The last story, titled "Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", is one of my favorites, and if I could rate just that, would get five stars.

The rest of the stories are good but not fantastic.

Read as a part of [b: The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin|29868611|The Found and the Lost The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476615440s/29868611.jpg|50237861]

This sci-fi novella is told from the perspective of a man on another human-like planet who goes on to work in the new field of teleportation. That's obviously a gross oversimplification of the plot since we actually spend most of the novella finding out about the world and its customs.

This world wasn't as interesting at the one in [b: The Matter of Seggri|34811132|The Matter of Seggri|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|56027726], but it was interesting nonetheless. I preferred the sci-fi part of the story more though and while the science wasn't as fleshed out as I usually prefer with my sci-fi, I liked the twist and the conclusion.

The First Contact with the Gorgonids : She has got the dynamic of the sexist, racist jerk and the woman who's grown up in an oppressive society and performs traditional femininity but really isn't so stupid as she lets men believe down to perfection. An ending fuelled by incandescent rage.

Newton's Sleep : This is a rather bleak and depressing tale... Ike is a man who is deeply afraid and clings to rationality to deal with his existential worries. He has led his family onto a space station that was created to escape a disastrous earth by a community of elite, extremely intelligent and rational people. Except things begin to go wrong in a way Ike can't understand. I was there for the ideas and the unflinching description of some horrible attitudes that exist in our society, but the ending left me completely puzzled. Usually Le Guin is one of the only authors who can give me a vague, open ending that I can still understand and feel closure with. Here though I really can't work out what happened

except possibly Ike just went mad? But somehow that doesn't feel like enough to give meaning to all the rest.

so clearly this flew over my head.

The Ascent of the North Face : This is extremely short and more of a joke than anything else. It's funny but not in a giggle or belly laugh way, more in an absurd, slightly silly kind of way. Not very memorable.

The Rock That Changed Things : Aah, this one I liked. Set in a strange, completely different world, with a dominant and an oppressed class, with a society centred around patterns of stones. But what happens when one of the oppressed finds the perfect stone for her pattern? This one was SO alien and yet enchanting.

The Kerastion : This one is so very short, set in a rigid, ritualistic society with castes and taboos. It deals with art and music too. I found it to be very bleak and hopeless, what a truly dreadful society.

The Shobies' Story (Hainish) : Another story with a lot of interpersonal relationships between the crew, leading to a bizarre and chillingly absurd situation. It was strangely heartwarming to see Gethenians and Annaresti again.

Dancing to Ganam (Hainish) : Very layered story with that subtle sense of wrongness and dread Le Guin creates so well. I love how it showed the very different perspectives of the members of the team. A subtle sendoff of a certain kind of entitled, sexist hero complex type of character. I predicted the ending and yet it was very impacting anyway.

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (Hainish) : Strange tangled story of an oblivious, slightly too self involved but well intentioned man who almost wrecks his life. An ode to home and family with a fascinating marriage system. An old Japanese tale, churten, long distance travel and time weirdness.

This collection felt more disparate and choppy than The Wind's Twelve Quarters. There are four great stories, three that are all right but missing that spark of absolute brilliance, and one completely forgettable. It's mostly worth it for the Hainish stories and the Rock one.

A mixed bag. Some good. Some funny. Some a bit confusing and hard to get into.

I never know what to expect going into a book of UKL short stories, but I'm always hoping for something from the Hainish cycle. This delivered in spades, in the three final stories, interconnected around the same idea so interestingly that they could make a nice novella. This is the farthest into the future of anything I've read in this universe (though I should point out that the same characters basically never reoccur between stories/books; I only know when a book is set based on references to technology or politics). In these stories, physicists have developed faster-than-lightspeed travel and are trying it out, but it turns out human perception plays a huge, complicated role in how/whether the technology works. The first story is a crew's very weird experience as the first to test the new churten technology, the second is a delicious, eerie all-is-not-as-it-seems trip to an uncontacted planet, and the third, "Another Story," is a heartwrenching, fascinating story about O and family and regret. One of my favorite things about her writing and this kind of scifi in general is the extrapolation of the human element from science fiction concepts: sure, nearly-as-fast-as-light travel makes you age much more slowly than people back home, but how does that actually feel? I could read this kind of thing forever.

The whole time I was reading these three I had the delicious feeling you get when you've studied all the exact right things for a test: I knew about the religious/scientific overlap of Annares-based physics because I'd read [b:The Dispossessed|13651|The Dispossessed An Ambiguous Utopia|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166571463s/13651.jpg|2684122] earlier this year, understood the Gethen family in the Shoby's crew because I finished [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309282484s/18423.jpg|817527] a few months ago, I was excited to read about Dalzul because of the references to him in [b:The Telling|59921|The Telling|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309203290s/59921.jpg|1873378], and I knew about sedoretus, the four-person marriages on O, from [b:The Birthday of the World and Other Stories|68021|The Birthday of the World and Other Stories|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170684442s/68021.jpg|639316], the mixed-species crews from [b:the word for world is forest|276767|The Word for World is Forest|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1283091038s/276767.jpg|3256815].

This is the strength of the Hainish cycle, I think: you can start essentially anywhere among the novels and stories she's written in this universe and not be lost, but the more you read, the more you understand, in fulfilling, interesting ways. The worldbuilding is so rich but so laid back at once, which takes a very deft hand.

Of the other, non-Hainish stories in this book, a few are fine but unremarkable (published quite early, I think). The two that stood out for me were "The Rock that Changed Things," which I read as social commentary story on class/race/overlooked art forms, and "Newton's Sleep," which I so wanted to be at least twice as long. The privileged, white inhabitants of a spaceship, who've fled an earth in chaos, begin having mass hallucinations about everything they've left behind: other races, animals, nature. That's the frustrating part of SF shorts, when there's a big idea trying to fit into just a few pages.

Those last three stories, though! I'll be thinking about them for quite a while.

The Rock The Changed Things was the first story i really loved in this collection. It stayed with me for days after i read it. As well as loving words, i am a very visual person. The idea of coloured rocks forming patterns used for expression and communication that was completely missed by more “intellectual” people, and what that expression brought about was wonderful.

It was the last three stories, The Shobies’ Story, Dancing to Ganam, and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea that truly stood out as the best of the lot. Although they are three independent stories with their own distinct narratives, they are all linked and in each story, the world they are set in grows a little. At the heart of all of them is the idea and development of instantaneous travel, across a laboratory, across a campus, across a planet, across space. This is simply the backdrop to the stories, but with each story the world evolved more in my mind.

As mediocre as the ratings i have given both this book and The Dispossessed are, Le Guin is definitely an author i will read again. I love her stories, the concepts and the settings. I just also think there is more potential in them; they could be a little more exciting, a little more interesting, a little more gripping. Just, a little more.

A longer review can be read at my book blog: Marvel At Words.