Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Dec 31, 2023
Summary
A collection of Ursula Le Guin's novellas.
Review
Subtitled The Collected Novellas, I had read several of these before in other settings. They can be grouped into three fairly clear categories:
- Hainish – light SF stories dealing with Le Guin’s Hainish universe, and here particularly with Hain itself and two applicants to the Ekumen – Werel and Yeowe, both slave-based societies proceeding at different paces. Le Guin looks at the situation from pretty much every angle, trying to see it reasonably fairly from a number of perspectives. I don’t recall other stories set on Hain itself, so that was interesting. The concept and series of stories works well, but feels relatively dry.
- Earthsea – a handful of stories exploring or filling in gaps in the Earthsea canon, such as how Roke was founded and what happened to it after the Earthsea books.
- General – these are, broadly, two initial stories – one SF and one fantasy, “Buffalo Girls Won’t You Come Out Tonight”. I found the inclusion of that latter odd, since it’s so much better known than the rest. The other story in this category is the final one, an SF story about an arkship (with a nice tip of the hat to Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky). This story felt a little more like a fully sketch of a novel than as an intended novella, if only because there are initially so very many section breaks.
I’d never really thought about Le Guin as an author particularly focused on gender. It’s been a topic for her, most famously in The Left Hand of Darkness, and she’s written about how she initially defaulted to male characters. but I was struck here by how many of the stories here center on gender or make it a key consideration. Perhaps that’s in part because so many of the stories center on the Hain/Werel/Yeowe triad in which gender is important. Le Guin is generally deft with it, so the focus didn’t feel monotonous, but it was striking.
Overall, the stories are masterful, but, as often with Le Guin, a touch on the cold side. Extremely well written, but everyone is so controlled – even when out of control – that you begin to wish someone would just burst loose. That’s Le Guin for you, though, and I was very glad to dig into these fine novellas. Oddly, while I have nicely produced e-book, it now seems available only in print and audio forms.
