Worlds
Far Away, Yet Close
by
Wendy Darling
 |
The
Birthday of the World and Other Stories
by Ursula K. Le Guin |
| BOOK
LINKS |
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
(2002)
by Ursula K. Le Guin
After
reading The Left Hand
of Darkness, I got a little obsessive about it, concocting
fan fiction in my head, speculating endlessly about different
aspects of Gethen, and of course rereading different sections
of the book. I basically wanted more and when I read something
about Le Guin having written Left Hand short stories and
this book containing one of them, the book was in my hands before
I knew it!
The
Birthday of the World and Other Stories starts out with what
I think is a really great Left Hand story. "Coming
of Age in Karhide" moves beyond some of the limitations of
the original book; it's written in the first person by a Gethenian
and includes explicit depictions of their sexuality, including
his first time in Kemmer. In the novel, sexuality remains for
the most part something described mainly in excerpted field reports;
the main Gethenian character, Estraven, works hard to repress
any personal information about himself and supressing his Kemmer
feelings as well. Not so in "Coming of Age in Karhide,"
where a Gethenian looks back on his youth and celebrates the confusion
of his adolescence and the glory of coming into himself (or herself,
as the first time he comes into Kemmer, he becomes female). I
must admit, this story played out some of the things I wondered
about when I read the book.
But
Birthday has a lot more to offer than just this one Left
Hand story — so much more! Le Guin, in typical fashion,
offers up stories which are science fiction with an anthropological
bent, written from the perspective of actual field anthopologists
or written as excerpts from native diaries or written to draw
out important aspect of various societies. The main focus of several
stories seems to be sexuality, gender and relationships —
and the fact that not all societies must be set up the way the
way Westerners (or anybody on Earth) see as normal. There are
societies dominated by women or ones where men and women are strictly
separated (e.g. they exist in totally separate societies) and
one where "pair-bonding" normally occurs as a foursome.
As usual, by drawing up alien societies, Le Guin displays a knack
for getting at some fundamental issues of our own society and
human nature.
While
there are three stories which don't really deal with gender, and
all of them are very well done, it's only one I must absolutely
mention, and it's the very last in the collection, "Paradises
Lost." This story is without a doubt in my mind, one of the
most shockingly profound things I've ever read in my life. And
I don't mean that in the sense of the story is "heavy"
or contains a lot of philosophy or noble speeches. Quite simply,
the main plot of the story — humans on a space ship on a
generations-long trip to another world, who've never known anything
but life on the spaceship "world" — is one that
is so original and yet at the same so obvious that for me it was
like Le Guin took cleaning fluid and somehow washed away paradigms
and mental barriers I didn't even know I had. I read it thinking
"Of course, that makes sense!" and "Logical, logical..."
but at the same time entralled because I really didn't know what
would come out of the situation. And then when the end came, it
wasn't at all what I expected, but something infinitely deeper
and finer. This last story is absolutely exceptional and reason
alone to read the whole book.
About
the Author:
Wendy Darling (nickname Wiebke Fesch) is a web designer, fanfic author,
and editor of Inception. She lives in Atlanta, GA, where she is self-employed,
operating her own web design business, Metro Girl. Wendy is co-author of a Wraeththu
Mythos novel called Breeding
Discontent, and is an editor with Immanion Press. You can reach Wendy
at wdarling@abraxis.com. |
