Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

[jamiereadthis]

I can see why this might not get as high a rating as Le Guin’s Hainish or Earthsea books— it’s not SF, its characters aren’t as immediately memorable, the arc, such that it is, doesn’t sort itself chronologically, or along any one line— but she writes “mainstream fiction” by inventing an Eastern European country and following it through centuries of birth, growth, change, failure, survival, death, and it’s powerful, and the way she handles place— so specific, so real, even as it invents, even as it’s universal— is the type of worldbuilding that fascinates me, and it’s a revelation of how to write sociologically but through a microscope lens, tender and personal, and where the line between history and alt-history can go, and it’s worth more than a dozen how-to books on craft or voice, these beautiful glimpses, these stories.

It doesn’t fit into genre, but it found its audience: me. I treasure the gift of this Orsinian world.