Rating: 
Summary: Splendid Short Story Collection from Le Guin
Review: This is a fine mix of stories - some old and some new - set primarily in Le Guin's Ekumen/Hainish cycle of novels and short stories. Without question Le Guin's best works in this series are her great novels "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed". One of my favorite stories in the current collection - and the very first - is "Coming of Age in Karhide", which is a fascinating, often hilarious look at a character's adolescence on the planet Gethen, taking place a few decades after the events chronicled in "The Left Hand of Darkness". The final tale "Paradises Lost" is set aboard a multigenerational starship whose crew must contend with religious fanaticism and the ship's unexpectedly swift arrival at another world. Most of the rest are just as good as these, exploring Le Guin's interests in cultural anthropology and gender relationships. All are graced with Le Guin's lyrical, often spellbinding, prose.
Rating:
Summary: A story-suite plus one
Review: To coin a term for a form of prose that's lacked one, Ursula K. Le Guin as chosen "story-suite" for a collection of short stories that are connected by theme, location, or events. This book mirrors her last SF story-suite, Four Ways to Forgiveness, in connectivity by theme but diverges from connectivity by place. At least, it makes wide ranges 'round the setting of many of her SF stories, called her "Hainish Universe." (Le Guin, typical of her self-deprecating humor, talks of her laziness in re-using this setting in her forward.)The theme of these stories is relationships. With ourselves. With our lovers. With our society. They use various tools to explore this topic and reveal the complexities of being human. Stories range from a first-contact tale with a deeply anthropological tone to a "comedy of manners" among some of the most complicated relationships in the universe. Along the way, we touch on some familiar settings (the world of Left Hand of Darkness, that of Four Ways) and get a look at some new. The final tale in this collection, a novella entitled Paradises Lost, is a bit of a divergence from the rest. It does not reside in the Hainish universe setting but upon a ship bound for a distant planet. Generations are born and die upon the ship as it crosses the vastness of space towards its destination. We watch one of those generations grow up and deal with a crisis of faith. In the end, we are presented with the answer chosen by the characters through whom we see the story. Typical of her skill, however, Le Guin does not present this solution as an absolute. That these people are protagonists does not make them absolutely right; other choices remain valid and are not demonized. Most refreshing for me, is the number of stories in this collection that have, for at least part of their narrative, the voices of children. For her last couple of books, Le Guin was excercising a mature voice, one of parents, grandparents, rulers burdened with great decisions. I suspected the trend followed Le Guin's own aging; that she was now writing the books of her maturity while previous ones were the books of her youth. In this collection, however, we see that her talent cannot be so easily pigeon-holed. The youthful voices speak with vigor and candor. The ideas are fresh, whole; they make a maddening sense and immerse you fully in their gossamer worlds. With each new release, Le Guin demonstrates that she is master of her craft.
Rating:
Summary: First time Guin-reader
Review: Wow. I am an anthropology and sociology major at the University of Michigan, and I picked up this book for free at a used book sale. Impressed would be an understatement. Guin's stories are as thorough as the ethnographies that I have to read for my Anthro classes; class, gender, inequality, signification, and more are covered in a writing that envelopes and enchants the reader. My favorite story is "Paradise Lost", a story about the culture and mythology that are created in a space vessel of humans travelling for generations towards a destination set by people who have been long dead. With none of the original people, the memory of Earth becomes more and more alien, and the quiet isolation of the ship entropies the spirit of discovery and adventure, transformed into a religion about the endless journey as the end goal of humanity. A simply amazing story.
| 
