Customer Reviews

A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories

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

 

 

The final story in this book, "Another Story," is almost certainly my favorite short story ever, and I've read a lot of them. Her writing is wonderful, and a lot of the best elements of both her writing and usual themes come together wonderfully in the final story. The other ones are worth reading, too, but the final story stands on its own and is alone worth finding this book now that it is, sadly, out of print. (I found two copies in a bookstore's bargain stack 6 year ago, luckily for me!)

Find the book, and at least read the last story. It's truly wonderful.

Le Guin's talent is diverse, but Science Fiction stories seem to be her best. And oh she is agile. This collection has everything. There's a small humorous story, a workshop story, an idea story, but finally there are the most important: the churten stories. Le Guin's Hainish universe has appeared in most of her other scifi novels, but these stories are probably the best. "The Shobies Story," "Dancing to Ganam" and "Another Story" (I think that's all) are all separate, but they all deal with 'churten,' Le Guin's brand of instantaneous travel. As usual, though, she doesn't focus on technology. She's a people writer, and the science is only there to bring out all of the psychological, emotional and spiritual questions with the characters. The title story, or "Another Story" is about a man who is caught in two places at once as a result of the churten. A delight to read. Each word is perfectly placed. Exquisite.

I was almost ready to give up on LeGuin after reading "The Telling", "Tehanu", and "Tales from Earthsea" in consecution, when I noticed this collection of short stories. I was pleasantly surprised. The heavy-handed moralizing and the sour tone are replaced with a sense of harmony, energy. One gets the impression that the writer simply let herself write to her heart's content.

The first few are short word-sketches, demonstrating LeGuin's surprising versatility. "First Contact with the Gorgonids" is written with prosaic wit, "Kerastion" is powerfully poetic, "Newton's Sleep" is a cautionary, postapocalyptic parable, etc. The book also includes a mini-cycle of three Ekumen stories, centered on instantaneous travel and its startling side effect: when intelligent beings are teleported, reality breaks down into individual perceptions (think Rashomon). The first, "Shobies' Story", documents the first-ever experimental flight. The second, "Dancing to Ganam", documents an exploratory expedition where every member gets different impressions of the natives' intent: where one sees ritual, another sees deceit. The last is possibly the first and only of LeGuin's time travel stories, telling of a homesick man who decides to correct the choice he made eighteen years ago. The second and third stories are especially well-written, keeping the reader guessing until the very end.

A very nice collection for disillusioned readers.

As noted in other reviews here, the collection is mixed. Some of the dabbling in fable styles and neo-primitivism (The Rock That Changed Things, for instance) left me cold. Ursula is an unabashed feminist, and more power to her; but she is at her best when she integrates her ethical and political ideas into her stories, rather than merely proselytizing.

The last three stories, dealing with a bizarre faster-than-light travel method called "churten" (sort of a descendant of Le Guin's FTL communication device, the ansible) are collectively worth the price of the book. "The Shobies' Story" explores fractured views of reality, taking its cue from the uncertainties of quantum physics. "Dancing to Ganaam" is an enjoyable spoof of the smug Captain Kirk-style space hero -- I envision its hapless protagonist as a close cousin to Zap Brannigan in the "Futurama" TV show. The final story, "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," works a strangely paradoxless time-travel thread into its exploration of science and human relations. The mild yet intense scientist-hero is reminiscent of Shevek from "The Dispossessed," and Le Guin's suggestion of a workable four-person marriage is quite intriguing. It rivals "Hernes" from "Searoad" as the best short story Le Guin ever wrote.

Another varied collection fron UlK. Some of the stories are wistful, some silly and indulgent. The strength lies in the cluster of stories around the invention of instantaneous space travel - which is itself an extension of the ansible invented by Shevek in'The Dispossessed'. The last (and title) story is the very best of these and is as good as anything she has ever written. As ever with UlK, she has very little interest in the natural science, though she quickly paints a backdrop which is completely convincing. Instead, she is interested in the human effects. The story is about loss and regret and finding ones way, deciding what to do with one's life and having an opportunity to have part of one's life again. If you are tired of mile long star ships and ravening beams of death then this is the sort of story that you have been waiting for. And you will always remember it.

i like this whole anthology despite not generally being a fan of short stories. however, it is the last one (the title story) i find most haunting. i come back to it again and again.

This little book is what LeGuin calls a "story suite", a set of interconnected short stories with overlapping themes and characters. The connecting theme of Four Ways to Forgiveness is, no surprises here, forgiveness--specifically, forgiveness between men and women trapped in the evils of gender domination. The connecting theme of Fisherman is narrative--story as a way to organize reality, story as revelation, story as truth.

All of the stories in Four Ways are set in LeGuin's Hainish universe, or the Ekumen. This is not the case with Fisherman; the three longest stories are set in the Ekumenical universe, but there are other, shorter pieces, including several humorous ones. "The Ascent of the North Face" describes climbing a gigantic skyscraper as if it were Everest. "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" makes an unexpected heroine of a browbeaten wife. "The Kerastion" demonstrates what an inspired writer can do with a list of items generated at a workshop; it's a story about a musical instrument that makes no sound.

The three Ekumenical stories, include the title story, revolve around the invention of a new technology, churten theory. Hitherto LeGuin has obeyed Einstein in this universe; her spaceships travel Nearly As Fast As Light, but never faster. People who wish to travel between worlds must accept that a trip which seems to them to take four days may amount to four hundred years on their home planet. Now, however, the Cetian and Hainish physicists have come up with churten, which is instantaneous travel, transilience: from here to there in no interval, no time. LeGuin, as always, is interested in how people deal with the implications of such technology, rather than in how it works.

In "The Shobies' Story", the first group of people to travel by churten *as* a group deals with a chaotic experience of their trip by weaving a single coherent story. "Dancing to Ganam" is a classic story example of the unreliable narrator: What do you do when the hero you admire seems to be telling a story that makes no sense? Finally, my favorite story, "Another Story, or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", explores the problem of churten and the marriage arrangements of the people of the planet O, who marry by sedoretu, a bond between two men and two women.

"Another Story" is, I think, LeGuin's only time-travel story to date, and it is unlike any other time-travel story I've ever read. Hideo leaves the farmhold where he grew up, son of a Japanese woman who married into this ancient culture, to study churten theory on Hain and its neighboring planet of Ve. His one visit home makes him realize how much he has given up in order to do so; he is deeply shaken by seeing his germane Isidri, child of the other parents in the marriage, married but without children. After many years of study, he uses churten to travel from Hain to O and discovers he has gone back in time eighteen years; he has the opportunity to reclaim the life he gave up.

The title of the story is based on a traditional Japanese folktale which Hideo's mother used to tell, about a handsome young fisherman who spends a night with the Queen of the Sea and returns to his village four hundred years later. I read the same story as a child in one of my many fairy tale books, where it was called "Urashima and the Turtle". Urashima's magical experience of time dilation is the same as Hideo's mother's experience of it--the loss of all she held dear in her decision to work for the Ekumen. Churten is the overcoming of that loss, which requires the creation of a new story, another story, in order to understand the universe.

Once again, Le Guin offers new stories by which we can come to new understandings of our own universe.

I finally bought this book after I checked it out from the library about once a month just to read the last story again. It is my favorite story of all time. The one story is worth the money. The others are OK and a few are fun. I would like to have just the last story in a smaller version.

Ursula has a true gift with the English language. Her prose and her style of writing all give such life to her stories! All the stories in this collection are gems, masterpieces. Especially "Newton's Sleep" an astonishing tale of an orbiting habitat above a chaotic earth. "The Shobies' Story" starts to turn into surrealist literature toward the end; no doubt Le Guin has had some experience with surrealist literature...the way she handles the churtening experience is virtuoso. And the last story...unbelievable! The way she weaved in the Urashima Japanese myth with that story was fascinating. The whole story was just fascinating, period. If you're into speculative fiction done well, I highly suggest reading this book now.

Le Guin's previous short story collections ("The Wind's Twelve Quarters", "Orsinian Tales" and "The Compass Rose") demonstrated that she is, if anything, an even more accomplished writer of short fiction than novels. This latest collection has some memorable tales; perhaps none more so than the title story. Three stories in particular link together around the development of a new method of faster than light space travel. However, this does not mean we are in for essays on obscure areas of physics, but rather for fables illustrating that how we share meanings and experiences help shape the reality around us. The title story takes this further by adding a time travel twist in the tail, and looks at how the choices we make in life shape us and those around us. As ever there is strong anthropological streak in her work, with some uniquely pictured societies (the complex marriage arrangements in the title story are especially fascinating!). The other stories vary from very brief vignettes, to traditional sci-fi, to more tongue in cheek fantasies. Le Guin retains an impish sense of humour in all her best work, no matter how serious the intent of the story. It is perhaps this that marks her out as one of the most human of all science fiction authors. Maybe not her greatest collection, but well worth reading, especially if it leads you to discover her other works.