fter she had taken her seat again, round about 1990, a sense came over some of us that the head of the Table was, once more, fittingly occupied. Now that Ursula K. Le Guin had picked up the reins of her corpus again, now that she had begun once again actively to issue SF and fantasy tales—tales that led on from and amplified the works that had made her famous two decades earlier—it seemed that a kind of equipoise had been restored to the enterprise of the fantastic in America. Her new stories, which were wise and urgent and serene and the best of them humble, restored to us a sense that the engine-shop—the organon—of 20th century SF could still be used to tell true, transparent things. By not abandoning SF and fantasy, she told us that SF and fantasy were not to be abandoned.
Not all of the work in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, which contains no story earlier than 1994, manages fully to convey the full Zen burn of Le Guin at her intensest; but it is a large
collection—her sixth since 1990—and the narrative longueurs that cotton over some of the tales can be sailed through to gain the cognitive meat within; and three or four of them, the tales she sets in the Hainish Ekumen, are among the 10 or so best she has ever written.
Longueurs first. "Old Music and the Slave Women" (1999) starts with an hilarious bang, what seems almost certainly a play (whether or not intended it is hard to say) on Iain M. Banks's notorious tin ear when it
comes to naming his characters:
The chief intelligence officer of the Ekumenical embassy to Werel [the story begins], a man who on his home world had the name Sohikelwenyan-murkeres Esdan, and who in Voe Deo was known by a nickname, Esdardon Aya or Old Music, was bored.
But the fun soon fades. Werel is gripped in a savage civil war between the repressive Legitimate Government—which maintains the practice of slavery (earlier examined in the connected tales [see below] assembled as Four Ways to Forgiveness [1995])—and the ideology-wracked cohort of
warlords known as the Liberation Command. Old Music attempts to leave the embassy, which is located in Legitimate territory, in order to liaise with the Liberation forces, but is captured, taken to a vast ancient country estate (in her introduction, Le Guin says that this estate was inspired by her visit to a slave plantation upriver from Charleston, S.C.), where he is casually tortured; and during his subsequent immurement makes friends with some of the slaves who have remained there, despite a liberation or two over previous months and years. Old Music is a wise and deeply attractive man; the slave culture is acutely anatomized; the astonishing beauty of the great estate (as does Charleston's) raises pertinent issues about the creation of great beauty out of great evil; lessons are drawn. Both sides attempt to suborn Old Music, but he temporizes until things fall apart, and the estate becomes, once again, a
balkan killing ground. Old Music survives, eyeing chaos and old night with balanced irony.
This synopsis takes radically less space than would a proper telling of the tale; but the actual text of "Old Music and the Slave Women" occupies nearly 60 ample pages, which is radically more space than it needed. Every sentence is balanced, laid out with high inconspicuous craft; but ultimately there is a surfeit of sentences which are not passages but nearly only beauty, an absence therefore of any sense of the pressure of the story shaping: the sign of absence of story in a story by Le Guin is that it does not stop. This flag of inattention also mars the longest tale in the book, "Paradises Lost" (newly published here), a generation-starship story which is severely hampered by disquisition until the final 30 pages or so, set on the destination planet, which are suavely and superbly dramatic.
Glimpses of genius from the pen of Le Guin
We come to the works of genius.
"Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995) is a short memoir of a Gethenian (see The Left Hand of Darkness [1969]), who does nothing in her/his text but describe the passage into and through puberty for a variation of human stock which (famously) is genderless, except during the period known as kemmer when, through the operation of complexly triggered chemical laws, Gethenians become either male or female and have a huge amount of joyous sex, and breed if they wish. In this tale, this abstract "thought experiment" rings absolutely true, rings absolutely like life.
"The Matter of Seggri" (1994) is a long but compact set of responses over several centuries to human life on the planet Seggri, where an acute shortage of males generates a system which complexly (once again complexly) questions most of our assumptions about male/female polarities. Men are prized for valor, game-winning skills, honor and lovemaking ability; and they are kept in harems. Women serve men, but control the society. Power is disjunct from honor and display and prowess. It is all, once again, utterly believable; though this time it is unslakeably sad.
"Unchosen Love" (1994) and "Mountain Ways" (1994) are both set on the planet O, whose society divides
along moiety lines; marriages are foursomes, consist of a man and woman from each moiety, whose interrelations—mandated and optional—are so intriguingly complex and fruitful of human weal that the whole system, as dramatized in these two subtle sex comedies, comprises as seductive an alternate model for our own procrustean sex rack as did Robert A Heinlein's line marriage, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). (The practical problem with line marriages, Christians aside, was that human domestic architecture on this planet does not run to compounds; moiety marriage offers a less daunting challenge to the number of rooms we live in now.) "Unchosen Love"—a story which as it progresses segues subtly through subgenres of telling until it becomes not only an SF tale, but a fairy tale, and a ghost story—conveys through its last line an aesthetic shock of recognition so manifestly inevitable that I found myself in tears.
And "Solitude." The tale is hampered by the presence of a female ethnologist whose hysterical inability to understand the world of Eleven-Soro makes the text almost unreadable at points; but the slow unpacking of the virtues and viability of a human culture for whom the engines of human intercourse are shunned as magic is, in the end, once again, deeply convincing.
These five stories are substantial and acute and moving enough when taken solo; when read as an ensemble, they are very nearly overwhelming. The voice of the author is never raised—but then, as many of us have surely noticed, it is the quiet speaker in a group who is often the leader of that group, especially if the loud ones are males. Speaking softly means that, when you speak, the rest must shut up in order to hear. In this context, to hear is to obey. Ursula K. Le Guin, who is once again in the seat of power of SF, is the captain who does not need to shout.
The suite smell of SF success
Here is a small bone to pick, and a surrender to make. In her introduction, Le Guin refers disparagingly to "a sneering British term 'fix-up' for books by authors who ... patch unconnected stories together with verbal duct tape. But the real thing is not a random collection, any more than a Bach cello suite is. ... Maybe we should call it a story suite? I think I will."
As the British critic who has used the term longest and most often, a couple of comments. The term, which is A.E. Van Vogt's non-pejorative phrase to describe his own practice in the making of texts, is not British. For decades, I attempted to defend my own identification of a form of text I called the fix-up by arguing that it described an SF form of narrative that seemed quite possibly unique to the field: what might be called a peephole epic, a narrative made up of a series of takes—differing in context, focus, length, intensity, point of view—on a central story, or epic, that is maybe too big to be told fully in a book, but which might be tellable—viewable—through gaps and episodes and indirection. The feel of fix-up was that of seeing the world flickeringly, through gaps in an arras, from behind the throne, while the time of the world jump-cuts onwards.
(But I think I should give up. I think the mere sound of the word fix-up makes what it describes nearly
unascertainable. So this is the end. I, for one, will never use the word again. And I think Le Guin makes a good suggestion. I think something like "story suite" might befit the form described, though I would shorten it slightly. I think "suite" might be enough. So, for "fix-up" read "suite." Thus we learn from the unraised voice.... )
