A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favorite authors. Her stories are always interesting and all seem to have a lot of thought behind them. For these reasons why I picked up "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," a collection of short stories I had not previously heard of by LeGuin, when I happened to see it it in a used bookstore.

The collection starts out with an essay by LeGuin on many misconceptions the public and literary authorities have with science fiction. It's brief, but LeGuin is very persuasive in her belief that science fiction can accomplish many things that other genres cannot, and that it is often undervalued. She follows this up with notes on each of the eight stories in the volume, which are helpful as a way into the mindset LeGuin had when she wrote them.

The first story is a short and somewhat silly story called "The First Contact With the Gorgonids," about an American couple's contact with extraterrestrial forces in the Australian Outback. It is a bit sharper than I'm used to with LeGuin, and it's rather obvious in its message of cultural relativism. It's alright, but is definitely not my favorite in the collection.

Next is "Newton's Sleep," a much more skillful, although just as sharp, story than "First Contact." LeGuin explains that it's a rebuke of the kind of science fiction which assumes that the clean, shiny, advanced people on a space ship are superior to the dirty unadvanced people on a planet surface. On a future Earth which has collapsed into anarchy, a satellite called SPES launches containing a small collection of very intelligent people trying to create a sort of ideal society in space. However, as the story goes along the people on SPES realized they've carried all of their Earthly baggage with them, including their racism, classism, and other unattractive features, symbolized as visions of the plants, animals, and people they left behind. I found it a quite effective story, subtly and slowly building to its final point about how humanity thinks and acts.

"Ascent Of The North Face" is just weird. It's the journal of an adventurer as he climbs up the outside of a house. It's just weird. It wasn't bad, but I didn't really get the point of it.

"The Rock Than Changed Things" was one of my favorite stories in the collection. It concerns a culture of creatures called obls and their servants, the nurobls. The obls' main form of art is made of complicated rock patterns that also symbolize words. After a flood at Obling University, the nurobls are assigned to reassemble the rock patterns that were knocked askew. One nurobl named Bu discovers that in addition to shape and size, there can also seen to be patterns in the color of the rocks which also say things. This simple discovery changes everything in ways unexpected. LeGuin in her introduction notes her discomfort with this story, given that it's a parable and she dislikes parables, but I kinda liked it because it was clever and inventive.

"The Kerastion" is not really a story, it's more of a character/background sketch. A woman named Chumo watches as her brother is buried. It then flashes back to fill in the background. The world of this story is fascinating, with people divided by their professions, decided when they feel a calling in early adolesence. The people worship the goddess of beauty, who is a jealous goddess who reclaims the most beautiful things to herself. Therefore everything is made of perishable materials and it is considered a great honor when one's creation is destroyed soon after it is made. "The Kerastion" portrayed a world entirely different from our own in only a few short pages, and I was fascinated by it.

The last three stories are related, and are a part of LeGuin's larger Hainish cycle of stories, in which lightspeed communication is possible but lightspeed travel is not, and where long ago a species called the Hain seeded various planets with intelligent life, including humanity. These three stories deal with the creation of the churten drive, a way for ships to go from one place to the other instantaneously. However, in each story there is a complication. "The Shobies' Story" tells of the first crew to test the churten, and their discovery of the churten's flaw: it is necessary to be in perfect unity for it to work. "Dancing to Ganam" takes place several years later, as a former member of the Shoby test crew is persuaded to try another Churten test to a planet called Ganam. Even though they succeed, the explorers on Ganam discover that they still need to stay harmonized in order to understand the culture they discover there. The final story, "Another Story or The Fisherman of the Inland Sea," tells of a scientist from the planet of O who works on developing the churten drive, and how that forces him to sacrifice his possible life on his home planet. The story asks whether it was worth it, and comes up with a more complicated answer than you might expect.

I liked most of the stories I read in "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea." they were interesting and very well-written. Leguin is an expert world-builder, creating alien cultures that seem like they could be real. I liked her little touches: the descriptions of the way marriages on O O(which are between four people) work and how the commander of the mission on "Dancing to Ganam," a childhood hero of the main character, is shown to be a flawed human being without having to make him secretly evil (which seems to be the fate of most childhood heroes in stories like this). I just all around liked them, and I'm going to make a point of reading mor LeGuin in the future