mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is Le Guin's first short story collection. It has 17 stories in it, which is too many for me to do in one post, so I'm splitting it in two. She provided author's notes for each story.


"Semley's Necklace" (1964)

In a fantasy setting, sufficiently advanced SF tech may as well be magic. First published as "The Dowry of Angyar," this became the prologue of Rocannon's World, where it was the best part of the book. I love the mythologization of relativistic effects. Le Guin says she put this story first in the collection because it was the most representative of her early work.


"April in Paris" (1962)

Two scholars living in the same room 500 years apart are connected across time. I like this story a lot. What it says is that regardless of time or culture, we all want to be with someone who gets us, and it says it with wit, vulnerability, and charm. This was the first story Le Guin sold after dozens of rejections, as she relates with her characteristic jovial self-deprecation.


"The Masters" (1963)

In a postnuclear dystopian future where math is considered dark magic, scholars rediscover the old ways in secret. I find this story doesn't have a lot of meat on the bones—it just presents the premise and doesn't take it anywhere unexpected. Le Guin also seems deeply underwhelmed by it, offering the backhanded compliment that it has one good sentence. ("He had been trying to measure the distance between earth and God.")


"Darkness Box" (1963)

A high fantasy kingdom is caught in a magical time loop. This short piece is super creepy and unsettling, almost horror. I really like it, though it's very nearly upstaged by Le Guin's explanation that she was inspired by her three-year-old daughter trying to get her to guess what was in a box. After several failed guesses: "She shook her head, smiled an unspeakably eldritch smile, opened the box slightly so that I could just see in, and said: 'Darkness.'" Kids are so much better at horror than adults could ever be.


"The Word of Unbinding" (1964)

A wizard is trapped by his enemy with no escape. This first Earthsea story prefigures themes from The Farthest Shore, not just in its underworld imagery but also in the idea that the greatest wizard is not the one with the most power, but the one who knows when not to use it. I love the narrative voice she uses for Earthsea so much. She nailed the mythic style on the first try!


"The Rule of Names" (1964)

This piece introducing Earthsea's concept of true names has a more playful tone that reminds me of The Hobbit. Le Guin worries that the depiction of Yevaud doesn't quite align with the books, but to me the story has the feel of an in-universe tall tale so I don't really see a continuity problem.


"Winter's King" (1969/1975)

The brainwashed king of Karhide travels to a distant planet for mind-healing. Due to time dilation, she returns when her infant heir is old and her kingdom is falling apart. This was written before The Left Hand of Darkness and the original version of the story didn't include the Gethenians' androgyny because Le Guin hadn't settled on it yet. This 1975 revision not only uses the gender-role worldbuilding from TLHoD but further refines its depiction, using she/her pronouns for the Gethenians. In the author's note, Le Guin mentions that her use of he/him in TLHoD had been criticized; she concedes that treating masculine pronouns as generic is "worth reflecting upon" and says her revision to this story is an effort to "redress that injustice slightly." (She also says she doesn't like 'it' or neopronouns and goes on about how difficult it is that English doesn't have the right gender-neutral words. In retrospect it's really hard to understand why it took so long for people to realize they/them was an option, but such is history—things aren't obvious until they happen.) Reading these author's notes as a teenager was the first time I knew that Le Guin was a writer who looked back at her own work and considered that maybe she'd made mistakes and could do better, so you could say it was the seed of this re-read project for me.

I don't find the story itself as memorable as the circumstances surrounding it. It's conceptually similar to "Semley's Necklace" but more complicated (needlessly, I think) and less impactful, especially because it's our second trip to this well in the same collection. Like yeah, time dilation, we did this already!


"The Good Trip" (1970)

An LSD trip isn't what it seems. Boy does this story not work. She's trying to do psychedelic stream of consciousness and it's way out of her wheelhouse. The strength of her writing is in its clarity and carefully chosen words, and if you throw that out the result is a mess. In the author's note she says this story led someone to accuse her of jumping on the bandwagon since everyone else was writing about drugs at the time. She says that wasn't her intention but hastens to add that the story isn't anti-drugs. Or pro-drugs. Okay, so what is the story trying to say? Neither the text nor the commentary make it clear.


"Nine Lives" (1969)

Two men on a remote mining station are joined by a set of ten clones. This story reminds me a lot of some of Star Trek's Borg storylines (what Voyager did with it, especially) and in retrospect I think it influenced my own writing. The idea of independence and distinctiveness as a prerequisite for love is something that resonates with me. Seeing someone as an inseparable part of yourself isn't love, it's suffocating enmeshment. Love is being separate from someone while reaching across the gap, and that's what this story is about.

The story was originally published in Playboy (maybe they liked the way it plays with the taboo of clone-incest/selfcest), who asked her to use the name U.K. Le Guin so it would not be obvious the author was a woman. She says this was the only time that ever happened to her and she's surprised she went along with it: "it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see it was also important."