Review: Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2004-07
Acquired: December 2020
Read: May 2021

Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts / Voices / Powers

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This Library of America edition collects three late-career YA novels from Le Guin, the loosely linked "Annals of the Western Shore." They are not very connected-- they take place in the same fantasy world, but there's no overarching plot, and each installment takes place in a very different part of that fantasy world. Each book has a different protagonist, but the previous book's protagonist makes an appearance as well, providing some continuity. Unlike most of the other Le Guin LOAs I've read, this one didn't contain any stories I've read before. (I own paperbacks of all three Annals but have never gotten around to them.) It took me a long time to get through all three stories, but I think that's the fault of me (or of the world), not of the books; once my semester I was over, I shot through the final story in just a couple days. Like, I am realizing, a lot of Le Guin's late career work, these are all bildungsroman. (Which is why they were marketed as YA; none of them feel like the kind of YA fantasy that have come to dominate in the post-Hunger Games era (thanks God), but that makes it hard for me to imagine these being published as YA novels now.)

The first, Gifts, is set in a mountain country divided up into small estates, each ruled by a man with some kind of "gift." Our main character, Orrec, comes from a family where people can unmake things and people, literally unraveling them, just by looking at them. He lives in fear of his own power, and also fear of his father, whose high expectations for him are seemingly impossible to live up to. It's an emotional, tragic story. Le Guin, of course, always gets how to do fantasy: this story expertly unfolds a different society, but also a person, and at the same time it's a metaphor for all fathers and sons. It's desperately sad in parts, in a way that's hard to talk about; some of what Orrec undergoes is awful.

It's also cleverly told; the story is narrated by Orrec, but often we are not told things in any kind of objective way; Orrec is very clear that he is telling us a story that someone else once told him. Everything is mediated through the experience of someone else. As much as anything else, the Annals are all about the power of stories, especially, the written word, to change the world, and this ranges from published books to the stories we tell ourselves, and Le Guin is always attentive to the details of how that works, and Gifts is all the better for it.

The second story, Voices, I struggled to get into. It's about a girl named Memer who might be able to hear the voice of books in a city occupied by an outside force that has banned its religion. It might not be the story's fault, but I never emotionally connected with this one. Memer's inner life and desires never came alive for me in the way Orrec or the third story's protagonist did; her goal was murkier. I'd be curious to reread this, though, at a time when I can give it more of my attention and see if I like it more.

The first two novels are each about 150 pages in my LOA edition; Powers is almost 300. Despite that, I read it the quickest of all three, and it was definitely my favorite. Powers is about a slave boy named Gavir in a place called the "City States" who is being educated so that he can educate future generations of his masters. He struggles with loving a literature that depicts ideals his actual society does not live up to-- and he might have powers he needs to keep secret. He eventually goes on a long journey, and what results is a moving story about finding and making one's place in the world; there are two different key parts where I started to tear up here. One due to relieved tension, and one where Gavir finally makes it, the power of stories having saved him in the end. I am a sucker for a good travel narrative and a good bildungsroman, and Le Guin blends both here to excellent effect. In discovering the world, Gavir discovers himself, and in discovering Gavir, we readers discover ourselves too. Shot through with tragedy, but also redemption. Stories blind us and save us, and I felt a little bit saved when I finished Powers. I look forward to reading and savoring this one again someday.

It was a bit weird reading the back matter, where it's brought out that some of the themes and ideas of the Annals are responding to things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that was just fifteen years ago, but worrying about the doings of Donald Rumsfeld feels like something from another century in the Age of Trump. We used to be so worried about what America was doing to the world, but that's almost quaint now that the country America is destroying is itself.

This is the fifth LOA edition of Le Guin, and the fourth that I have read. They have all being great opportunities to visit parts of the Le Guin canon that are new to me, and revisit ones that I already knew I loved. It's not clear to me that if a sixth is planned, but man, I really hope so. More Le Guin is always needed.

Review: Library of America Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two by Ursula K. Le Guin

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1972-2000
Acquired: January 2019
Read: August 2020

Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two: The Word for World Is Forest / Stories / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This volume collects the last of Le Guin's "second phase" Hainish works (1969-74) and then the bulk of it is taken up by the works of her third phase, when she returned to Hain after a fifteen-year absence and with a somewhat different approach (1990-2000). As with volume one, all the novels were rereads, whereas all the short fiction was new to me.

The Word for World Is Forest
I remember liking this novella enough to do a project on it in college (I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do remember it involved me writing documents and such from the world of the novella; it was for an English education class), but on reread, it's definitely the weakest of the phase two and three Hainish books. And even though it's better from a technical standpoint than any of her phase one works, I find it hard to get into. Unusually for Le Guin, there's been no real effort to create sympathetic characters. There's no attempt to make Davidson anything other than a monster even when you're in his head. He's a monster that feels real, sure, but it's exhaustive reading. But Lyubov, who I feel like should have our sympathy, is a largely pathetic figure. Davidson despises him, he despises himself, and, I would argue, the narrative itself despises him. The sections told from the perspective of the Athsheans are hard to glom onto, too. The overall effect is something that seems like it ought to be powerful, but is actually quite clinical; it always feels like you're experiencing events at a remove because no one in the book has feelings congruent to your own.

I know the book came out of a very 1970s sense of anger over Vietnam and the environment, but I think 1990s Le Guin could have done this same material much more powerfully. (And I agree with Harlan Ellison over Le Guin: The Word for World Is Forest is a much better title than Little Green Men!)

Stories
Le Guin returned to the Hainish world in 1990, but didn't write an actual novel until 2000, easing back into the universe. This volume collects all of her third-phase short fiction except for "Coming of Age in Karhide" (collected in volume one). Three of the stories make a little sequence about "churtening," a form of FTL travel being tested by the Ekumen where spaceships, objects, and people can "move" instantaneously across rooms or star systems. (It's technically not movement, the Cetians point out, because movement takes time, and churtening does not.) I liked the idea of "The Shobies' Story" and "Dancing to Ganam" more than the actuality; the premise is that churtening disrupts our experience of reality and stories help us reclaim it. In "The Shobies' Story," the characters rebuild a mutual experience through storytelling, while in "Dancing to Ganam," one character's belief in stories warps the reality he finds. But I feel like the description of the stories I've just given you works better than the actual stories Le Guin wrote. I did like "Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," which revisits an old Le Guin theme (the person who returns home after a long relativisitc journey, as seen in Rocannon's World and "Winter's King"), but from a more upbeat angle.

A couple of the other stories are what we might call anthropological stories, where the Ekumen explicate other societies: "The Matter of Seggri" and "Solitude." This made me realize that so many Le Guin stories are told this way-- we don't learn about another society from the inside, but the outside, through the eyes of an external interlocutor (e.g., Rocannon's World, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World Is Forest, the present-day chapters of The Dispossessed, some sections of Five Ways to Forgiveness, The Telling). It might be easy to dismiss this as laziness, or (more charitably) convenience: far easier to have an Ekumenical Observer use exposition to reveal a society than have it unspooled through incluing from the inside. But I don't think that's it. I think Le Guin gets that there's no such thing as a "pure" culture: all cultures are defined by their relationships with other cultures, as she highlights in The Dispossessed, when contact with offworlders gives Urras and Anarres the identity of "Cetian" for the first time. That we can discover another society from the inside is an illusion: the Ekumenical Observers stand in for us the readers,* and it would kind of be a lie to not have them. All this is to say that I enjoyed both stories, though "Matter of Seggri" was pretty tough going at times.

Finally, there are a few stories exploring gender dynamics on O, where people marry in groups of four: "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways," and "Another Story" also fits into this group. They're neat-- I think like a lot of sf, you get that doubling effect. You explore a weird world, but you are also reading a metaphor for your own. I particularly liked how Le Guin explores the way in which the system doesn't work for everyone in "Unchosen Love" and (especially) "Mountain Ways." What system does?

Story Suite: Five Ways to Forgiveness
When I read this before, there were only four ways to forgiveness. The original four stories were published individually 1994-5, and then as a single volume in September 1995. Le Guin published a fifth installment in 1999, but the Library of America publication is the first time it appears with the others. I remembered really liking this book, and thinking it underrated. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness cast a long shadow, and justly so, but they do mean that people don't really discuss the other Hainish novels a whole lot, and Five Ways to Forgiveness is the best of the others. It offers five different stories about the decolonization of the planet Yeowe. Three of them are excellent on their own ("Forgiveness Day," "A Woman's Liberation," and "Old Music and the Slave Women"), and I think "A Man of the People" is pretty good too (I do admit "Betrayals" leaves me a little cold). But like many "story suites," the whole is greater than the parts, giving us a variety of intersecting and complementing perspectives on slavery and colonization. I think a particular strength is the exploration of the "slave mentality," that many of the former slaves cannot get rid of, and also how slavery shapes the enslaver. There is some really hard reading here, especially in "A Man of the People."

"Forgiveness Day" is my favorite; Teyeo is such an excellent character, a man whose rigidity saves him and destroys him at the same time. I also really like the perspective we get on Hain itself in "A Man of the People": most of the Hainish don't care about space anymore, and spend their time leading traditional lives in small communities. The ones who do look outward are "historians": their purpose in connecting to other planets is to chronicle history, of which Hain has so much. It's an interesting way of thinking about interactions with other societies.

Women are the (co-)protagonists of three of the five stories here; I find it fascinating that it took Le Guin almost thirty years to write a Hainish book where a woman's voice dominated. What an example of internalized patriarchy!

The Telling
I know I've read this before, but I had literally no memory of it going in. And I never had a memory of it: not a single passage or incident sparked a memory of having read the book before. I don't know why, because it's quite good. It's a pretty typical late-period Le Guin Hainish story: it's very quiet and mostly about explicating a different society. But it's also tough going in her depiction of religious fundamentalism. Sutty's past life and present day collide at the end, and it's a very devastating ending after what has been a pretty gentle book. Definitely a "lesser" Hainish work... but a lesser Le Guin still towers above the work of many others! I can't believe I forgot it.

I did find it interesting the way this lined up with "Forgiveness Day": both stories feature young woman as Ekumenical Observers who are naive but don't realize how much they don't know, and their arrogance gets themselves and others into trouble; they end up in relationships with rigid men from an oppressive society. There's something vaguely misogynistic about it, actually, which I find quite weird; if it just happened once, you'd think it was just an individual, but twice feels like a commentary.

Also both The Telling and Five Ways depict situations where the oppressive society explored by the Ekumen was actually indirectly caused by the Ekumen. The Werelians in Five Ways developed spaceflight and colonized Yeowe in response to Ekumenical contact; the dictatorship in The Telling is inspired by hearing from Terra on the ansible. It's an interesting critique of a set-up that was fairly benign in Left Hand: even a well-intentioned contact between cultures will change both sides in ways we can't imagine. The Ekumen does not always make things better. (Though, both stories argue, in the long run, things will come out all right.)

* * *

Something else that stuck out to me while reading volume two is that a lot of Le Guin's phase-three Hainish work is very bildungsromanish. The Dispossessed in volume one was arguably the start of this trend, but many of the stories in phase three start in someone's childhood and track them all the way up through adulthood: "Coming of Age in Karhide" (duh!), "Another Story," "Solitude," and three of the stories in Five Ways. Probably others I'm not thinking of. This isn't true of any of the phase-one stories, I don't think. I'm not sure what to think of it, but the bildungsroman is arguably about learning how to fit into society, which has interesting correspondence with how Le Guin's sf is about discovering societies, from without and from within.

The arrangement of these volumes is largely in publication order, except that the short fiction is grouped together in a way that reads well. But I don't get why The Dispossessed (1974) was in volume one while The Word for World Is Forest (1972) is in volume two. Especially as 1) switching the 300-page Dispossessed with the 100-page Word for World would give more even page counts (volume one is over 1,000 pages, and volume two under 800), and 2) putting them the other way around would distribute the two most famous Hainish novels across two different volumes, which is surely good from a sales standpoint.

That said, the arrangement is largely academic to me, because I read the stories in pretty strict publication order, rather than the given order. I think the order here would be fine, but I did really enjoy the publication order. For example, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" makes sense to read in proximity to The Word for World Is Forest, as both are about ecology and colonialism, and "Coming of Age in Karhide" feels very much of a piece with the anthropological coming-of-age stories collected in volume two.

If you want to know the publication order of the Hainish cycle, I've published a page on it here.

Because I'm me, I also spent my time making notes about the internal chronology of the stories-- no easy task, because Le Guin often didn't care! But I think she cared more than she claimed to, and a coherent timeline isn't too hard to work up with a couple exceptions. When I first read the Hainish books back in 2005-7, I did it in chronological order, but extra clues from reading the short fiction (and not just the books) led me to discover that I made an error. Contra whatever timeline I consulted at the time, I think The Telling almost certainly precedes Five Ways to Forgiveness (though this is one of the areas where the details are contradictory). Anyway, full details are at the same link above if you are interested. I think there is merit in a chronological read-through for a first-time reader, in that it front-loads The Dispossessed, one of the best Hainish novels, instead of causing you to lead off with the three original novels, which are the weakest and most generic in my opinion. But the books are all so lightly linked that order rarely matters.

* Some have criticized Left Hand, for example, for the fact that Genly sexual/gender biases are so much like those of a contemporary reader, but that's the point. To an extent, Le Guin isn't really trying to imagine someone coming from a cosmopolitan future society going to a different planet, but someone from 1970s America doing so.

Review: Library of America Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One by Ursula K. Le Guin

Hardcover, 1,095 pages
Published 2017 (contents: 1964-95)
Acquired January 2019
Read July 2020

Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This beefy tome collects about half of Ursula Le Guin's so-called "Hainish cycle," less a series and more a setting that she set most, but not all, of her space-based sf in. It's one of two from Library of America, and it collects all of what I would call her "phase one" Hainish stories (1964-67), and about half of her second phase (1969-74), along with one short story from the third phase (1990-2000). Before launching into this (the first of a two-volume set), I had read all six of the Hainish books but none of the short fiction; my original read (back in 2005-07) was in internal chronological order, but I did this one in publication order (more on that in a future post). So I was coming at this material from a slightly different angle than before, with older eyes.

Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions
These three novels were the first Hainish stories written, but a couple slot in earlier chronologically. That makes me glad I read them in chronological order before, actually, because they are a rough beginning. They're not bad... but they're also nothing special. Together they make up what I see as the first phase of Hainish stories, all action-adventure stories about war. It's Le Guin, so they're deeper than they need to be, but what she would accomplish later is largely nascent here. I've seen some reviewers say each book is better than the one before it, but I disagree: I find Rocannon's World the most interesting. It's a good exploration of something Le Guin was handle a lot in her writing, encounters between different cultures and worldviews. Semley goes from her society to a more advanced one on her own planet, and then to the stars; Rocannon comes from the stars to a "primitive" planet and then treks across it, encountering a number of different societies. There's some beautiful writing, especially in the prologue, where Le Guin cleverly retells an ancient myth in the trappings of sf so well you could be convinced the myth was meant to be about space travel to begin with! Rocannon is a thoughtful protagonist, one of many in the Hainish stories. But I find the end unsatisfying on a number of levels.

Planet of Exile seems to me to be doing something interesting in pairing a war narrative with a more female-focused one, and indeed, its co-lead is the only female protagonist of a Hainish book (there are some in the short fiction) until 1995! But to be honest, I find it boring. Le Guin never really makes one care about the invaders on this distant colony world. City of Illusions starts strong, with a trek across a dangerous landscape combined with a coming of age-- putting those two things together is arguably what she's best at-- but once action moves to the eponymous city, I find everything gets dull fast and there's a little too much psychobabble. I can see why the Shing were quietly written out of the Hainish continuity.

The Left Hand of Darkness
I've always loved The Left Hand of Darkness. (This was my third time.) Reading in publication order, it's even more impressive, though. It's published just two years after City of Illusions, but represents such a massive step up in Le Guin's skill as a writer in general, and a writer of science fiction in particular. Just within the first chapter, you notice a depth of character, a depth of world, and a depth of theme that were absent in the three League of Worlds novels.

Everyone always talks about the gender stuff, something Le Guin herself actually complained about ("the real subject of the book is not feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort; as far as I can see, it is a book about betrayal and fidelity"), but what always gets me is the relationship between Genly and Estraven. Two people from vastly different world initially unable to comprehend each other who eventually-- I would argue-- fall in love. The climax gets me emotionally every time, utterly heartrending. This is full of acutely observed detail in terms of both character and culture, which would define most of Le Guin's later Hainish work.

The Dispossessed
This was also my third time reading The Dispossessed. I've always liked it, but this was my first time loving it; I think it resonates with me at age 35 in a way it did not at ages 17 and 20. Yes, it's an exploration of anarchist utopia, but it's also an excellent bildungsroman: how do you position yourself in society in a way that's ethical and consistent with your values? This is no less difficult than a utopia, and I found myself moved as I followed each stage of Shevek's journey. The structure is quite clever, too. The image of the wall is very potent.

Stories
There are four pieces of short fiction included in this volume: two sequels to The Left Hand of Darkness ("Winter's King" and "Coming of Age in Karhide"), one prequel to The Dispossessed ("The Day Before the Revolution"), and one other story that I assume is here because all the short fiction in volume two is from the 1990s, and so it would be out of place there ("Vaster Than Empires and More Slow"). I don't think any of these are Le Guin's greatest work, to be honest. "Winter's King" seemed to me to scratch the surface of its theme, one of Le Guin's favorites (the traveller who misses out on years because of NAFAL travel, depicted also in Rocannon's World and volume two's "Another Story"). "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" was interesting and probably the best of them; its twist is an old theme but I think Le Guin handles it better than most. "The Day Before the Revolution" is a quiet meditative piece that I did really enjoy. "Coming of Age in Karhide" is typically of Le Guin's third-phase Hainish work, and it really belongs in volume two despite its links to The Left Hand of Darkness. It explores an alien biology and culture in a very straightforward coming-of-age story, giving new depth to the Gethenians (and handling their sexual ambiguity better than either Left Hand or "Winter's King" did).

Appendix
Four introduction Le Guin wrote are collected here, alongside a couple other essays and a version of "Winter's King" written before she came up with Gethenian sexuality. The best is "Is Gender Necessary? Redux"; it was an essay originally written in 1976 as a defense of Left Hand, and then rewritten in 1987 to admit she could have done it better after all. The discussion of pronouns is particularly interesting, and strengthens my belief that Ann Leckie was responding to Left Hand when she wrote Ancillary Justice (a novel where people from a gender-ambiguous culture go on a dangerous sledge trip and learn something about each other).

Notes
Overall, I think Brian Attebery's apparatus is good, the notes being minimal and unobtrusive. Two things stuck out at me. One was just amusing: there's a note that explains "Fomalhaut II" means the second planet out from the star Fomalhaut, a thing no sf fan would ever need explained. Clearly a Library of America volume has a very different audience! The other did bother me: volume two annotates "thick description" almost every time Le Guin uses it, explaining the meaning and crediting Geertz. But The Dispossessed frequently uses "mutual aid" and yet Attebery never mentions Kropotkin. (Le Guin mentions him in an essay, but if you didn't already know Kropotkin popularized the term, you wouldn't make the connection.)

* * *

This is a great volume for anyone who thinks they might like Le Guin, or thinks they would. I'll talk more about the Hainish stories overall when I get around to finishing and reviewing volume two.

Review: Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

Hardcover, 826 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 1981-2019)
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Always Coming Home is a critical utopia by Le Guin from 1985, here collected in a beautiful Library of America edition with many supplemental materials (I own all four LoA Le Guins, but this is the first I've read). The book is odd and tough to get into at first: Pandora, an anthropologist from our time, is doing a study of the Kesh, a civilization in the postapocalyptic Napa Valley. What we get are a mixture of texts: notes by Pandora on Kesh culture and language, Kesh poetry and song and myth, Kesh biography and memoir, short interviews with particular Kesh, and a partial Kesh novel. At first I admired it more than I liked it, but as I went on, I got into it more and more.

I particularly liked how it was structured: most of the biographies are short, but there's one long one, "Stone Telling," that's distributed in three chunks across the whole book. The first part is tough going, because you're thrown into this alien culture with pretty much no explanation. But as you read further into the book, moving back and forth between different kinds of texts, they start to reinforce one another. The specificity of "Stone Telling" brings some of the anthropological details to life, keeps them from being abstractions, but also by the time you get to the final chunk of "Stone Telling," you understand it a lot better because of all the other material about the Kesh you've read. It help that "Stone Telling" is about a Kesh who goes outside the valley; Le Guin correctly grasps that contrast is a strong way to reveal how something is constructed. We figure out the Kesh by seeing what they are not.

There are lots of neat little details. I like the train, and the Kesh lodges and houses, and the attention to how language structures thought, and the discussion of Kesh adolescence, and the Kesh term for "pets," and how some Kesh became warriors because of outside influence. I like how at first the society seems non-technological, but as you go you realize that this seemingly "primitive" people have solar panels on every roof and a computer access terminal in every village! I liked the City of Mind (a vast computer network) and the City of Man (the way the Kesh understand our civilization). As someone who reads a lot of nineteenth-century utopian literature, I liked when Pandora gets metatextual with one of her cicerones: "This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that!" (370) I laughed out loud at that (and then struggled to explain why it was funny to my wife). H. G. Wells made a similar joke in The Time Machine, but Le Guin takes it in a much more optimistic direction.

I don't think you have to read every word to enjoy this (I skimmed some of the poetry, sorry Ursula, and occasionally some of the narratives got a little too weird to be interesting), but by the end I was really enjoying it, and I feel like I learned something about my own society, which is what any good utopia should do. I don't think I would like being Kesh, to be honest, but thank you to Pandora and Le Guin for letting me visit them.

The book also contains three other sections: "Pandora Revisits the Kesh and Come Back with New Texts," "Other Writing Related to Always Coming Home," and "Essays." The first is some extra material Le Guin finalized just before her death, published here for the first time. The most noteworthy part is that Always Coming Home features a one-chapter excerpt from the Kesh novel Dangerous People, but here we get three chapters, and extra footnotes from Pandora; when I got to where Dangerous People was incorporated in the original ACH, I jumped ahead and read the version here, before going back. There's also some more poems.

The second section is Kesh-related material published elsewhere; the standout part of it is "May's Lion," a great little short story about a dying mountain lion, in both our world and the Kesh's.

The final section is a number of essays and lectures by Le Guin that illuminate Always Coming Home in some way. They did indeed deepen my appreciation for the book, and allow me to see more of the levels on which it was operating. But also Le Guin was an accomplished essayist, so these make for thoughtful, interesting reading on their own, especially "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be" (about how to imagine utopias better), "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (fiction that moves away from conflict), and "Indian Uncles" (Le Guin's relationships with three Native men who were friends of her father, himself an anthropologist).

"Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural invention must have been a container to hold the gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier." So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation. But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a spaceship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. (726-7)

Review: The Norton Book of Science Fiction edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery

Trade paperback, 869 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1960-90)
Acquired November 2008
Read September 2018

The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990
edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery
Karen Joy Fowler, consultant

This is an odd book; one can tell that as soon as you look at the table of contents. There are not many familiar names or familiar stories here. I think this would be okay if it were marketed as Science Fiction Stories Liked by Le Guin and Attebery, however, it's supposedly The Norton Book of Science Fiction, an overview of an entire genre. The back cover trumpets it as suitable for use in schools, but I think you'd be better off with, say, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One if you want a chunky anthology that gives an overview of the genre. I don't think an overview has to be historically comprehensive, it just has to cover the range of subforms the genre can take, so the subtitle of "North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990" isn't necessarily limiting even if it is arbitrary. But this feels to me like a limited slice of what science fiction can do.

I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that Le Guin's taste in sf is literary. That's perfectly fine by me, as I like literary sf, and Le Guin is my joint favorite sf writer. What does surprise me from the author of the Hainish cycle is that it's very Earthbound. Very few stories here take place in space. I think that's what makes it feel limited: sf's ability to imagine other worlds and future times is very underrepresented here. There are times this book feels very insular. It's hard to imagine handing this to a literary sf neophyte and having them come away wowed at the possibilities the genre offers.

Random thoughts on random stories:

• "The Handler" by Damon Knight (1960): This felt very old-school to me, a short story constructed around a sort of Twilight Zone-y concept of a man who operates a human suit. But it's more than just a twist, it tells us something about ourselves in that best sfnal way, so I ended up liking it a lot despite the fact there's not a whole lot to it. (Kind of an odd choice to begin the collection, though, but I guess that's chronological order for you.)
• "High Weir" by Samuel R. Delany (1968): I really enjoyed this, a tale of explorers on Mars where an encounter with an ancient, dead civilizations ends up unsettling the minds of one of the explorers. I am always meaning to read some Delany.
• "Day Million" by Frederick Pohl (1969): This is one of the few stories (I think just four?) in the book that I'd read before (in this case, in Ascent of Wonder, a collection it definitely did not belong in). I enjoyed it there and enjoyed it here, a very weird story of romance.
• "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1973): Justly a classic. My second time reading it, and I still quite enjoyed it. Cleverly written from the perspective of a male protagonist where you have to read against what he says to sympathize with the female characters.
• "Schrödinger's Plague" by Greg Bear (1982): A sort of goofy sf thought experiment about a disease that may or may not exist, but clever enough and well told enough (it's a found documents story) to get away with it.
• "Snow" by John Crowley (1985): A man accesses the life experiences of his dead wife, which had been recorded completely. There's a lot of stories here about people flitting into the lives of the dead, I think, actually, but this is one of the better ones. They didn't exactly love each other, which makes it more poignant.
• "The Brains of Rats" by Michael Blumlein (1986): This was a dark, disturbing story, of a self-hating male feminist scientist. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I did think it was executed with great skill.
• "We See Things Differently" by Bruce Sterling (1989): In a future where America is no longer a dominant world power, a Muslim Egyptian journalist interviews a popular rock star. This did absolutely nothing for me, and I'm not sure what the point was, even with the twist at the end.
• "Half-Life" by Paul Preuss (1989): This is perhaps a typical weak story in some ways, one I wanted to like but couldn't never quite unlock. Something something Marie Curie, but I'd be damned if I could tell you what, and I think how the story is told gets in the way of whatever effect the writer was trying to achieve.
• "And the Angels Sing" by Kate Wilhelm (1990): Perhaps unfairly, you could say this was like a lot of stories in the volume: something fantastic enters into the lives of humdrum people. That said, I did quite enjoy it, as Wilhelm draws character sharply and has a knack for the uncanny and the weird. A reporter who pushes everyone away suddenly finds an alien and has to figure out what to do, along with a photographer who doesn't like him very much.

There were plenty others I liked, too: "When I Was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman Hess, "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" by Eileen Gunn, "(Learning About) Machine Sex" by Candas Jane Dorsey, "Tauf Alef" by Phyllis Gotlieb, "Invaders" by John Kessel, and "Schwarzschild Radius" by Connie Willis. This all gives a disproportionately positive impression, though, because there are a lot of stories I just didn't even mention here, because I just couldn't latch onto them, not even enough to tell you what I don't like about them. Skipping back through the book to pick out the ones I listed above, I found there were so many I just didn't remember. There are some sixty-seven stories in the book, so even thirty standouts wouldn't be a very good rate. (The book took me seven months to read; I read a story over lunch at work one to five times most weeks.)

So, it's definitely got some interesting stuff going on, and there are stories I would revisit, but on the whole, there are definitely better entries into the genre of Honking Big SF Anthologies than this one.