November was Le Guin Month (in my world, not the one at large). It was wonderful – all Le Guin, all the time. *sigh*

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Le Guin

Some of my favorite Hainish stories are in this collection. The churten stories are particularly fascinating to me, both because of the particular questions she explores about jumps in location without interval, but because of the characters she uses to tell the stories. They are interesting people.

The title story is one of the sweetest and saddest and most intriguing. A man, a scholar studying the emerging churten theory (in which matter in instantaneously moved from one location to another, with no interval), takes part in an experiment. The experiment goes awry, moving him instantaneously through space from one locale to another, but also back in time about 18 years. He returns to his home village, where he had only left for higher education studies a short while before (months? weeks?), and lives his 18 years again, this time as a villager, and not a scientist.

The Birthday of the World, Le Guin

Another favorite. This collection also holds one of my favorite stories, “Paradises Lost.” What happens to a people, a small society, when they traverse space, the Void, over several generations? Some of them, Le Guin imagines, will begin to hold very different views about what the world Is, about what it means to Exist in the World. Some of them will not, and the conflicts between the world views cause rifts and emotional chaos, as well as impacting the voyage itself. Le Guin does a good job in this particular story of imagining a paradigm shift, and also of a people who must relearn what sunlight is, what dirt can do, what life with limited technology is like for those who are new to it.

Changing Planes, Le Guin

One of her weirder collections. But I like the concept, and some of the stories were really interesting, and sometimes sad. “Wake Island,” The one about the genetic experiment in 24/7 wakefulness was especially disturbing, others (like “Porridge on Islac,” who’s residents are genetic amalgams of human and plant and animal, are merely odd and playful. Not all of the stories focus on genetic manipulation.

Orsinian Tales, Le Guin

I only read the first three or four of the stories, before moving onto the following book. It was funny: I was moving through Le Guin’s short stories but sort of skipped by Orsinian Tales, I think because I was looking for Sci Fi, and while Orsinia is an imagined place, it’s not sci-fi-ish. But I did read a few stories, including “The Barrow,” which I’ve always liked. Kind of creepy, kind of melancholy, kind of inspiring.

But then… it was my birthday, and I usually buy myself a book or two for that annual event. I treated myself to a first edition hardback of Le Guin’s latest fiction, Voices and in order to get myself in the mood, I read the first book in that series,

Gifts, Le Guin

This is the first book in her Stories of the Western Shore series. It’s not our planet, or our time, or any time or culture on Earth, but it’s not of the Hain series either (though it could be, but it’s a different kind of place, more fantasy oriented than SF).

The “gifts” of the title are innate abilities to affect things, physically, around one. For instance, one of the main characters can “call” to animals – communicate nonverbally. The family members of the other main character (though not him) have the ability to “unmake” things, a skill primarily used to destroy other beings. Other abilities in other families are different, but in the world we are reading about, all are used primarily as weapons against other clans. The two teenagers who the story is focused on are having doubts about possessing such abilities, and one of them begins to explore the idea that each of the Gifts may have originally been used more positively.

It is a story written for a young adult market, and so some of the ideas in it are explored more… simply? lightly? than she usually does. But the story is well told, and doesn’t dip into syrupy fantasy lingo about the Gifts. The Gifts may be Magic, and certainly there are far-off places in the story, where most people don’t have or use the Gifts, and view them as bad Magic, practiced by Witches. But the abilities are described in practical terms, not mystical ones. There are no wizards, or dragons, or magic wands. There is a lot of farm work, and family politics, and local feuds, and a few deaths. The Gifts are used for practical purposes, or power-hungry ones, but mostly people don’t employ them, having a lot of plain ol’ hard work to take care of. And the story is about people coming into their adulthood, facing the responsibilities and obligations of adulthood within their clans. Very good.

Voices, Le Guin

This is the second entry into her Stories of the Western Shore set (the third one is in the works). Though set in the same world, it is only loosely related to the first story. The main character of Voices is a teenage girl in a city occupied by a fiercely religious force which does not favor her family or her religion. The Alds, who occupy the city, are of the view that all writing is absolutely evil, Black Magic. They have long since burned libraries and banned all forms of writing from the city. Our protagonist is from one of the oldest and strongest households, once home to a library and a school. It is now a ruin, but the girl and her mentor have access to a hidden library beneath the house.

The story is about this girl meeting up with the protagonists from the first story, who are now much older and have traveled widely along the Western Shore, the one working as a horse trainer, the other as a story teller. The girl and these two, along with an existing resistance movement, manage to engineer a revolution against the Ald, which while somewhat violent, is substantially tempered by the efforts of the girl, the characters from the first story, and the girl’s mentor to keep the peace and come to compromise.

Good story, and a interesting follow-up to Gifts.