Customer Reviews

Changing Planes

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ursula Le Guin is funny. I mean, she has a deep, cosmic sense of humor --- a good thing for a writer of speculative fiction. Her new book, CHANGING PLANES, has a near-universal complaint for a premise (the tedium of waiting in airports for delayed/canceled flights) and a play on words for the title (instead of changing to flying machines bound for Memphis or Boise, people transport themselves to different planes of existence). The key to "interplanary travel," the anonymous narrator explains, is the very awfulness of the airport experience: "a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom." You might call CHANGING PLANES the ultimate in escape reading.

After this clever set-up, the book becomes a sort of glorified travelogue. Granted, the civilizations on the various planes aren't real --- but they could be, and Le Guin's gift for inventing plausible and detailed alternative societies is as brilliant as ever. In the tradition of her eminent anthropologist parents, she creates a succession of strange lands and customs that overturn our assumptions about what is standard, settled, and normal. It's cultural relativism as you've never seen it before: witty, sophisticated, and gloriously human.

"The Silence of the Asonu" shows us a civilization in which adults don't speak. In "The Nna Mmoy Language," words have ever-shifting meanings ("Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water," a puzzled outsider says) and "Feeling at Home With the Hennebet" challenges our notion of identity and the individual soul. Often the stories are vehicles for social criticism and satire: rampant consumerism ("Great Joy"), genetic engineering gone nuts ("Porridge on Islac"), pointless wars ("The Ire of the Veksi"; "Woeful Tales from Mahigul"), and celebrity worship ("The Royals of Hegn"), to name a few. Some are surreal ("Confusions of Uñi"), while others are quietly mysterious, such as "The Building," in which a "primitive" people builds an enormous, uninhabited, apparently purposeless palace of green stone, or "The Fliers of Gy," one of Le Guin's most moving stories, which imagines a race in which a few people in every generation grow wings. Are they handicapped or godlike? The parallels to our own fear of (and yearning for) flying, risk and death are inescapable and poignant.

A strong theme in several of the stories is a mistaken idea of progress, an attempt to "fix" social systems that aren't broken. "Seasons of the Ansarac," my favorite of the collection, shows us a migratory culture in which the people, gripped by a powerful sexual drive, trek periodically from the south (seat of cities and cultural institutions, where they live in random, close-packed groups and talk all night, but never make love) to the rural north, where they have sex and procreate and cleave to their families. When the Beidr --- an aggressive, technologically advanced civilization --- sets out to save them from hormonal enslavement . . . well, you can guess the rest. The upshot is that the Ansarac no longer allow visitors to their plane; it is closed off to humans in the time-honored tradition of lost paradises (from Dante to Shangri-La), and the story ends on a note of profound longing.

"Seasons of the Ansarac" is up to Le Guin's finest work (THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE EARTHSEA TRILOGY, and more), but I can't say the same for all of the tales in CHANGING PLANES. It's true that they are vastly intelligent and adroit, often written in a style that combines the detached, slightly stuffy observations of a scientist in the field with an attractive fable-like cadence (they'd be great read aloud). Many of them, however, seemed slight --- sketches rather than the real, completed thing. After a while I began thinking of them as fictionalized essays rather than stories. (Nor did I appreciate the line drawings by Eric Beddows. This is not a criticism of the artist; I simply think it is more fruitful for the reader to create his or her own inner vision of a character or setting --- including alien species --- than to be confronted with somebody else's version.)

I don't mean to carp, though; I'd rather read Le Guin in any form than most writers working today. That's why I picked up CHANGING PLANES while sitting in JFK last month, waiting for a flight to France. I couldn't help laughing at the irony. I'd rather have passed the time in interplanar travel, of course, but this book was the next best thing. Try it if you're shackled to a plastic airport chair or stalled on a runway and you're looking for provocative, intelligent diversion (it's small enough to fit in the seat pocket). Or read it if you have no intention of going anywhere, but are in the mood for mental adventure. You'll return home with new eyes.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Waiting in airports can be interminable tedium, OR, a passage to other planes of existence, fascinating new worlds. In fact there is a whole world of such worlds, linked by a loose-knit Interplanary Agency, with Interplanary Hotels for travelers, and Rornan's Handy Planary Guide for guidance. Such is the premise for this collection of fantastic allegorical stories.

Strange stories they are, too, stories of people just a little different from ourselves, people whose foibles and fallacies are just a little different from our own. Stories of people wracked by pointless ethnic conflicts that go on for centuries; people who have ruined their worlds and destroyed their ecologies; worlds in which ancient cultures and traditions are fading away. There is a quality of wistful longing in these stories, longing for a simpler, saner world that has been lost or ruined. LeGuin's beautiful writing is complemented by the inventive, Escher-like drawings of Eric Beddows.

Author Ursula K. LeGuin is a master story-teller. These stories are easy to read, compelling, humorous, engaging, and hard to forget. They will get you to thinking and they will haunt you. I recommend this book highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

Who among us has not experienced the misery of long waits at airports, trapped in a slow-moving time-warp between flights? Le Guin starts this quaint book with a horribly accurate word picture of what such a wait can be before segueing into a neat fantasy. Imagine if, just as we change airplanes on connecting flights, we could switch between different planes of existence (the pun is entirely intentional!) and discover alternate worlds? Sit back then for an enchanting ride as Le Guin lets her imagination create 16 wondrous alternate worlds which this book explores almost like a travelogue. Take the world of the Asonu, where children speak less and less as they mature, till as adults, their communication is entirely silent. The only sounds are those of nature and people going about their business - no conversation at all. (I could go for that!). Contrast that peaceful world with that of the Veksi who are always angry and quarrelsome, or the Hennbet who are either reincarnated beings or multiple personalities (or maybe both!). Even more imaginative are the long migratory cycles and courtship dances of the Ansarac (much to the disapproval of the efficient tech-specialists who try to colonize them) and the slow evolution of Mahigul. The book is not all light hearted fun however. Porridge on Islac looks at the dangers of genetic engineering. The land of Hegn, where everyone is part of the royal family and hence all attention is on the one family of commoners, neatly inverts the usual fascination for royalty, enabling Le Guin to gently skewer the monarchical concept. And Great Joy is a searing look at corporate behavioral ethics (or the lack of them). I must also credit the illustrator, Eric Beddows for some very apt images, including a couple that are startlingly reminiscent of the peerless M. C. Escher. A nice read, though very different from what one usually expects from Ursula Le Guin. (I wonder if she dreamed this one up at an airport!)

Ever wonder what it would be like on a world where everything was different? Ursula LeGuin presents just a few of the possibilities in intimate detail. These other worlds have dilemmas and ideas which we would never encounter in are own, and the experience of the complete differentness is refreshing.

What would it be like to have wings? Would it be a gift or a burden? In the world of the Fliers of Gyr, one Flier expresses his joy at flying, but also his regrets. Once in the freedom of the air, he could not bear to return to the grounded life, forsaking community and family.

What would it be like if we were all mixed together? After a genetic disaster, people in this world contain genes of animals and plants, which manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Take the chicken-people, who look normal but spend their time running in hyperactive circles. It is funny but a little sad. A conversation with a young waiter who is four percent corn reveals all this and more.

My only complaint ais that some of the stories are too documentary-like, though no less interesting. By all means, read this book, and take a journey out of the ordinary.

Just an opinion, but a book whose very title is a pun is off to a mighty good start. The premise of Changing Planes is that a traveler in a U.S. airport becomes so mightily disturbed by flight delay, food that could double as a petro-chemical, and airline attendants that could easily be outperformed by a Tickle Me Elmo doll, that she is able to access interstellar planes, making travel twixt the numerous civilizations in our universe quite accessible.

Daughter of a writer and an anthropology professor (Berkeley), LeGuin's earliest writings often involved imaginary civilizations. What does a writer whose career spans more than four decades, has garnered numerous awards, and gathered a significant band of devoted readers choose to write about in her mid-70's? Well, whatever she damn well pleases, is what. Which, with qualifications (more on this in just a bit), is much to our benefit.

The influence of LeGuin's anthropologist/writer genome is strong in Changing Planes. Some books, to be fit into a nutshell, would require a coconut. The kernel, but not all the richness, of Changing Planes can be fit into a sunflower seed: Think Gulliver's Travels on an intergalactic basis. In a series of short stories, each reflecting a trip to a different plane/planet, our neo-Gulliver (who goes by Sita Dulip)visits civilization after civilization, exploring whatever themes haunt the intelligent and agile mind of Ursula K. LeGuin. Genetic manipulation gone wild, clashes between cultures that differ in technological expertise, tales of the consequences of abandoning rituals that are tuned to the rhythms of nature, a planet turned into an extreme version of Disney's "Happiest Place on Earth": Le Guin simply lets fly, with largely intriguing results. My own favorite story? A planet is which everyone dreams a new, but shared, dream every night; a communal dream that includes the longings, fears, joys, and horrors of every citizen.

Changing Planes, absorbed at a measured pace, and with a bit of patience, is richly provocative. It could (in Berkeley, but not likely in Sarah Palin's home town) be used to great effect as an entire high school course, with sufficient depth of material to consume an entire semester. Is it worth your time? Let me get back to those qualifications I mentioned above...

If you like your sci-fi chock full of nano-tech warfare, spaceships whose guns are projecting blue trans-dimensional disrupter beams at sinister aliens, and scientific underpinnings as hard as diamonds (I do like all these things)....go play somewhere else. If you are ideologically in the Bush/Cheney camp (ideological implies ideas, admittedly a bit of a stretch for these two gentlemen), spare yourself some Pepcid/antacid purchases, pick up a Clancy novel instead. But if, on the other hand, you'd like a book that you could leave on your bedstand in order to graze on a story/plane, and subsequently drift off to sleep thinking "Hmmmmm. Interesting. Very, very interesting", well then! Time to change planes!

You can just tell how much fun Le Guin had writing this book. Many of the stories have an irreverent tone. But many also explore serious themes in a novel way. How would you like to sprout wings and fly? Live without any need for sleep? Be immortal? Explore the downsides. But mostly, just enjoy the ride.

This book makes me think of Douglas Adams and Jonathan Swift. It has the appeal and fun of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" through the protagonist's (Sita) travels to varied societies (worlds) which are similar to the many places in "Gulliver's Travels".

The book is written as a pun about the miseries of air travel. The first page will strike a definite chord for anyone who has flown very much. Le Guin calls the worlds she visits "planes" (another little joke here I believe) where the protagonist(Sita Dulip) meets a variety of people. In all Sita goes to 15 different worlds where she meets societies to include a world where applied genetics had gone wrong; a society where the older the people got the less they spoke; another society talks but their words have meanings that change all the time; another world is one of migratory people who like many animals of our own planet trek long distances to mate.

This book is funny, ironic, intelligent, thought-provoking and the ultimate in escapism reading. Even if you've never read Le Guin before, you will be delighted with this book. The only complaint I have with the book is that the drawings in the book are distracting. The artist does a fine job, but I prefer to have my own mental pictures from a book; otherwise, it's a lot of fun to read!

Changing Planes is a collection of related short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The organizing theme of the collection is that a tired traveler, Sita Dulip, was stranded in Chicago-O'Hare airport. Suddenly, she realized that since she was "between planes" (literally), she could go "between planes" (to other planets, with travel organized and regulated by the Interplanetary Agency, which manages hotels for visitors in most places.

Changing Planes relates 16 trips. They start off with a bang ("Porridge On Islac"), and then start exploring many philosophical, religious, scientific, and moral issues. You can tell that Le Guin really had fun with writing this.

Some of the civilizations were very different. "Like everybody else, I found their language so difficult that they [the Nna Mmoy] probably thought me retarded" (p. 176; in "The Nna Mmoy Language"). Le Guin invented some very, very unique cultures "The Building," "The Fliers Of Gy"). And she "speaks" the language of the traveler: "Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder" (p. 222).

The stories tended to get more complicated, and thoughtful, toward the end. I really liked the story "Woeful Tales From Mahigul," with its stories within stories.

Recommended for all.

Beautifully written stories about a universe where one can move
from world to world, these stories start out like a very light
version of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and grow deeper and darker.
One of my favorite among her works, for its light, simple touch.

This book starts off with a light-hearted introduction, but quickly plunges the reader into a maze of possibilities. It is a book to be read slowly, thinking about each plane as it is presented. The best part of the book is it's concluding story, which is something like a metaphor for Le Guin's life to this point, a blur of possibilities, imaginings, and outcomes. This book is highly recommended for Le Guin fans or as an introduction to her work.