Ursula K. Le Guin, Interfaces (anthology, 1980)

This is an anthology of original sf put together by Ursula Le Guin and her agent, Virginia Kidd, back in 1980. Between this and Le Guin's other anthology that I've read, the Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993), I think I have to conclude that while Le Guin's short fiction is very much to my taste, Le Guin's taste in short fiction is not exactly to my taste. There's a whiff of the Ellisonian form of the "New Wave" in here, stories that trade a bit too much on sex or violence or literary effect but forget to be an interesting story. I'm not enthusiastic to write up stories I dislike, though, so you'll mostly just have to infer those by omission. (The book has fifteen stories and two sets of poems.)

Interfaces
edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd

Published: 1980
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2026

Still, there was some good stuff. "The Reason for the Visit" by John Crowley didn't totally make sense to me, but I was fine with that, because the conceit was interesting and the way it was told was very well done. (I don't want to give away the premise, because working it out for yourself is one of the story's pleasures.) I liked the narrative voice of "The New Zombies" by Avram Davison and Grania Davis, though otherwise found the story trite and obvious. "Earth and Stone" by Robert Holdstock was weird and I didn't exactly get what happened, but I did enjoy the ride. Gene Wolfe's "A Criminal Proceeding" was a great little piece of dystopian satire, I found it hilarious and sadly prescient. I enjoyed Edward Bryant's "Precession," though mostly for its depiction of grading student essays and dealing with student freakouts, which was apparently little better forty-five years ago. I did not totally get James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Slow Music," about those who opt not to become immortal, but I liked what I did get.

My favorite story, though was Michael Bishop's "A Short History of the Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D." The story does one of my favorite sfnal moves, which is to take a pretty absurd premise and extrapolate with utter seriousness; in this case, it's the idea that bicycles are a creature that independently evolved on an alien planet; the story alternates between the scientist studying the ecology of bicycles and extracts from scientific writing. It's a weird idea well told; it's also a strong metaphor for the human treatment of nature. Lots of well done little details and good jokes, a perfect little tale. From the ISFDB it seems to have only been reprinted the once, in a collection of Bishop's work from 1983, which seems a real shame, as it deserves a wider audience.