Rating: 
Summary: An excellent and thoughtful read
Review: Ever wonder what it would be like on a world where everything was different? Ursula LeGuin presents just a few of the possibilities in intimate detail. These other worlds have dilemmas and ideas which we would never encounter in are own, and the experience of the complete differentness is refreshing.What would it be like to have wings? Would it be a gift or a burden? In the world of the Fliers of Gyr, one Flier expresses his joy at flying, but also his regrets. Once in the freedom of the air, he could not bear to return to the grounded life, forsaking community and family. What would it be like if we were all mixed together? After a genetic disaster, people in this world contain genes of animals and plants, which manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Take the chicken-people, who look normal but spend their time running in hyperactive circles. It is funny but a little sad. A conversation with a young waiter who is four percent corn reveals all this and more. My only complaint ais that some of the stories are too documentary-like, though no less interesting. By all means, read this book, and take a journey out of the ordinary.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent and thoughtful read
Review: Ever wonder what it would be like on a world where everything was different? Ursula LeGuin presents just a few of the possibilities in intimate detail. These other worlds have dilemmas and ideas which we would never encounter in are own, and the experience of the complete differentness is refreshing. What would it be like to have wings? Would it be a gift or a burden? In the world of the Fliers of Gyr, one Flier expresses his joy at flying, but also his regrets. Once in the freedom of the air, he could not bear to return to the grounded life, forsaking community and family. What would it be like if we were all mixed together? After a genetic disaster, people in this world contain genes of animals and plants, which manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Take the chicken-people, who look normal but spend their time running in hyperactive circles. It is funny but a little sad. A conversation with a young waiter who is four percent corn reveals all this and more. My only complaint ais that some of the stories are too documentary-like, though no less interesting. By all means, read this book, and take a journey out of the ordinary.
Rating:
Summary: It's better than clever
Review: It feels like Le Guin dreamed herself into a mad tea party with the likes of Dr. Seuss (the writer) and Italo Calvino, then woke(?) and wrote this book. Or we're all social dreaming along with her. It's a multi-lidded wink and a lot of good, deep fun. It should be required airport reading (especially if you're stuck in the Alaska Airlines terminal at LAX).
Rating:
Summary: Too Good to be Read in an Airport
Review: This book starts off with a light-hearted introduction, but quickly plunges the reader into a maze of possibilities. It is a book to be read slowly, thinking about each plane as it is presented. The best part of the book is it's concluding story, which is something like a metaphor for Le Guin's life to this point, a blur of possibilities, imaginings, and outcomes. This book is highly recommended for Le Guin fans or as an introduction to her work.
Rating:
Summary: Too Good to be Read in an Airport
Review: This book starts off with a light-hearted introduction, but quickly plunges the reader into a maze of possibilities. It is a book to be read slowly, thinking about each plane as it is presented. The best part of the book is it's concluding story, which is something like a metaphor for Le Guin's life to this point, a blur of possibilities, imaginings, and outcomes. This book is highly recommended for Le Guin fans or as an introduction to her work.
Rating: 
Summary: Good But Not Outstanding
Review: This is a collection of sketches based on the clever conceit that bored airplane travelers can move from tedious airports to parallel worlds (planes). Each of the stories is a sketch of some key feature of the plane being visited. Several of the stories have a bit of an allegorical flavor, some are mildly satirical, and others feature interesting psychological issues. LeGuin is an extremely talented writer and several of these stories are very enjoyable and all are worth reading. None of these stories, however, comes close to LeGuin's best work. For readers familiar with LeGuin, this is something of a disappointment. Readers new to LeGuin who find this book enjoyable should pursue the LeGuin's older collections of stories, particularly those written 20 to 30 years, such as Orsinian Tales or the Compass Rose.
Rating:
Summary: Good But Not Outstanding
Review: This is a collection of sketches based on the clever conceit that bored airplane travelers can move from tedious airports to parallel worlds (planes). Each of the stories is a sketch of some key feature of the plane being visited. Several of the stories have a bit of an allegorical flavor, some are mildly satirical, and others feature interesting psychological issues. LeGuin is an extremely talented writer and several of these stories are very enjoyable and all are worth reading. None of these stories, however, comes close to LeGuin's best work. For readers familiar with LeGuin, this is something of a disappointment. Readers new to LeGuin who find this book enjoyable should pursue the LeGuin's older collections of stories, particularly those written 20 to 30 years, such as Orsinian Tales or the Compass Rose.
Rating:
Summary: Good for waiting
Review: Ursula K. Le Guin's Changing Planes was somewhat of a homecoming for me, as I've read little speculative fiction lately. I have always enjoyed her style, and this book was no exception. On the darker side, the introduction bills this as a good airport book (changing planes -- get it?), and its construction as a travelogue, combined with the relatively light-weight stories, bear that out.
Rating:
Summary: Looking for some fun at the airport? Read this book!
Review: Ursula Le Guin is funny. I mean, she has a deep, cosmic sense of humor --- a good thing for a writer of speculative fiction. Her new book, CHANGING PLANES, has a near-universal complaint for a premise (the tedium of waiting in airports for delayed/canceled flights) and a play on words for the title (instead of changing to flying machines bound for Memphis or Boise, people transport themselves to different planes of existence). The key to "interplanary travel," the anonymous narrator explains, is the very awfulness of the airport experience: "a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom." You might call CHANGING PLANES the ultimate in escape reading. After this clever set-up, the book becomes a sort of glorified travelogue. Granted, the civilizations on the various planes aren't real --- but they could be, and Le Guin's gift for inventing plausible and detailed alternative societies is as brilliant as ever. In the tradition of her eminent anthropologist parents, she creates a succession of strange lands and customs that overturn our assumptions about what is standard, settled, and normal. It's cultural relativism as you've never seen it before: witty, sophisticated, and gloriously human. "The Silence of the Asonu" shows us a civilization in which adults don't speak. In "The Nna Mmoy Language," words have ever-shifting meanings ("Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water," a puzzled outsider says) and "Feeling at Home With the Hennebet" challenges our notion of identity and the individual soul. Often the stories are vehicles for social criticism and satire: rampant consumerism ("Great Joy"), genetic engineering gone nuts ("Porridge on Islac"), pointless wars ("The Ire of the Veksi"; "Woeful Tales from Mahigul"), and celebrity worship ("The Royals of Hegn"), to name a few. Some are surreal ("Confusions of Uñi"), while others are quietly mysterious, such as "The Building," in which a "primitive" people builds an enormous, uninhabited, apparently purposeless palace of green stone, or "The Fliers of Gy," one of Le Guin's most moving stories, which imagines a race in which a few people in every generation grow wings. Are they handicapped or godlike? The parallels to our own fear of (and yearning for) flying, risk and death are inescapable and poignant. A strong theme in several of the stories is a mistaken idea of progress, an attempt to "fix" social systems that aren't broken. "Seasons of the Ansarac," my favorite of the collection, shows us a migratory culture in which the people, gripped by a powerful sexual drive, trek periodically from the south (seat of cities and cultural institutions, where they live in random, close-packed groups and talk all night, but never make love) to the rural north, where they have sex and procreate and cleave to their families. When the Beidr --- an aggressive, technologically advanced civilization --- sets out to save them from hormonal enslavement . . . well, you can guess the rest. The upshot is that the Ansarac no longer allow visitors to their plane; it is closed off to humans in the time-honored tradition of lost paradises (from Dante to Shangri-La), and the story ends on a note of profound longing. "Seasons of the Ansarac" is up to Le Guin's finest work (THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE EARTHSEA TRILOGY, and more), but I can't say the same for all of the tales in CHANGING PLANES. It's true that they are vastly intelligent and adroit, often written in a style that combines the detached, slightly stuffy observations of a scientist in the field with an attractive fable-like cadence (they'd be great read aloud). Many of them, however, seemed slight --- sketches rather than the real, completed thing. After a while I began thinking of them as fictionalized essays rather than stories. (Nor did I appreciate the line drawings by Eric Beddows. This is not a criticism of the artist; I simply think it is more fruitful for the reader to create his or her own inner vision of a character or setting --- including alien species --- than to be confronted with somebody else's version.) I don't mean to carp, though; I'd rather read Le Guin in any form than most writers working today. That's why I picked up CHANGING PLANES while sitting in JFK last month, waiting for a flight to France. I couldn't help laughing at the irony. I'd rather have passed the time in interplanar travel, of course, but this book was the next best thing. Try it if you're shackled to a plastic airport chair or stalled on a runway and you're looking for provocative, intelligent diversion (it's small enough to fit in the seat pocket). Or read it if you have no intention of going anywhere, but are in the mood for mental adventure. You'll return home with new eyes. --- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
Rating: 
Summary: Gulliver's New Travels
Review: Waiting in airports can be interminable tedium, OR, a passage to other planes of existence, fascinating new worlds. In fact there is a whole world of such worlds, linked by a loose-knit Interplanary Agency, with Interplanary Hotels for travelers, and Rornan's Handy Planary Guide for guidance. Such is the premise for this collection of fantastic allegorical stories. Strange stories they are, too, stories of people just a little different from ourselves, people whose foibles and fallacies are just a little different from our own. Stories of people wracked by pointless ethnic conflicts that go on for centuries; people who have ruined their worlds and destroyed their ecologies; worlds in which ancient cultures and traditions are fading away. There is a quality of wistful longing in these stories, longing for a simpler, saner world that has been lost or ruined. LeGuin's beautiful writing is complemented by the inventive, Escher-like drawings of Eric Beddows. Author Ursula K. LeGuin is a master story-teller. These stories are easy to read, compelling, humorous, engaging, and hard to forget. They will get you to thinking and they will haunt you. I recommend this book highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber
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