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A review by mattie
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin
4.0
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 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.