10. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Legion

I am not a fan of short stories.  Either they don't really work or I want more.  I also find they slow down my reading because I need time to transition from one book to the next.  My plan here was to read a few at a time, but I ended up plowing through.  I have written specific notes about each story below.

Overall, these stories reminded me of what a great writer Le Guin is.  Among other things, she is a master of setting and evocative details that pull you in.  Unfortunately for me, she is also to smart and too driven by real issues to leave it at that.  I wish she would write a simple adventure book with wizards fighting each other, but her stuff always goes deeper and way darker which is why I take a long time between books.  In this collection we get both the fun and the deep, with a few misses along the way to remind us that she is indeed human.

Each story has a nice little intro by Le Guin, which helps to put them in context and get a sense of playful personality (as a writer at least) in 1975.

Semley's Necklace - interesting study of alien life forms, time passing too long

April in Paris - time travel via an old apt in Paris

The Masters - intolerance of science in a post "Firefall" world where everything is done by rote and a builder starts to figure out how numbers and algebra work and gets his hands smashed in punishment

Darkness Box - neat story about a magical world where time is stopped - one brother with a hypogriff goes and fights his invading brother on the beach over and over --  and a little boy gives a box of darkness that starts time.

The Word of Unbinding - really cool in the Earthsea archipelago world, a wizard is attacked from behind and imprisoned from some rumoured invading and destroying wizard and he uses all his magic to get out and defeat him.

The Rule of Names - another really cool won in the Earthsea archipelago world about an island with a kind of weird, incompetent wizard (every island should have one) who turns out to be a powerful dragon on the dl.  These two stories remind me of how good LeGuin is at fantasy world building and details and how great Earthsea is before it gets so dark.

Winter King - from the same universe as The Left Hand of Darkness, a cool mini-saga about a good young king (a she) who is kidnapped and mindmolded so that she will become a tyrant, her only choice is to abegnate and leave the kingdom to her son.  Wish it had been expanded into a novel.

The Good Trip - ambiguous and not very good description of an acid trip that wasn't or maybe it was.  Had an unconvincing back story of a wife lost to depression.

Nine Lives - very cool story about a team of ten elite clones on a distant planet working with two normal, flawed humans on a mining project.  When nine of the clones are killed in an accident, how does the tenth now respond?

A Trip to the Head - a surreal experiment, I guess that helped her to break through writer's block but it's a mess and not enjoyable. LeGuin says in the intro that the only drug she has done is tobacco and I believe her because whenever she tries to go trippy, it's bad.

Vaster than Empires and More Slow - a really cool story about a group of deep space explorers all with various mental issues (because nobody else would volunteer for a program where they come back hundreds of years later) who land on a planet that is all grasses and plants.  One of the members, Osden is an extreme empath who is a total asshole.  As his behaviour starts to make the rest of the team fall back into their own various pathologies, he is sent out to explore on his own.  He is attacked and the group all start to fear that something is out there, though their instruments show no sentient life.  This is a really neat examination of isolation versus connection and how knowing everyone else's feelings could create negatively spiralling resonances. 

The Stars Below - an astronomer is burnt out of his home and observatory for heresy and is hidden in an abandoned mine by a sympathetic noble.  There he discovers a small group of ex-miners who befriend him and he learns to look downward for the stars.  A neat, tight little tale that highlights one of Le Guin's many strengths: her ability to elicit rage in the reader at the forces of social repression.  Fuck those priests!

The Field of Vision - A trio of astronauts return from a trip to Mars where the discovery of some rooms appear to have killed on, rendered another deaf and unresponsive and blinded a third (though sort of the opposite; everything is too bright).  It seems that they have seen god, the room was a kind of proselytizing space.

Direction of the Road - another really innovative and tight piece told from the perspective of a tree. The conceit is that it believes it is moving towards and away all the things that come to it.  Very anti-car.  I like.

The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas - a political parable (that she calls a psychomyth) about a near utopian society whose happiness and existence is dependent on an abused child kept in a locked room.  Definitely a critique of liberal complacency and moves neatly into the last story...

The Day before the Revolution - kind of an origin story of the world of The Dispossessed, it looks into the final days of Odo who was the leader of the Revolution that led to the anarchic world of Odo.  It's more about getting old but neat to see some of the ideas that are more fully fleshed out in the novel.