Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a collection of short pieces, not even so much stories as observations on various places, assembled by Ursula Le Guin. The premise is that people can open up their minds to "changing planes"; the method for doing so is different on every plane, but in our plane, it has to be done while literally "changing planes"—you can only do it while waiting for a connecting flight in an airport! (Incidentally, the flap writer seems to think the stories are narrated by Sita Dulip, the Cincinnati(!) woman who invented the method, but that's clearly not the case; the narrator is a friend of hers.) The opening story lays out the basics of the method and is probably the funniest thing I've ever read by Le Guin, an enjoyable satire on the indignities of air travel.

Collection published: 2003
Contents originally published: 1998-2003
Read: June 2023

The book reminds me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and that's surely on purpose; Le Guin had a fascination for that kind of fictional travelogue, as she translated a couple of them into English. The chapters are fairly different: some are full-fledged short stories about a trip taken by the narrator, some are explications of other societies and cultures, some are stories from those other planes. Most, of course, reflect back on our world, depicting other ways of being in the world and thus causing us to reflect on ours. My favorite along those lines was "Seasons of the Ansarac," about a plane where the inhabitants are migratory, and only engage in sex while in the north; in the south, they have no sex, no romance. It asks us to consider why our society is organized the way it is, and how it might be different; like many stories in the book, it also contains some brief moments of cultural imperialism. "The Royals of Hegn" is a good satire on our interest in royalty; it takes place on a plane where everyone is royalty except for a couple commoners that the royals are totally obsessed with. (Though like a couple stories in the book, it uses rape as a sort of tossed-off joke in a way that surprised me. I wonder if that would have been true if I had read it in 2003; I think our mores around this have shifted.) I also enjoyed the satire of "Great Joy," about a group of businessmen who remake another plane as a series of holiday-themed vacation sites: Christmas Island, Easter Island, Fourth (of July) Island, and so on.

Some of the sociological ones that were less satirical I found less interesting, but I did particularly like "The Building," a weird story about two societies on one plane, where the members of one continuously work on a building with no clear purpose or structure, and "The Fliers of Gy," about a plane where the occasional inhabitant is born who can fly—and is thus doomed some day to die when their wings spontaneously give out. Only one story did I not enjoy at all, "Woeful Tales from Mahigul," which relates a series of stories from one of the other planes, which I found difficult to find anything interesting in.

At her best, though, as always, Le Guin makes us imagine other worlds and reimagine ourselves. My favorite of these stories was "The Silence of the Asonu," which is about a plane where people gradually cease speaking as they grow older, and the visitors from other planes who desperately try to find meaning in the few words they do speak.

This is a Le Guin book my wife owned which I borrowed off her to finally read. I think it's probably minor Le Guin, but even minor Le Guin is always worth your time. According to David Cloyle Smith at Library of America, it will be collected in one of their volumes eventually, though it seems like not soon.