The Birthday Of The World (And Other Stories)

Ursula K. Le Guin

★★★★☆

Hainish Stories

Most of Le Guin’s Hainish stories are about imagining different ways for human societies to live. These in particular are mostly about different ways for men and women to relate. They’re all self-contained, though the first one probably works better if you’ve already read The Left Hand of Darkness.

Coming of Age in Karhide

Left Hand… explored what an androgynous society might be like. This story answers any lingering questions you might have about sex among humans who only experience gender once a month (and never know for sure which they’re going to be ahead of time).

The Matter of Seggri

In many real-world societies, women are oppressed to “protect” them. On Seggri, the situation is reversed: Most people are women, and the few men are kept apart and guarded to make sure that there are enough around for procreation. They don’t really have much to do except fight and play sports (I still can’t decide whether the stereotyping is a weak link or a deliberate counterpoint to the way women get stereotyped in reality), and occasionally help someone get pregnant.

It’s told as a mix of Ekumen survey reports and local stories, not unlike Left Hand…. Some of the stories are dry, while others get into forbidden romance territory.

Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways

Two stories set on the planet O, where marriages consist of four people: two men, two women, one each from two different divisions of society. As you’d imagine, setting one up is…complicated.

“Unchosen Love” is kind of a gothic romance/ghost story, about figuring out how to deal with your new extended family. That really doesn’t do it justice, and it’s the more satisfying of the two.

In “Mountain Ways,” the partners in a torrid affair try to pass one of the women off as a man so they can fill in the missing role, bending a strict tradition in one way in order to uphold it in another. It…sort of works…for a while.

Solitude

A society of introverts, where people stick to the absolute bare minimum connection needed to continue humanity. An Ekumen observer embeds herself and her children in one of the loose villages in order to understand it. This is one that sticks with you, and I’ve written about it in more detail.

Old Music and the Slave Women

The most brutal of the stories in what is now Five Ways to Forgiveness, in which a Hainish observer (Old Music is his name) is held captive for an extended period by the slave-owning side in a civil war.

Stand-Alone Stories

The Birthday of the World

It’s a good title, but it’s far from the best story in the collection. Mainly what sticks in my head is the low-tech interpretation of prophecies involving high-tech events. (A house falls in fire but still stands, for instance.)

Paradises Lost

A standalone novella about the middle generations of a multi-generation starship, and what happens when some of them come to believe that nothing outside of the ship actually exists. Well worth the read, and I’ve reviewed it in more detail already.