My hardback The Birthday of the World was definitely one of the better second-hand finds. Still, it probably sat in the TBR pile a while, as hardbacks are wont to do, not quite so friendly for either tube travel or bedtime reading as a slimmer paperback.
I should have got there sooner. The delight of Ursula Le Guin’s work is in its contrast to much of science fiction, certainly of the pulp-kind, which throws technology into the story but somehow leaves the people largely unaffected. Domestic disputes played out over teleporters, wars in which the weapons are from the twenty-second century, the heroes straight from the nineteenth.
Le Guin turns all that on its head. Her stories don’t tend to feature much technology at all, except as a means of exploring different societies, thought experiments to allow her to investigate entirely novel ways of existing. Her world building, by necessity, has to be exemplary, and of course it is.
On that basis, I could have chosen any of the stories from the collection, but the titular ‘The Birthday of the World’ gets the nod for its epic scope (in short story form), and for being a story about society changing under your feet. Revolutionary indeed.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2000, and then in the collection, The Birthday of the World and other stories, Harper Collins, 2002
A Personal Anthology 