This volume collects eight of Le Guin’s longer short stories, most of them set in the Ekuman shared universe. Most of the stories share an anthropological theme, with an outsider’s eye on the societies we encounter.
Coming of Age in Karhide explores adolescence in Gethen, the world of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness and ins and outs of sexuality in a world where gender-fluidity is part of their biology. There’s not much of a plot, but Le Guin is just having fun exploring the world through the eyes of its natives, rather than a rather biased Terran.
The Matter of Seggri has a number of Ekumen mobiles across time visiting the world of Seggri, where there is a very unbalanced ratio of male to female births, and the males are sequestered away in their own “castles” and brought out by the dominant female population to provide sex and stud services, and it follows how the society changes after first contact. It’s a fascinating study into the ethics of first contact (different Ekumen visitors make different decisions on whether or not to reveal their origins) and into such an unbalanced society and one way that it could possibly develop.
Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways are both set of the world of O, where the population have (by our standards) very complicated four-way marriages. The former involves a man of the country who falls in love with a man from a craggy oceanside fastness but who struggles to make his way in the village, questioning if love is enough to survive. While the latter involves a remote, mountain village and bending the customs to breaking point for the sake of love.
The world of Solitude is a difficult one. It’s another society where men and women are split along gender lines, with women forming communities, and when boys reach adolescence they’re expelled and have to live off the land, fighting rather than working communally. An Ekumen observer comes to this world to try and understand it, bringing her children with her. Unfortunately for her, her daughter fits in rather too well.
Old Music and the Slave Women is one that I skipped here, because I’ve read it before and found it hard going. I’m not really interested in exploring the horrors of slave-driven societies. If memory serves, it’s a good and powerful story, but not one that I want to re-read.
The title story, The Birthday of the World is one that Le Guin says she doesn’t know if it’s in the Ekumen or not. I could go either way on it. It’s an interesting society where the rulers are literally regarded as gods, with an added dose of incest. There’s prophecy and a military coup and a lot of interest.
The final story, Paradises Lost, is definitely not Ekumen. It’s a generation ship story of the middle generations who are destined to live and die on the ship having never seen Earth and who will be old when the ship reaches its destination. It shows us how the society is constructed and designed to be entirely stable, and how religious influence was controlled, but how a new religion eventually subverts this.
Le Guin is a master at constructing interesting and quirky societies, and she never forgets the place minorities within them, whether those are ethnic, religious or sexual in nature. This is a great collection from a master of the form, with a keen eye for anthropology.
