left to deal with the fallout on worlds where genetic tweaking is a little too easily available. And Great Joy is funny in a way, but also a very heavy-handed warning about indigenous people being exploited by a corporation that’s turned their entire planet into a tourism destination devoted to solely to Christmas. That’s the whole planet, 365 days a year, Christmas every day, and the lucky natives are the ones who only have to deal with taking on the identity of Mary and Joseph for the rest of their lives.
And then of course there’s The Royals of Hegn, which beats the reader over the head with a metaphor about celebrity culture. It’s set on a world where everyone on the planet is a member of royalty, except for the one family of commoners whose every moment is followed by the tabloids and slavishly worshiped by their hoards of royal fans. It’s a cute story, but also not very subtle.
Le Guin does better when she’s portraying a world where there’s at least one aspect of the civilization that’s completely baffling. Trying to learn how to speak to the natives in The Nna Mmoy Language is almost impossible, since the meaning of every word they speak changes constantly. (“Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water.”) The natives in The Building have spent decades creating an endless empty palace, for reasons that no one will explain, and the natives in The Ire of the Veksi are constantly at war because they never stop being angry.
The writing style changes slightly from story to story, sometimes it’s a professional travelogue, sometimes it’s an entry in one person’s vacation journal, and a couple read like a historical treatise. Most of them don’t actually have a real plot, they’re just little snippets of culture from someone living in each world.
The slice-of-life format is the style for Seasons of the Ansarac, which many reviewers seem to agree is the best story in the collection. The narrator in this case is listening to an elderly native talk about the Ansarac year that lasts 24 Earth-years, and how the lives of the people of Ansarac revolve around the migration in springtime from the plains of the southern continent to the mountains of the North, and back again to the plains in summer. It’s an amazingly appealing-sounding life, with the natives living both aspects of their lives – the passionate, nurturing side and the intellectual, creative side – deeply and fully. Just not at the same time. Le Guin paints beautiful pictures of the six-year-long seasons, the time of mating and family and farming in the northern springtime, and the wild city-life of learning and sports and socializing once winter comes to the mountains and they’ve followed the sun back to the south.
Some of the other stories in the book can feel a little chopped off or incomplete, but it’s this kind of vignette where Le Guin’s writing really shines. And even with the less successful stories, the whole collection is wonderful to curl up with on a cold winter’s day, especially in the middle of another round of ice and gloom, which shouldn’t happen here until at least (quickly checks the weather report) *sigh*. Thursday. You can imagine why I think the concept of boredom as a method for interplanar travel sounds like such a good idea.