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Changing Planes (2003)

par Ursula K. Le Guin

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1,740519,856 (3.82)78
"All Le Guin's stories are...metaphors for the one human story; all her fantasy planets are this one. Le Guin is a quintessentially American writer, of the sort for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing." In this collection of short stories, Sita Dulip from Cincinnati finds a method of transcending the miserable experience of flying. A mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, takes her not to Denver but to bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own and sometimes open doors into the alien. Changing Planes is by turns funny, disturbing, and thought provoking.… (plus d'informations)
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Affichage de 1-5 de 51 (suivant | tout afficher)
I can't write useful reviews for LeGuin because I love everything she writes. ( )
  mmparker | Oct 24, 2023 |
This is a collection of short pieces, not even so much stories as observations on various places, assembled by Ursula Le Guin. The premise is that people can open up their minds to "changing planes"; the method for doing so is different on every plane, but in our plane, it has to be done while literally "changing planes"—you can only do it while waiting for a connecting flight in an airport! (Incidentally, the flap writer seems to think the stories are narrated by Sita Dulip, the Cincinnati(!) woman who invented the method, but that's clearly not the case; the narrator is a friend of hers.) The opening story lays out the basics of the method and is probably the funniest thing I've ever read by Le Guin, an enjoyable satire on the indignities of air travel.

The book reminds me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and that's surely on purpose; Le Guin had a fascination for that kind of fictional travelogue, as she translated a couple of them into English. The chapters are fairly different: some are full-fledged short stories about a trip taken by the narrator, some are explications of other societies and cultures, some are stories from those other planes. Most, of course, reflect back on our world, depicting other ways of being in the world and thus causing us to reflect on ours. My favorite along those lines was "Seasons of the Ansarac," about a plane where the inhabitants are migratory, and only engage in sex while in the north; in the south, they have no sex, no romance. It asks us to consider why our society is organized the way it is, and how it might be different; like many stories in the book, it also contains some brief moments of cultural imperialism. "The Royals of Hegn" is a good satire on our interest in royalty; it takes place on a plane where everyone is royalty except for a couple commoners that the royals are totally obsessed with. (Though like a couple stories in the book, it uses rape as a sort of tossed-off joke in a way that surprised me. I wonder if that would have been true if I had read it in 2003; I think our mores around this have shifted.) I also enjoyed the satire of "Great Joy," about a group of businessmen who remake another plane as a series of holiday-themed vacation sites: Christmas Island, Easter Island, Fourth (of July) Island, and so on.

Some of the sociological ones that were less satirical I found less interesting, but I did particularly like "The Building," a weird story about two societies on one plane, where the members of one continuously work on a building with no clear purpose or structure, and "The Fliers of Gy," about a plane where the occasional inhabitant is born who can fly—and is thus doomed some day to die when their wings spontaneously give out. Only one story did I not enjoy at all, "Woeful Tales from Mahigul," which relates a series of stories from one of the other planes, which I found difficult to find anything interesting in.

At her best, though, as always, Le Guin makes us imagine other worlds and reimagine ourselves. My favorite of these stories was "The Silence of the Asonu," which is about a plane where people gradually cease speaking as they grow older, and the visitors from other planes who desperately try to find meaning in the few words they do speak.
  Stevil2001 | Oct 8, 2023 |
A travelogue of fifteen worlds, haunting or humorous (or both). The bittersweet Seasons of the Ansarac was my favorite, but there is much to savor. If you have commitment issues, this is great way to sample Le Guin. Deceptively heavy. ( )
  SusanBraxton | May 16, 2023 |
A series of vignettes all based on the premise, set out in the first chapter, that inter-planal travel is possible when you're stuck in the liminal time and space of waiting in the airport for a connecting flight. Each subsequent chapter, then, is either a story set in one of the planes or a sort of ethnography of the people/species who live there.
Does what sci-fi does: uses distant times and places to lightly disguise a close examination of our own culture and times. It's a clever idea cleverly carried out, but the cleverness is somewhat lost on me because I can't ever manage to enjoy short story collections, which is very much how this reads. So take my rating with a large pinch of salt - you may very well enjoy it a lot more than I did. ( )
  electrascaife | Apr 10, 2022 |
Interesting book. Reminds me of Borges, although it has been many years since I read any of his stuff. ( )
  smbass | Jan 30, 2022 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 51 (suivant | tout afficher)
Perhaps as a result, the book is marred in parts by signs of haste, bits of undigested spleen and even some uncharacteristic patches of cliché. ... Luckily, there is much in Changing Planes to make up for such lapses. Le Guin's intellectual fertility remains unmatched. Nearly every interplanary destination is a fully realized world, complete with language, nomenclature, landscape and social organization. And then, every so often, one comes across the ultimate seduction, a trademark Le Guin passage, perfect in every phrase and cadence, such as this description of the tenuous, cloudy plane of Zuehe ...
ajouté par lquilter | modifierWashington Post, Elizabeth Ward (Aug 31, 2003)
 

» Ajouter d'autres auteur(e)s (8 possibles)

Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Ursula K. Le Guinauteur principaltoutes les éditionscalculé
Beddows, EricIllustrateurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
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The range of the airplane--a few thousand miles, the other side of the world, coconut palms, glaciers, the poles, the Poles, a lama, a llama, etc.--is pitifully limited compared to the vast extent and variety of experience provided, to those who know how to use it, by the airport.
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We'd all like to see the moonstone towers of Nezihoa, as pictured in Roman's Planary Guide, the endless steppes of mist, the dim forests of the Sezu, the beautiful men and women of the Zuehe, with their slightly translucent clothes and bodies, their pale grey eyes, their hair the color of tarnished silver, so fine the hand does not know when it touches it. ("Confusions of Uni", p.231)
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"All Le Guin's stories are...metaphors for the one human story; all her fantasy planets are this one. Le Guin is a quintessentially American writer, of the sort for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing." In this collection of short stories, Sita Dulip from Cincinnati finds a method of transcending the miserable experience of flying. A mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, takes her not to Denver but to bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own and sometimes open doors into the alien. Changing Planes is by turns funny, disturbing, and thought provoking.

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