“Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories feel like the definition of the form to me, and her writing played a big part in forming my ideas about what short fiction can do and how they can use apparently simple storytelling to tell us deep truths about ourselves and the world. I love this story, which manages to be both escapist and monstrously real and totally heartbreaking. It calls for courage and demands hope.
First published in New Dimensions, 1973, and collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975. Also available in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2015
A Personal Anthology 