A collection of short stories in which Le Guin once again imagines alternative civilizations, or in one case an alternative history, with a strong feminist bend. My favorite of them was "Solitude", about a girl who grows up on an alien planet studied by her mother, a Hainish observer, but ends up going so thoroughly native that she has trouble fitting into "normal" society again. ( )

This is a big book, which took me about a month to get through. In the end, I didn't really love it as much as I had expected to. Which is not to say that the stories aren't reasonably entertaining and consistently well crafted or don't offer impressive characterization and intriguing settings.

These mostly new to me stories just didn't grab me as much as Le Guin at her best has consistently done. "Ether, Or" which follows the points of view of an eclectic group of residents of a town of varying location, was my favorite ( )

For many years, I avoided Ursula Le Guin, on the mistaken assumption that she was essentially a fantasy author, by virtue of her Wizard of Earthsea novels. It was not until later that I discovered her science fiction work and grew to enjoy it immensely. But Le Guin is not your prototypical science fiction (or it turns out, fantasy) author. She does not write space opera, but instead focuses on character development and human (or alien) interaction. You could label her work anthropological or sociological science fiction, with the fact that aliens, or space travel, or wizards are involved, becoming almost secondary.

I had previously read the author’s collection of novellas, The Found and the Lost, and was generally pleased with the content. This collection of short stories, on the other hand, was largely a dud. The short stories are grouped into two volumes, according to the author, based on the premise of “Where on Earth” and “Outer Space, Inner Lands”, whatever that means. I found the stories in volume one to be very disappointing. In fact, I discovered that there was actually overlap between the two collections. My least favorite “novella”, Buffalo Gals, also appears in this collection of short stories, as did The Matter of Seggri, which was in volume two. In the forward, the author bemoaned the task of choosing between her many potential inclusions, and then includes two “novella” which had already been published in a recently released book. This mystifies me. Most troubling, Buffalo Gals was not nearly the worst selection.

Volume two began promisingly, with a turn toward more of the author’s trademark anthropological science fiction, leading me to believe that “Outer Space, Inner Lands” somehow referred to science fiction. Soon, however, volume two veered into work very similar to that contained in volume one. It made her whole justification for separation of the works nonsensical.

I have to say this was my least favorite of the many works I have read by Ms. Le Guin. ( )

Review pending ( )