Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 5

A collection of short stories from early in Le Guin’s career, spanning her first sale through the time when she’d begun to be recognized as a major force in the genre.

Semley’s Necklace ★★★★★

Adapting the one-night-in-faerie trope to relativistic space travel, this works better on its own than as the prologue to Rocannon’s World.

April in Paris ★★★★★

A delightful story about time travel, loneliness and companionship, set in one room in Paris across centuries.

The Masters ★★★☆☆

In this society, once you master your craft, that’s it. There’s nothing else to learn, because figuring out new things is heresy. Interesting, but I think “The Stars Below” explores the themes better.

Darkness Box ★★☆☆☆

A fairy tale that follows dream logic and reversals.

The Word of Unbinding and The Rule of Names ★★★★☆

The first two stories of Earthsea, set long before the time of Ged and Tenar. They’re interesting both on their own and in seeing what Earthsea grew from, and I’ve reviewed them in more detail on their own page.

Winter’s King ★★★★★

My favorite story in the collection, worth its own review (TODO). Set in the Hainish universe, primarily on Gethen, though it has less to do with gender and more to do with relativity, perspective, and rearranging snapshots of time.

The Good Trip ★★★☆☆

What is this I don’t even.

Nine Lives ★★★☆☆

A rare hard-sci-fi story from the author, focusing on a space mining operation where the new crew shows up and they’re all clones of the same person. The first half is a bit of a slog through exposition, but it gets moving at the point where the title starts to make sense and questions of individuality become more urgent.

Apparently a movie adaptation got as far as casting back in 2018, but nothing’s been announced since. (It probably would be a better movie than novella, and would make an interesting double-feature with Moon.)

Things ★★★★☆

A surreal tale of a seaside village than giving up on meaning as “the end” arrives, but two people keep trying to live their lives, and a bricklayer just can’t quite invent boats.

A Trip to the Head ★★☆☆☆

Another weird experiment that doesn’t quite work.

Vaster than Empires and More Slow ★★★★☆

A fascinating story of a dysfunctional deep-space crew where everyone has their own neuroses, including an empath who has immense difficulty with other people, as they explore a world with only plant life. Another one worth its own review. Set in the Hainish universe, a long way away from the worlds of the Ekumen.

The Stars Below ★★★★☆

An astronomer, his observatory burned by the authorities, is forced into hiding in an underground mine. Like “The Masters,” it’s a take on forbidden ways to gather knowledge, but this one’s more character-driven and gets into the psychology of having your life’s work destroyed and what’s left of your world turned upside-down.

The Field of Vision ★★★☆☆

Interesting and disturbing take on alien artifacts and sensory overload.

Direction of the Road ★★★☆☆

Movement is relative. Told from the point of view of a tree.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ★★★★★

An absolute classic on societal guilt and on how we rationalize others’ misery, especially when we believe it’s the price for our own happiness, boiled down to a single, stark choice.

The Day Before the Revolution ★★★★★

A character study of an aging revolutionary, and a glimpse of the woman behind the anarchist philosophy that will come to define the society of Annares in The Dispossessed. Her days of both theory and practice are largely behind her now, and she thinks back on what she built and what (and who) she lost as she navigates a world in which the revolution she’s worked so hard for has moved beyond her.

And yes, as a DS9 fan, reading about a “founder” named Odo is a bit odd, but I started picturing her more like Le Guin herself as she looked when she was much older, which I think suits her.

I finally read the original two stories set in Earthsea, before Le Guin began the first novel and the stories of Ged and Tenar. She hadn’t quite settled on the tone yet, but you can see the rough outlines of the archipelago, and magic working through words and names, and mages both traveling and settled. And, surprisingly enough, the land of the dead and the human/dragon dichotomy, themes which she brings together in The Other Wind.

“The Word of Unbinding” feels a bit more like an Earthsea story despite some of the inconsistencies. (Le Guin suggests in the intro that perhaps trolls went extinct in Earthsea sometime after this story.) It’s a story of the balances between life and death, and between responsibility and ambition.

“The Rule of Names” feels a bit more Tolkien-esque, set in a pastoral village like the Shire, complete with a Mr. Underhill who lives, well, under a hill and a mysterious wizard showing up on an equally mysterious errand. Though with a wry twist at the end.

Each stands on its own, and neither really contains any major revelations about Earthsea that aren’t explored in more depth in the novels (ok, except maybe the trolls), but they’re interesting enough to be worth checking out, whether you’ve read the rest of the series or not.

Both stories are collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Books of Earthsea. (The former is a lot easier to carry around unless you’ve gone for a digital edition!)

A serviceable dialer app for the actual phone part of your smartphone, using your device’s contacts, favorites and call history. Still lets you swipe to accept/reject a call. You can block calls from specific numbers, or from calls with hidden numbers, or from anyone who isn’t in your contacts.

Advantages over Google’s default dialer:

• You know it’s not sending your call activity to the cloud.

Disadvantages:

• It also can’t pre-screen likely spam/scam calls, do speech-to-text transcripts or menus, or offer visual voicemail, and it doesn’t have much in the way of accessibility features.

It’s not clear whether it picks up any CallerID data beyond the incoming number. Since switching, I haven’t seen any labels, even “Scam likely,” on incoming calls that aren’t in my contacts. But then I don’t get a lot of actual phone calls, so it’s hard to be sure.

I recently went back and re-read the entire iZombie comic book series for the first time since the TV adaptation launched. If you only know the TV show, it’s very different, though they both share a similar quirky not-quite-horror, not-quite-comedy tone.

The show took the basic premise: a woman in the Pacific Northwest becomes a zombie, but can continue living as a human as long as she eats brains frequently enough. She picks up flashes of memories from the brains she eats, sometimes with a compulsion to resolve unfinished business.

The comic deals with supernatural rather than biochemical zombies, with werewolves (well, a were-terrier anyway), ghosts, vampires and more. It starts off in the mystery/monster genre just a bit darker than Scooby Doo/Buffy level, with a dash of secret agent intrigue, slowly building to a Lovecraftian cosmic horror cataclysm with a side of Michael Moorcock’s eternal champion (whose expy, here, is a minor character at best).

Here, Gwen gets her brains working at an eco-friendly cemetery (no embalming!). Her best friends are a ghost who died in the 1960s and a were-terrier. She barely remembers her family, who think she’s still dead, as her pre-zombie life keeps fading.

It’s full of off-the-wall concepts that they just run with. There’s a group of vampires who run a paintball outfit, draining customers out in the woods just enough to leave them woozy instead of leaving a trail of bodies. (Naturally, the story is called “uVampire.”) An artificial construct who’s building her own Frankenstein-brand monster for nefarious purposes. A secret international order of monster-hunters, and an even more secret group of monsters working as government agents (under the alias of the Dead Presidents). A diner proprietor rumored to have been either a hit woman or the original model for a popular doll line. And a several-millenia-old former mummy with a mysterious agenda involving Gwen.

Early on, Roberson establishes a remarkably simple cosmology to tie all the monsters together: the idea that every living being has both an “oversoul” and “undersoul” (roughly corresponding to intellect and emotions, or conscious and subconscious, or superego and id).

• Dead body where the oversoul sticks around: Vampire. Still intelligent, wants blood to make up for the missing undersoul.
• Only the undersoul? Now you’ve got a zombie, who wants brains.
• Disembodied oversoul? Ghost.
• Disembodied undersoul? Poltergeist.
• Human possessed by an animal’s undersoul? Werewolf etc.

I’d forgotten how much I liked Mike and Laura Allred’s art here. Their clean style makes for a great contrast with the monsters and occasional gore, and helps keep it on the lighter side of the genre. And seeing it again reminded me I should look up some of their other work!

The 28-issue series is available as a 4-volume paperback set or a massive 1-volume omnibus, as well as digitally.

This story looks at a different corner of the Hainish universe than usual. Too far for instant communication. Centuries of time dilation instead of decades. Completely cut off from anyone you might have known back home. What kind of person would willingly go so far beyond the known worlds that they could never even talk to anyone back home?

Much as Larry Niven suggests only someone who doesn’t need social interaction can be a solo ramjet pilot, Le Guin suggests only someone who can’t deal with society would be willing to take what’s effectively a one-way trip.

A crew made up of people with varying neuroses and phobias finds a planet full of plant life, but with no sign that animals ever evolved there. The center of it all is one crewmember who’s an empath, able to feel others’ emotions, but who doesn’t get along with anyone.

It’s an interesting psychological exploration of the crew, the relationship between empathy and fear, how they deal with each other and the planet, how they break down individually and as a group, how that changes from the confines of the ship to life on a forest planet, and how the planet reacts to them. And it’s an interesting take on large-scale plant (and planet) sentience, predating works like Bios (or Avatar) by decades and contemporary with the development of the Gaia hypotheis.

Wait, Autism?

But it’s hard to read it today because the empath’s abilities hinge on him having been “cured” of “autism,” and he’s also a complete a–hole when he’s around other people.

On the plus side, it’s probably the oldest thing I’ve read that posits autism can be a form of hyper empathy, with people withdrawing into themselves because they’re overwhelmed. In this case, he’s always been science-fiction-level empathic, but he no longer withdraws into himself as a defense against overstimulation.

On the minus side, his being so hostile aligns with an actual stereotype of autistic people that still causes prejudice against them (and gives some genuinely awful people a disingenuous excuse: “oh, I’m not really racist/sexist/whatever, I just have Asperger’s!”) And the term is consistently used in the old, extremely-withdrawn sense. Language changes, and the meaning has broadened since 1970, which is why we talk about an autism spectrum these days.

Reading in 2025, though, with RFK Jr. putting conspiracy theories about “autism” front and center in government health policy? It’s hard to ignore that this old sense of the word is what he’s pretending is on the rise (even though there isn’t) so he can blame vaccines, or Tylenol, or whatever supports his goals this week. Instead of accepting that there’s just a wider variety of human neurology than we used to be willing to admit, and that we’re getting better at recognizing it.

So it’s kind of like reading the “wicked as a woman’s magic” parts of early Earthsea, only without follow-up works to reconsider it.

Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Buffalo Gals, and The Found and the Lost.