First Contact: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

First Contact: If I ever see a Gollancz SF Masterworks edition of something I haven’t read, I buy it. It’s a proper mark of quality in a genre I continue to enjoy exploring. I have a bunch I haven’t read yet and I am on the lookout for more. It makes sense to me to group reviews of these editions, and First Contact seems like an appropriate name for that grouping. I continue to experiment. Bear with me.

[If I read something that I know has an SF/Fantasy Masterworks edition but that’s not the edition I have, I’ll count it anyway.]

I read Semley’s Necklace in my undergrad SF module and it might have actually been the first Le Guin I ever read. It intrigued the hell out of me and was one of the first New Wave stories I’d read that wasn’t something by Ballard. Since then I’d meant to get properly into Le Guin’s short fiction and just didn’t get around to it until recently. I love her novels; I’ve read The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Left Hand of Darkness. The Earthsea stories in this collection are the only ones I’ve read so far; yes I know I need to read them. 

I read this as part of Gollancz’s collected edition along with The Compass Rose, but I think this earlier one is stronger, even if I think a few of the stories are quite weak (The Good Trip, A Trip to the Head). These weak stories are more than counterbalanced by the masterpiece level ones in this collection, like Semley’s Necklace, Winter’s King, Nine Lives, The Field of Vision. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. 

I felt like I’d read Omelas before reading it, such is its place in the canon of SF and even the wider consciousness at the moment. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since I read it and will re-read it soon, I think.

I’m attracted to SF as a literature of ideas and of stylistic experimentation; there’s a reason I like New Wave stuff. To me, there’s a direct thread between modernism and SF. Le Guin’s ideas are almost always fascinating, and examine spaces where we can see the “soft” implications of “hard” science, like FTL travel, or cloning. The stories in this collection have introductions from the author, and I particularly like this passage from her introduction to The Masters:

“Some science-fiction writers detest science, its spirit, method, and works; others like it. Some are anti-technology, others are technology-worshippers.I seem to be rather bored by complex technology, but fascinated by biology, psychology, and the speculative ends of astronomy and physics, insofar as I can follow them”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, page 37, from the introduction to the story The Masters

People forget that the social sciences are sciences. 

I’m (slowly, oh so slowly) working my way through Arthur C. Clarke’s collected stories, and as much as his ideas and concepts do fascinate me, the quality of the prose often leaves me cold. There’s a reason people think of the movie when they think of 2001. I mean, the novel’s fine. It’s fine. But there wasn’t much in it that stuck with me the way some of the frames in that movie have. Reading Le Guin, by comparison, is a treat. I find myself underlining and annotating like I’m an undergrad again. A couple selections. 

“He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 49, from the story The Masters

“She had already learned that the Earth was, here, called Winter, and that Ollul was, here, called the Earth: one of those facts which turn the universe inside out like a sock.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 102, from the story Winter’s King

“Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 257, from the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

She writes with such humour, and pain, and depth of feeling. 

[I originally intended for this to be a #onetweetreviews like my reading of the complete Ballard short stories (Volume 1, Volume 2), but I’ve ended up using Twitter less and less because it’s a total shower. I post updates on there when I put something on my blog, but otherwise I feel even more than ever that time spent posting on Twitter would be wasted time, and I don’t have the energy to try and do something similar on Mastodon. I’m free, right? I’ll use the time to do something else. But I still like the idea of writing a short review of each story in a collection. I’ll keep doing that.]

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Semley’s Necklace (1964)

Still love it. Has the quality of legend, myth, and is also utterly modern in its focus. I think of the Elgin Marbles, and of “dispassionate” administrators without a clue of the lived experience of the administered. 

April in Paris (1962)

Loneliness is a hell of a drug. A story that perfectly captures the vertigo of looking at a monument, and wondering who else has seen the same thing. 

The Masters (1963)

I love a good SF story that doesn’t present as such. Notes of The Dispossessed. There are many sciences . 

Darkness Box (1963)

More here than I could glean on a first read. Enduring images; a box full of darkness, a room full of candles, lined with gold, studded with gems, a white suit of armour, a black cat. 

The Word of Unbinding (1964)

So this is Earthsea, huh? Words having literal power, I like that. 

The Rule of Names (1964)

There’s a reason they employed a burglar in that other fantasy universe. 

Winter’s King (1969)

I love, love, Le Guin’s commitment to the full implications of relativity. This is hard SF with a soft heart. 

The Good Trip (1970)

Who needs drugs when you have an imagination amirite.

Nine Lives (1969)

I had heard about this story and was excited to read it, because I wanted to see what kind of SF Playboy used to publish. Like The Odd Couple with more examples of the tragic, brutal uncaring of the universe. Masterpiece. 

Things (1970)

You are what you do, and Lif goes on. 

A Trip to the Head (1970)

I don’t get it. 

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow (1971)

Everybody’s gangster until the trees start vibing. 

You should read poetry for many reasons, and one of them is so you can give your stories absolutely boss titles like this one has. 

The Stars Below (1973)

I love the idea that anything can be interesting if you consider it closely enough, like Corbyn and his manhole covers. And I loved this story of endurance in the face of profound, wilful ignorance. 

The Field of Vision (1973)

My God, it’s full of… God. 

I’ve got some very definite ideas, but on reflection, I don’t know how healthy it would be for me to definitively know one way or the other w/r/t the existence of the creator. 

I love a good “astronauts go mad” story.

Direction of the Road (1974)

It’s a truism to say that every perspective is different, and it’s another thing to write a story that really demonstrates that difference of perspective. Such an alien story about such an everyday thing. 

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973)

A masterpiece, but you knew that. We live in Omelas, but you knew that too. 

The Day Before the Revolution (1974)

For anyone who has ever wondered how Che Guevara would have felt about being on T-shirts and posters.

I really need to re-read The Dispossessed.