Microreview [book]: Microreview [book]: The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. LeGuin, Vol. 2: Outer Space, Inner Lands

The Meat 

As I ranted at some length in my review of book one of this two-volume collection of LeGuin's short stories, anthologies are suspect for all sorts of reasons, and when I read this volume, I discovered yet another, one moreover that's a bit of a paradox: volume two is, more or less, consistently excellent in the quality of its stories. How is this paradoxically a problem with anthologies, you ask? Why, because volume one was considerably more uneven, with a few truly brilliant stories dimmed just a bit by those surrounding them (mediocrity by association?), while Outer Space, Inner Lands is (just?) very good from start to finish. In other words, volume two had moments of sheer brilliance which stood in sometimes stark relief to other rather ho-hum stories in the collection, whereas volume two has no ho-humitude...but also, arguably, no such stand-out moments either.

   On the other hand, it would be remiss of me to complain about the fact that volume two was so consistently good. And there are some stories I personally found more appealing than others. For instance, there was "Semley's Necklace," which LeGuin, in her forceful and witty introduction (which while an essay is in some ways really almost a short story in itself, and a good one at that) somewhat reluctantly concedes could be labeled 'science fantasy'. She's quite self-deprecating about it, essentially claiming she only wrote it because at the time she didn't yet know any better, but she was selling herself, and the entrancing Semley, way short with that assessment.

Artist's rendering of the eponymous ultra-valuable necklace
(one school of thought claims it may not be the original, however)

   "Semley's Necklace" shares a theme with several others in the collection, namely speculative explorations of the wrenching sense of temporal displacement, or to put it in more human terms, the loss of all those one loves, that would surely come with NAFAL (no, this isn't a clever amalgamation of Raphael Nadal's name, though it would be pretty cool if that caught on; it stands for "nearly as fast as light") travel. We've all seen Avatar, and we accept too readily—because Cameron, the King of the World, demands it—that it would be a simple matter to jump on a ship, get frozen, and spend the six years or whatever in a heartbeat, and we all think it's awesome because the people on the ship won't have aged hardly at all! LeGuin refocuses our attention on that dreadful gap in perception...suppose you left your parents or lover or cat or whatever back on Earth, and once your journey was complete, you spend a few years on the planet and head right back to Earth because you miss those loved ones you'd left behind. Bam! Dare to imagine all that would have happened in those twelve or fifteen or twenty years, and I think you'll see, as LeGuin certainly has, the wisdom in saying, as you depart, "We are dead, you and I"—for even if both you and your beloved still live at the end of that awful separation, what you were is dead, and you cannot ever hope to recover the shattered synchronization of your lives.

   LeGuin believes that the final two stories in the collection are the finest, but I remain unconvinced of that. They're not bad—none of these stories is less than very good—but "She Unnames Them" is merely cute, and "Sur", in particular, was of only mild interest. How she could choose their blandness over the fiery challenge of, say, "The Matter of Seggri" puzzles me. "Seggri" intrigues with its bold speculations about how a world might develop in which female human(oid)s outnumber males 16 to 1, and its wry lack of judgment, as though forcing all the men and women who read it to wonder with her, "Which world is better?" Ours, with today's growing hope of equality, not to mention deeply meaningful relationships between men and women, overshadowed by the dismally violent record of all human history, or theirs, with the (not necessarily?) terrible fate of the men balanced against their apparently more or less eternally peaceful society?

   Fans of Earthsea will be intoxicated by "The Rule of Names", about a certain critically important if minor—though by no means small-statured—character from the first book, and the socks of William James fans (if anyone cares about him anymore) will be blown clean off by "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". I would count myself among the likely walkers, so to speak, but I freely admit such a utopia would be hard for almost anyone to reject.

   Ultimately, if there is one theme running through nearly all these stories, it is that of loss, its consequences and our painful efforts to recover, rebuild, remake ourselves.  And in a strange way, this theme felt more immediate to me, more 'real', in this volume, rather than in book one, where many of the stories are much more transparently about the 'real' world.  LeGuin herself, in the intro, playfully leaves it up to the reader to determine which book is which in this two-volume series called The Unreal and the Real...my TLDR answer is: this **** is Real!

**** = 'book', of course.

The Math

Baseline score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being "all good", +1 for Selmey's tragic and incomprehensible journey and the shudders of tearful sympathy it induced in me

Penalties: -1 for LeGuin making it crystal clear she and I don't see eye to eye on her work, e.g., claiming that what are probably the two least interesting/challenging stories are her favorites

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 Well and totally worth your time and attention

["8" is the new "great"! Check out an explanation of our utterly uninflated scores here.]

Microreview [book]: The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. LeGuin, Vol. One: Where on Earth

The Meat

As a general rule, I'm not fond of anthologies. Why raid the refrigerator for a bunch of different random stuff, all mixed together and all of which you've tasted already? Isn't it more satisfying to find something you've never had before, or choose just one thing you know you like and eat until you drop? Plus, if I wanted to listen to the greatest hits of a band, I could just go back to their previously released CDs, where each of those songs has certainly appeared; the thought of shelling out money for a 'new' album that's a mere collection of bits and pieces of other albums (especially if I already own them!) doesn't appeal to me at all. Who, exactly, is the target audience for anthologies? Avid LeGuin fans will have read most or all of these stories before and might feel cheated, whereas neophytes probably won't understand how these particular stories function and fit into her larger oeuvre (which is Pretentious-talk for "body of work"). Who, then, is left who might be able to appreciate the much-maligned anthology?

Me! I'm what you might call a lapsed, moderately avid fan of LeGuin, or more specifically, of her novels; when I was younger, I had little interest in short stories as a medium, and none at all in short stories about the "real world": in other words, any stories not overtly devoted to escapist science fiction or fantasy themes were dead to me. So whenever I heard about or saw another story in LeGuin's fictional but (usually) all too drearily real Orsinia or the like, my eyes glazed over and I reached reflexively for one of her more straightforward science fiction novels instead.

You've probably guessed that I really liked this volume of short stories, so you may well expect me, at this point, to say something like "what a fool I was—I wish I'd been open-minded enough to appreciate those stories years ago", but in fact, I don't regret how things turned out. It's sort of like the first time I tried to read Ulysses, mostly just to prove I could; turns out that's not a very good motivation for reading something. I hated it, and stopped reading almost immediately in disgust. But a few years passed, and then suddenly it just felt right to read it...that's pretty much what happened now, with my belated discovery of LeGuin's less science-fictiony stories.




Sure, like all anthologies it suffers from some unevenness in story quality; LeGuin has a tendency to write in a fascinating style, a hybrid of minimalism and just slightly pretentious pithiness; when the story can support that kind of emotional payload, it's powerful stuff, and doesn't feel pretentious at all, but in some cases, the stories weren't quite engaging enough. For example (from Brothers and Sisters, one of my least favorite stories of the collection): "Her sorrow boasted of itself. She rose to the occasion like a lark to the morning. His silence and her outcry meant the same thing: the unendurable made welcome. The younger son stood listening. They bore him down with their grief as large as life. Unconscious, heedless, broken like a piece of chalk, that body, his brother, bore him down with the weight of the flesh, and he wanted to run away, to save himself." Taken out of (or even in!) context, this strikes me as a bit overwrought.

What's so remarkable about LeGuin, though, is that this same style, in some cases, has real emotional power: she had me in tears, several times, with some of her finer stories. Real tears, mind you, necessitating a Kleenex and everything—when's the last time a book actually managed to move you to tears? Moreover, even though none of the stories are overtly S/F in nature, LeGuin does include some fascinating starting premises for several, including a town that magically relocates within Oregon from time to time ("Ether, OR"), and a type of technology that creates a visualization of another's conscious thought, which in her telling is being used, behind the Iron Curtain at least, to crush opposition even on the level of thought ("The Diary of the Rose", probably my favorite story of the entire volume); both stories are excellent, especially the latter, with its heart-rending examination of the rapport building between a doomed patient and a doctor powerless to intervene.

Indeed, LeGuin shines brightest when she's describing human relationships, especially those within a family; she's not as convincing when she discusses big sweeping ideas in a more abstract way. Her treatment of Soviet-era Eastern Europe, and especially the glorious, idealistic tearing down of the Iron Curtain in "Unlocking the Air", feels too simplistic, almost binary in its oppositions of soldiers and poets, guns and words, evil and good. Yet even within that very story, she delivers some passages, concerning the mother-daughter relationship in particular, as fine as anything in her work.

Long ago I eagerly devoured the Earthsea trilogy and most of LeGuin's anthropological S/F stuff, and only now have I reached the point where I could appreciate this volume, a good sampling of the rest of her work, which is quieter, with few explosions and whatnot but, instead, a great deal of ordinary life, in the Virginia Woolf sense. As such, this volume probably won't appeal to everyone; a good test to see if you're 'ready for it' would be to try reading the fourth Earthsea novel, Tehanu (assuming you've read the Earthsea trilogy already). If you throw it down in disgust, I recommend waiting a few years before you pick up this volume of stories; if, however, you find yourself appreciating at least some aspects of Tehanu, then you won't be disappointed by what these stories have to offer.

 

The Ultimate Litmus Test for LeGuin: if you don't hate Tehanu, you'll probably like Where on Earth!

The Math

Baseline score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for managing to wring tears out of this jaded cynic

Penalties: -1 for overwrought language and simplistic good vs. evil depictions of Eastern Europe

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

[Don't think of this as a C- or something, because it's not; in fact, 7/10 is quite high for us. You can read about our scoring process here.]