Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes

[mmcirvin]

This little book is a collection of short stories with a common premise, written over the past several years, some apparently new to this volume.

Most of Le Guin's science fiction (such as the novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) has been set in her Hainish Ekumen universe, a widescreen galactic setup that allowed her to invent planets that were basically imaginary foreign societies of humans and near-humans. That the central premise was biologically implausible (Earth humans turn out to be one of the many genetic experiments of the ancient Hainish) never mattered much; she was really doing something along the lines of speculative anthropological and political fiction, doing her own thought experiments. But the star-travel trappings set certain limits. Travel was by time-swallowing relativistic starships, with limited instantaneous communication by "ansible"; her outside-observer characters were not 20th century Earth humans but ambassadors of the far-off Ekumen.

Changing Planes is in a similar vein to some of Le Guin's short anthropological stories such as "The Matter of Seggri", but tosses out the interstellar Ekumen and replaces it with a cosmic tourist agency and an overtly whimsical inter-universal travel technique based on a pun. There are, it seems, lots of "planes", which in practice tend to manifest themselves physically as more or less Earthlike planets inhabited by more and less humanoid people; and humans of our world can travel between these planes by a special psychological technique that can only be performed while feeling uncomfortable and stressed in an airport waiting lounge. The people of other planes have been doing this for a long time, and there are already hotels and tourism bureaus set up. The visiting tourist of many of the stories seems to be Le Guin herself or someone very much like her, very much not a Mary Sue (hey, it's transrealism! Call Rudy Rucker!)

In most of the stories, all this is just background; the stories amount to capsule descriptions of the strange and familiar cultures that abound on different planes. There is satire and humor here, but some of the stories are as earnest and even tragic as anything Le Guin has written, and the description is always vivid. Le Guin's other worlds are more fleshed-out than, say, Calvino's invisible cities.

I first read the chapter "The Island of the Immortals" a few years ago when it was published as an independent short story (without the explanatory chapter on "Sita Dulip's Method" that opens the book). I was struck then by the economic casualness with which Le Guin introduces the "planes" concept and passes over it to get to her story about a particular plane and its mysterious island. I think that the whimsy of the central conceit is an intentional signal that we're not supposed to investigate the technical details of interplanary travel very closely. The point is to imagine what it would be like to visit these Earthlike but novel lands and what their societies would be like. For this purpose, binding them to the mechanics of star travel just gets in the way; you might as well get there by teleporting out of an airport lounge.

It's a good book and now out in paperback; the hardcover, at least, has excellent illustrations by Eric Beddows, in a style that probably intentionally recalls Escher.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Awesome, thanks for the review. I've put it on my request queue from the Barrington Public Library.