‘Direction of the Road’ by Ursula Le Guin

Another queen of the short story. I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin since my teens, and rereading and discovering entirely different meanings as I grow into her stories. I could have chosen a baker’s dozen of stories just by Ursula – the only author I ever wrote a fan letter to (so far!)

I was looking for Sea Road, but it too has disappeared. Most of the stories in Buffalo Gals are slight and mischievous, and ‘Direction of Road’ is too, but also mind-bending in its exploration of relativity, as a tree grows and experiences the change of pace as walkers become horse riders become jalopy owners become an entire traffic jam, for whom the tree must accomplish the increasingly complex task of appearing to grown closer/bigger and diminish so that the poor humans think they are actually going somewhere.

First published in Orbit 14, 1984, and collected in Buffalo Gals, Roc Fantasy, 1990

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

“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

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Brendan Behan once said in an interview with Anthony Cronin that as a writer, he was a nurse, because “in my plays and in my book, I try to show the world to a certain extent what is the matter with it.” Ursula K. Le Guin, similarly, had as a focus of her writing both philosophical and political criticisms of the world as she saw it. Her opposition to the Vietnam War was expressed in The Word for World is Forest; she delivered stinging criticism of consumer capitalism, specifically as it affected writers, in a speech at the National Book Awards in 2014 (“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”) Though politically a pacifist anarchist, Le Guin did not necessarily insist that she had the right answer, or even that there was one; her novel, The Dispossessed, acquired a later subtitle of ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’. She was also very influenced by philosophy and wrote a translation (or a “rendition”) of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Chinese Taoist philosophy. This combination of politicised philosophical reflection, or philosophical political reflection, characterises ’The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.

The story takes place during the Festival of Summer in Omelas, a city “bright-towered by the sea”, with mountains in the distance that “burned with white-gold fire”, and a great water-meadow that is the destination of all the festive processions. Everything is beautiful and idyllic, and the citizens are ‘decorous”, “grave” and “merry”. Hardly has the story started when Le Guin breaks the fourth wall, raising questions about the assumption, the “bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates”, that “only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” Unable to describe the city in a satisfactorily convincing way, Le Guin invites the reader to participate in the world-building, to imagine Omelas “as your own fancy bids”. She proposes ideas for it, all intended to reflect the fundamental, central happiness of the citizens, thought she fears that “Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody”, and repeats her encouragement to the reader to come with their own ideas; “If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate”. Once the reader has reached the point of believing in Omelas and its people, Le Guin asks to add “one more thing.”

The idea for a story about the psychomyth of the scapegoat came from reading the American philosopher William James (older brother of Henry), who hypothesised a world in which the permanent happiness of millions could be achieved but only at the cost of “a certain lost soul at the far-off edge of things”, condemned to live “a life of lonely torment”. This is Le Guin’s “one more thing”: in a basement under a public building in Omelas a child is kept prisoner, abject and abandoned. Everyone knows that the child is there, other children are brought to see it so that they understand that a price is being paid for happiness. Most of the citizens forget their initial shock and repulsion at the sight of the child, and the realisation that nothing is to be done to relieve its misery. Some do not forget, and these are the ones who walk away from Omelas.

The ‘meaning’ of their departure is unclear. The story could be understood as a stark parable of consumer capitalist society, where the only response to realising that there is a price being paid out of sight is to withdraw. But given how reflective and articulate Le Guin was, it seems unlikely that she would simply recommend flight from an intractable reality. The darkness into which those who leave walk might be the great difficulty of imagining how, based on the world we currently have, to achieve something that is fundamentally fair and happy, the darkness is the as yet-unimagined better world, and those who walk (perhaps those who recognise that there is no inevitability about the way things are) “seem to know where they are going.”

‘Things’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin explains that, when first published, the editor changed the story’s title to ‘The End’. Although still fitting, I agree with Le Guin’s re-assertion of her original title. Although set against the backdrop of the apocalypse, this is not a story about endings: this is a story about things.

In a small, seaside town, an (unspecified) end is nigh. Everyone has resigned themselves to their fate: either taking to the hills to weep or the streets to rage. Everyone, that is, except one brick-maker. A stolid man, he cannot abandon his creations, and isn’t drawn to the mob. Instead, he finds himself drawn to the faintest possibility of hope: the idea that something may exist across the waters. While the rest of his village burns and fades, he begins the patently futile task of building a bridge across the ocean. He is aided by the sole other remaining villagers, a widow with a small child, and the three of them attempt to build something, even as the world ends.

Unsurprisingly, given the author, this is a beautiful story. I have a hard time reading it through misty eyes. It showcases the disregarded perseverance of those who quietly strive to create in a world full of destruction. The choice of bricks as the central ‘thing’ is inspired. Solid, unspectacular, unremarkable, and the foundation for everything else, even hope.

First published in Orbit 6, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970. Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975

‘The Birthday of the World’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

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

‘The Fliers of Gy’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

I could fill this list with Le Guin stories, but ‘The Fliers of Gy’, in Changing Planes, a later short story collection, is my favourite. So many of Le Guin’s stories have an anthropological lens; in ‘The Fliers of Gy’, the people observed by the visiting narrator ‘have plumage, not hair’, but she notes they are ‘staid, steady’ and ‘traditional’. Amongst them, shunned, misunderstood and yet occasionally revered, are the winged people, those who can grow fully-fledged wings on their backs and fly – analogues of anyone who is chosen by fate to stick out in their society and lead, irrevocably, a different life.

Those with wings move between ecstasy at their ability and terror of it, especially because soaring above the earth is not without its perils – while you can sleep as you fly, you might also experience a wing breakdown, fall to earth and die. I’ve always loved this story because it’s about whether you answer the call of fate. If you choose not to, you avoid risk, danger and failure but you also lose the superpower of flying, the dreaming and the dizzy heights. And what does Le Guin think? She plays her cards close to her chest here, but seems to suggest the risk is worth it.

First published in Changing Planes, Harcourt, 2003/Gollancz, 2005, and collected in The Unreal and the Real, Gallery, 2016

‘Paradises Lost’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

‘Paradises Lost’ is one of the most compassionate and humane of Le Guin’s short stories, but if you’re snobby about sci-fi you’ll never see this because you won’t want to read about generation ships and interplanetary voyages. It’s a perfect example of how science fiction can be full of heart and expand one’s universe, whilst also being a great vehicle for asking questions about, in this case, our planet’s future. The children on this generation ship voyage only know Earth from virtual reality tapes – they have been on-board the ship their whole lives, heading towards a new habitable planet. But there’s a cult on the ship who don’t want to arrive at the new planet; they believe the journey itself is the purpose and want to cut off all connections to a terrestrial existence. For them, the voyage is life itself; life on Earth or other planets is a danger, or even illusory. This is just great plotting, and I wish someone would adapt it for television. There are conspiracies, propaganda, a love story, the question of what kind of home humans need and deserve – and just all-round brilliance. Put your genre snobbery aside and give it a try.

First published in The Birthday of the World, Harper Collins, 2002

‘The Bones of the Earth’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Set in the fantasy world of Earthsea, this fable of teachers and pupils, of surrogate fathers and sons tells the tale of how an old wizard and his young apprentice stop an earthquake.

Le Guin writes fantasy like no other. Mythic wisdom? Le Guin has it in spades. But sometimes it seems she is not that interested in the fantasy part. For so much of this story the characters are concentrating on household chores: tending to the goats, cleaning the kitchen.

For this reason it is hard to find a single quote that does the story justice. The writing on every page is clean and beautiful. Such as in this moment just before the climax, where the logic of the words descends into doubt as the old wizard descends into the earth:

He had time to regret the sunlight and the sea wind, and to doubt the spell, and to doubt himself, before the earth rose up around him, dry, warm, and dark.

From Tales From Earthsea, Harcourt, 2001/Orion, 2002

‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

There are some stories that feel almost like a wounding. Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ was one for me, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s ‘Hell Screen’ is another. I can’t think of many stories that left me feeling as burned as ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. It’s a complicated story but in one sense, it’s a warning about utilitarianism, the suffering borne by others and complicity therein. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, it took me a while to realise that great evil almost always emerges from and is enabled by a process of abstraction. Murder becomes just a statistic read out on the evening news like the football results; an act that aids the murderers and erases the victims and their families. It’s much more difficult for ideologues to justify the unjustifiable when the actualities of what they did is revealed. I have a chapter in my recent memoir Inventory (Chatto & Windus / FSG) that recounts a number of killings during the conflict not in abstracted terms but according to specifics. So instead of ‘a Catholic or Protestant was shot today’, we are told the reality of, say, “a family were sitting watching Coronation Street on the television with their dinners on their laps and a trembling teenage stranger walked into their house and shot the father in the face.” Though Le Guin’s speculative fiction is a different world to mine, she was immensely influential for me, especially with this story. She tells us, ‘Do not allow yourself to look away. This is the cost. Are you prepared for someone else to carry that? And if you are, what does that make you?’

First published in New Directions 3, Nelson Doubleday/SFBC, 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

‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K Le Guin

The capaciousness of Le Guin is likewise a problem. The most famous of her stories is ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, which incorporates the moral questioning and philosophical weight of her speculative fictions, but also her ability to make stories that already feel like myth, graven into time. Her Earthseatrilogy does this, as does her now increasingly politically crucial novel, The Left Hand Of Darkness, set on a planet where gender is transitory and people remain gender-neutral until certain times. Perhaps you’re groaning and thinking this can’t be subtle, but Le Guin pulls it off, always deft in her framing of otherness but also in making quotidian things—cold winters, stone walls, the words exchanged in passing during friendship—appear in turn to make her worlds real. Some of LeGuin’s further short stories in Tales From Earthsea and The Birthday of the World are set in her existing universes, and for anyone who comes to love them they are excellent. Le Guin did the metanovel before David Mitchell was even born! However, here I’d like to stick to standalone stories, and hence…

‘The Eye Altering’ by Ursula K Le Guin

This may not objectively be one of Le Guin’s best or even most notable stories. I remember reading it when I was thirteen or fourteen in a copy of The Compass Rose, an early-ish collection of her short stories. It took me a long time to find it again, because I remembered it as “the one about the paintings” and I misattributed it to Bradbury, of all people, for years. Has she done better work? Yes, but this is one I came back to and thought about, even when I didn’t know it was hers, and long after I grew up from that young reader into the sort of person who writes about paintings myself a lot. So Le Guin has come full circle with me, and so I pick this story.

Originally written in 1975 for a workshop given at Portland State University. First published in The Altering I, Norstrilia Press, 1976. Collected in The Compass Rose, Pendragon Press, 1982. Also available in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose, Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2015.

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K LeGuin

Another too obvious choice?

Maybe. But it’s still a good one.

I shouldn’t like this at all. It doesn’t do any of the things that I want a story to do: no characters, as such; no dialogue; no plot, in any normal sense of the word. Kinda preachy.

But what a lesson it declaims!

LeGuin knows exactly what she is doing here, and the place she takes us, the question she makes us confront – would you walk away from Omelas? – is profound and central to our claim to humanity. It is a question that seems more vital than ever.

What is your final answer?

First published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg, Doubleday, 1973. It has been collected more times than there are Donald Trump lies

‘Unchosen Love’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Sex, for everybody, on every world, is a complicated business”, wrote Ursula, and she wrote a body of stories exploring sex and gender by taking it to other worlds where things are entirely different from our own, and yet strangely familiar. Sometimes I want to laugh at the strange concepts she comes up with, and the ersatz scifi ‘foreign planet’ names; but mostly I can spend a long time wondering what she is really telling us about fidelity, trust, intimacy, sex, love and relationships. This story asks: what does it mean if one person loves more than another? And how much is the relationship worth in comparison to the people within it? What does it mean if a marriage begins with a dishonesty?

First appeared in Amazing Stories, Fall 1994. Collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, HarperCollins/Gollancz, 2002/3

‘Brothers and Sisters’ by Ursula le Guin

She rules. This is just a taste of what she can do with a story. These realist tales make a mockery of the ghettoisation of sci-fi as genre. Transcendent realism perhaps, but her distancing devices work to polish the mirror of self-reflection.

First published in The Little Magazine, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, 1976. Collected in Orsinian Tales, Harper & Row, 1976, most recently Harper Perennial, 2004