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The Wind's Twelve Quarters / The Compass Rose
Grand Master Ursula K. Le Guin has been recognised for almost fifty years as one of the most important writers in the SF field - and is likewise feted beyond the confines of the genre. The Wind's Twelve Quarters was her first collection and it brings together some of finest short fiction, including the Hugo Award-winning The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the Nebula Award-winning The Day Before the Revolution, and the Hugo-nominated Winter's King, which gave readers their first glimpse of the world later made famous in her Hugo- and Nebula-winning masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness.
Contents:
The Wind's Twelve Quarters • (1975) • collection by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Compass Rose • (1982) • collection by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Trip to the Head • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
April in Paris • (1962) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Darkness Box • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Direction of the Road • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Foreword (The Wind's Twelve Quarters) • (1975) • essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
Nine Lives • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Semley's Necklace • [Hainish] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin (variant of The Dowry of Angyar)
The Day Before the Revolution • [Hainish] • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Field of Vision • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Good Trip • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Masters • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Rule of Names • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Stars Below • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Word of Unbinding • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Things • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow • (1971) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Winter's King • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Gwilan's Harp • (1977) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Intracom • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Malheur County • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mazes • (1975) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Preface (The Compass Rose) • (1982) • essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
Schrödinger's Cat • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Small Change • (1981) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
SQ • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sur • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Diary of the Rose • [Orsinia] • (1976) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Eye Altering • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The New Atlantis • (1975) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Pathways of Desire • (1979) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Phoenix • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Water Is Wide • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The White Donkey • (1980) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Wife's Story • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Two Delays on the Northern Line • [Orsinia] • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Contents:
The Wind's Twelve Quarters • (1975) • collection by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Compass Rose • (1982) • collection by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Trip to the Head • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
April in Paris • (1962) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Darkness Box • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Direction of the Road • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Foreword (The Wind's Twelve Quarters) • (1975) • essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
Nine Lives • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Semley's Necklace • [Hainish] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin (variant of The Dowry of Angyar)
The Day Before the Revolution • [Hainish] • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Field of Vision • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Good Trip • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Masters • (1963) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas • (1973) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Rule of Names • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Stars Below • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Word of Unbinding • [Earthsea Cycle] • (1964) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Things • (1970) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow • (1971) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Winter's King • (1969) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
Gwilan's Harp • (1977) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Intracom • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Malheur County • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Mazes • (1975) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Preface (The Compass Rose) • (1982) • essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
Schrödinger's Cat • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Small Change • (1981) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
SQ • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sur • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics • (1974) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Diary of the Rose • [Orsinia] • (1976) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Eye Altering • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb • (1978) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The New Atlantis • (1975) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Pathways of Desire • (1979) • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Phoenix • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Water Is Wide • (1976) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The White Donkey • (1980) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Wife's Story • (1982) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
Two Delays on the Northern Line • [Orsinia] • (1979) • shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
561 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
124 people are currently reading
838 people want to read
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
1,050 books30.6k followersUrsula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 67 reviews
March 9, 2019
Originally I only intended to read ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,’ but I’m so glad I picked up her masterworks collection. Clearly a genius ahead of her time, each of these stories was rich, diverse, and uniquely thought provoking. There wasn’t a single story I disliked, but here were my favorites.
‘Semley’s Necklace’ - Probably her most “romantic” story
‘Nine Lives’ - featured in an issue of playboy, but forced to abbreviate her name because she was a woman -_-
‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’
‘The Field of Vision’
‘The One’s who Walk Away from Omelas’ - the whole reason I picked up this anthology (per RM’s recommendation)
‘The Diary of the Rose’ - heartbreaking
And ‘Intracom’ - which had me laughing out loud.
May 23, 2024
i definitely preferred the wind's twelve quarters, but both had so many great stories! 3.5 stars
November 13, 2023
Rating: 3.5 stars
Ok so I had hoped to get this review out sooner, because I had taken rather extensive notes so I just needed to copy and paste them in order and not write too much extra, but this time I have a legitimate excuse! (I have excuses other times but none of them are properly acceptable, but this one is actually valid I promise.) The new Florence + the Machine album Dance Fever came out the day I finished this book (I finished the book in the morning and the album came out midday-ish... Did you need those specifics? Probably not) and you have to understand my tardiness, because the build up to this album was looooong. Not only have the band not put out an album since 2018 - that's four Florence-less years - but the first single from the current one came out in February. And we had to wait until May to get the whole thing. Ok, ok, maybe this isn't that unusual for the music industry, but I don't really follow any modern artists bar F+TM (not saying that the rest of them are not any good, just that I personally have not latched onto them) and all the rest of my favourite artists are from the 70's and 80's, so I am used to getting instant access to entire discographies, so you'll forgive my ignorance. Plus sometimes I am not good at waiting for things. Yeeeeeah *clears throat* OK SO now before we dive to deep into my mental state, let's start the review.
This (double) anthology made me realise how diverse a SFF short story could be. I can remember doing “creative writing” at school and getting annoyed because the word limit never allowed for my giant science fiction adventures (well, the Star Wars rip offs) or any expansive fantasy epics (all heavily Tolkien/Narnia/Percy Jackson inspired). I simply thought that the only way to write those kinds of stories were with screeds upon screeds of pages. And yet, some of Le Guin’s stories here are under ten pages (which still would have been way too long for my school assessments, but I digress) and they are excellent! I wrote some notes on random stories that I found I had opinions on, so good luck making it to the end.
April in Paris
I love this little story, but this could be just based on the fact that it has time travel in it and I am a sucker for time travel. I'm a second generation Whovian, what can I say.
The Masters
I always like the kind of cult like stories were someone is brought up believing everything is a certain way and then something happens that changes their view on the world. This story was more of an undeveloped idea than an actual full fledged short story but I still liked it.
Nine Lives
Sometimes I hate the cloning trope and sometimes I love it. I love the way it was done here. Now I haven't read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the grandaddy of all clone/genetic scifi stories, so maybe take this with a grain of salt. Also, is it kind of weird that this story was first published in 1969 in Playboy? As in Hugh Hefner Playboy?? I am generally confused.
Intracom
This was hilarious. I tried tabbing all the funny passages but there was too many. [Edit: ok... I kind of did. This is going to be a long section] It’s like a play on Star Trek: The Original Series in that you have a captain, first mate, chief engineer (who is a Scotsman too, I might add) etc etc on a ship and something goes wrong so they have to fix it. But it is a spoof. There is the Insane Second Mate (also called 'Bats') who is locked in the break room “busy pulling the stuffing out of chairs and sofas, and throwing pool balls at indirect lighting fixtures”; the Communications Officer (or 'Sparks') who won’t talk to anyone because there might be a message coming in while she is talking, so she just sits there and listens to static (the hiss is the noise that stars make):
Then there’s the Chief Engineer who has an anti-matter leak which she is trying to stop, because if it continues it will lead to an automatic self destruct (but then the automatic self destruct units are all self destructed so things get worse):
And lastly we have the Captain (Captain Cook) and First Mate ('Balls'... he's the only male onboard you see) who are arguing about how many people are aboard (Captain says there’s more than five but First Mate is sure he counted right). Oh and then an alien turns up, gets the hiccups from eating soup too quickly, First Mate hunts him down and goes crazy, but then the crew suggest that the alien might also be a male so he is not alone on a ship full of girls and First Mate likes that and his fine. I just have to put the whole thing here, it's too funny:
(But they were all too loud and Communications Officer wants to listen to the stars so shhhh everyone) Ah I will reread this story alone in the future. It is great. Ok need to do next one now.
Vaster Than Empires But More Slow
There was technically some autism representation here and I am not sure how I feel about it. There is an argument to be had to say that no ASD rep is incorrect because of how diverse the community is, but something felt a little off to me here. Someone else on the spectrum could read it and think it was the best representation they had seen and really relate to it, so it is really an individual thing. It also kind of reminded me of Troi from TNG, an empath on a ship of humans.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
I loved Le Guin's intro to this story:
Ok now this is one of Le Guin's most famous works, and everyone has said their piece on it, (there are almost 3,000 reviews on Goodreads for this short story alone) better than I could ever do, so I won't dwell on it too much. It was incredible, obviously. It didn't win the Hugo for nothing. It kind of reminded me of the train track moral dilemma, you know the one where there are three people on track A and one on track B and you have to choose to switch the tracks so that the train goes down A or B. Either way someone's life is going to be ruined. Ahh it's too depressing to think about anymore.
SQ
This seemed like an idea that could have been used in a much larger story. Like a proper novella, or even maybe full length novel. I liked the idea, where the whole world has to be tested to determine the level of their sanity and be “helped” accordingly, but I felt there was more that could have been explored that was left largely alone.
The Diary Of The Rose
Dammit I wish I had this machine thingy. It would help me sort out my thoughts and actually be able to say what they were. I could do without the political brainwashing though. Little bit 1984 aren’t we. (Actually, this story got me to reread Orwell's 1984)
You made it? Well done. This review should have its own Goodreads listing it's so long.
Ok so I had hoped to get this review out sooner, because I had taken rather extensive notes so I just needed to copy and paste them in order and not write too much extra, but this time I have a legitimate excuse! (I have excuses other times but none of them are properly acceptable, but this one is actually valid I promise.) The new Florence + the Machine album Dance Fever came out the day I finished this book (I finished the book in the morning and the album came out midday-ish... Did you need those specifics? Probably not) and you have to understand my tardiness, because the build up to this album was looooong. Not only have the band not put out an album since 2018 - that's four Florence-less years - but the first single from the current one came out in February. And we had to wait until May to get the whole thing. Ok, ok, maybe this isn't that unusual for the music industry, but I don't really follow any modern artists bar F+TM (not saying that the rest of them are not any good, just that I personally have not latched onto them) and all the rest of my favourite artists are from the 70's and 80's, so I am used to getting instant access to entire discographies, so you'll forgive my ignorance. Plus sometimes I am not good at waiting for things. Yeeeeeah *clears throat* OK SO now before we dive to deep into my mental state, let's start the review.
This (double) anthology made me realise how diverse a SFF short story could be. I can remember doing “creative writing” at school and getting annoyed because the word limit never allowed for my giant science fiction adventures (well, the Star Wars rip offs) or any expansive fantasy epics (all heavily Tolkien/Narnia/Percy Jackson inspired). I simply thought that the only way to write those kinds of stories were with screeds upon screeds of pages. And yet, some of Le Guin’s stories here are under ten pages (which still would have been way too long for my school assessments, but I digress) and they are excellent! I wrote some notes on random stories that I found I had opinions on, so good luck making it to the end.
April in Paris
I love this little story, but this could be just based on the fact that it has time travel in it and I am a sucker for time travel. I'm a second generation Whovian, what can I say.
The Masters
I always like the kind of cult like stories were someone is brought up believing everything is a certain way and then something happens that changes their view on the world. This story was more of an undeveloped idea than an actual full fledged short story but I still liked it.
Nine Lives
Sometimes I hate the cloning trope and sometimes I love it. I love the way it was done here. Now I haven't read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the grandaddy of all clone/genetic scifi stories, so maybe take this with a grain of salt. Also, is it kind of weird that this story was first published in 1969 in Playboy? As in Hugh Hefner Playboy?? I am generally confused.
Intracom
This was hilarious. I tried tabbing all the funny passages but there was too many. [Edit: ok... I kind of did. This is going to be a long section] It’s like a play on Star Trek: The Original Series in that you have a captain, first mate, chief engineer (who is a Scotsman too, I might add) etc etc on a ship and something goes wrong so they have to fix it. But it is a spoof. There is the Insane Second Mate (also called 'Bats') who is locked in the break room “busy pulling the stuffing out of chairs and sofas, and throwing pool balls at indirect lighting fixtures”; the Communications Officer (or 'Sparks') who won’t talk to anyone because there might be a message coming in while she is talking, so she just sits there and listens to static (the hiss is the noise that stars make):
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Because I'm trying to pick up the message.
CAPTAIN: What message?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: The one we haven't heard before.
CAPTAIN: What for?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Well, it might indicate where we're going - we and all the other ships of the Fleet.
CAPTAIN: What does it matter where we're going, so long as we're going? Listen, 'Sparks,' I don't like to berate you like this. We'd like to have the upmost faith in you. You're a fantastically good Communications Officer, for a woman. But-
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Excuse me, Captain, I'm getting star hiss. Over and out.
Then there’s the Chief Engineer who has an anti-matter leak which she is trying to stop, because if it continues it will lead to an automatic self destruct (but then the automatic self destruct units are all self destructed so things get worse):
CAPTAIN: You mean the automatic self-destruct units are all self-destructed?
CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye, that's about the size of it, Captain.
CAPTAIN: You mean we can't destruct the ship, if the crack in the Anti-Matter Isolater widens? But if we can't self-destruct, and the Anti-Matter Isolater blows, we'll take the fifty nearest stars and all their planets with us - we'll blow up this whole region of space - if the anti-matter meets an F-2 star, the destruction might become a chain reaction and the entire Galaxy could be destructed!
CHIEF ENGINEER: Weel, we're working hard on that crack, Captain.
CAPTAIN: We? What do you mean, we? There's only one of you down there in the Engine Room. Isn't there?
CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye. But I wish there was a few more.
And lastly we have the Captain (Captain Cook) and First Mate ('Balls'... he's the only male onboard you see) who are arguing about how many people are aboard (Captain says there’s more than five but First Mate is sure he counted right). Oh and then an alien turns up, gets the hiccups from eating soup too quickly, First Mate hunts him down and goes crazy, but then the crew suggest that the alien might also be a male so he is not alone on a ship full of girls and First Mate likes that and his fine. I just have to put the whole thing here, it's too funny:
FIRST MATE: [...] Captain Cook! Captain Cook! This officer is insane!
CAPTAIN: What officer?
INSANE SECOND MATE: Me.
CAPTAIN: Oh, now, we just call you that, because you won't use secondary process thinking.
[...]
CAPTAIN: All right, everybody. Lunchtime. Mouth to the soup chute, mates! Ready? [...] Soup's on!
FIRST MATE: Mmmm.
INSANE SECOND MATE: Yum.
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Yum.
CAPTAIN: Yum.
INSANE SECOND MATE: What about the alien?
CHIEF ENGINEER: Ahh.
CHIEF ENGINEER: I'll see to the puir wee beastie. Send me another chute of soup, Captain, and I'll catch it in an oilcan and pour it in through the slot. Aye, that's it. Now then. Here I am. Are you ready, beastie? Here it comes!
ALIEN: Num, num.
CHIEF ENGINEER: There's a bonnie beastie. Go to sleep now.
[...]
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: [...] This is from the alien, I think.
INSANE SECOND MATE: [...] What is it saying?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It still doesn't speak English.
INSANE SECOND MATE: What's the message, then?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: Hiccups.
CAPTAIN: Hiccups?
COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER: It has the hiccups. It must have been the tomato rice soup. Here, I'll put it on the intracom. Listen.
ALIEN: Hic
Hic
CHIEF ENGINEER: Captain, there's a rattling in the forward pipes, and a high pressure area building up amidships. Should I try baking soda?
CAPTAIN: No, no, you never use soda when there's an alien aboard, haven't you read the Handbook? Try Maalox.
CHIEF ENGINEER: Aye aye, Captain.
ALIEN: Hic
CHIEF ENGINEER: There, there, puir wee sleekit cowerin' beastie.
FIRST MATE: Oh, my God, if only I could have shipped aboard a cruiser, where I belong! I'm going mad here! You're all mad. I'm mad
INSANE SECOND MATE: Mr Balls. Listen. Would it make you feel any better if there was another male on board?
FIRST MATE: Another male? Of course it would. Strength! Sanity! Logic! Cleanliness! Godliness! Virility! Yes! Yes!
INSANE SECOND MATE: Even if it was an alien?
FIRST MATE: An alien?
INSANE SECOND MATE: This might, you know, be a male alien.
CAPTAIN: Yes, there's better than a fifty percent chance of that.
FIRST MATE: My God. It might. You're right. It might.
CAPTAIN: That was a good thought, 'Bats.'
INSANE SECOND MATE: Well, it's not my own preference, but I thought it might stabilise Mr Balls.
FIRST MATE: A male alien. A male. By golly. It just might be. Hey. Alien. Are you there?
ALIEN: Hic
FIRST MATE: What are you, alien? Hmm? Are you a little boy alien? Hmm?
(But they were all too loud and Communications Officer wants to listen to the stars so shhhh everyone) Ah I will reread this story alone in the future. It is great. Ok need to do next one now.
Vaster Than Empires But More Slow
There was technically some autism representation here and I am not sure how I feel about it. There is an argument to be had to say that no ASD rep is incorrect because of how diverse the community is, but something felt a little off to me here. Someone else on the spectrum could read it and think it was the best representation they had seen and really relate to it, so it is really an individual thing. It also kind of reminded me of Troi from TNG, an empath on a ship of humans.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
I loved Le Guin's intro to this story:
The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. [...] Of course I didn't read James and sit down and say, Now I'll write a story about that 'lost soul.' It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word 'Omelas' in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards. Don't you read road signs backwards? POTS. WOLS nerdlihc. Ocsicnarf Nas... Salem equals schelomo equals salaam equals Peace. Melas. 0 melas. Omelas. Homme hélas. 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin.?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?
Ok now this is one of Le Guin's most famous works, and everyone has said their piece on it, (there are almost 3,000 reviews on Goodreads for this short story alone) better than I could ever do, so I won't dwell on it too much. It was incredible, obviously. It didn't win the Hugo for nothing. It kind of reminded me of the train track moral dilemma, you know the one where there are three people on track A and one on track B and you have to choose to switch the tracks so that the train goes down A or B. Either way someone's life is going to be ruined. Ahh it's too depressing to think about anymore.
SQ
This seemed like an idea that could have been used in a much larger story. Like a proper novella, or even maybe full length novel. I liked the idea, where the whole world has to be tested to determine the level of their sanity and be “helped” accordingly, but I felt there was more that could have been explored that was left largely alone.
The Diary Of The Rose
Dammit I wish I had this machine thingy. It would help me sort out my thoughts and actually be able to say what they were. I could do without the political brainwashing though. Little bit 1984 aren’t we. (Actually, this story got me to reread Orwell's 1984)
You made it? Well done. This review should have its own Goodreads listing it's so long.
July 9, 2025
This collection has many brilliant short stories - I particularly loved 'the rule of names', a quiet and moving prequel to the earthsea series. 'Diary of the rose' was compelling from start to end. 'Two delays on the northern line' and 'malheur county' were painful and bleak but, as in many of her works, Le Guin captured something special about human connection.
January 1, 2024
I am so in love with Ursula K. Le Guin. I wish I could have met her... :(
January 18, 2025
UKLG is an uneven writer of speculative short fiction and 'soft' sci-fi. She can produce the greatest thing you've ever read then the next story can be entirely drab and skippable.
At her best she creates living, breathing, worlds with rich, multidimensional, characters to inhabit them. She makes you ponder weighty subjects like philosophy, anthropology, capitalism and post-capitalism, feminism, gender, ecology, and so on in the speculative setting of the near or distant future, or an alien planet
The highest compliment I can pay her best stories is that they would make for excellent the original Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, or Black Mirror adaptations. That 'sweet spot' where high and low brow culture meet, where pop culture can be educational without being didactic, and weighty themes or subject matter are put forth in a rigorous yet entertaining manner.
Her worst stories on the other hand are often dull, didactic, numbers, freighted down with the heavy baggage of the 1960s and its legacy: moralistic ecology, second wave feminism, and a sometimes trite anarchism.
Thankfully, the stories in this collection can be split between the former and latter category in something like a 70/30 split.
At her best she creates living, breathing, worlds with rich, multidimensional, characters to inhabit them. She makes you ponder weighty subjects like philosophy, anthropology, capitalism and post-capitalism, feminism, gender, ecology, and so on in the speculative setting of the near or distant future, or an alien planet
The highest compliment I can pay her best stories is that they would make for excellent the original Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, or Black Mirror adaptations. That 'sweet spot' where high and low brow culture meet, where pop culture can be educational without being didactic, and weighty themes or subject matter are put forth in a rigorous yet entertaining manner.
Her worst stories on the other hand are often dull, didactic, numbers, freighted down with the heavy baggage of the 1960s and its legacy: moralistic ecology, second wave feminism, and a sometimes trite anarchism.
Thankfully, the stories in this collection can be split between the former and latter category in something like a 70/30 split.
July 8, 2024
Really beautiful writing, my first Ursula le Guin book and I loved her style. She is a real master of the deep and the mundane in a way that intersects all the time while keeping you engaged. The collection is quite wide and there is a bit of everything, but some of the stories were truly spectacular and vivid and will live with me for a long time.
January 18, 2024
Crazy that she was this great at short stories too. Truly the best to ever do it. Shout out to “The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb” for razzing Thomas Mann like that.
May 13, 2025
Some great stories, most not so great. Fun to see her evolve as an author
January 14, 2022
absolutely loved some stories, but really disliked others. for a full list:
semley's necklace - 2/5
april in paris - 3/5
the masters - 1/5
darkness box - 5/5
the word of unbinding - 4/5
the rule of names - 5/5
winter's king - 1/5
the good trip - 1/5
nine lives - 1/5
things - 4/5
a trip to the head - 1/5
vaster than empires - 4/5
the stars below - 5/5
the field of vision - 4.5/5
direction of the road - 1/5
the ones who walk away from omelas - 5/5
the day before the revolution - 2/5
the author of the acacia seeds - 3/5
the new atlantis - 1/5
schrodinger's cat - 4/5
two delays on the northern line - 1/5
sq - 1/5
small change - 5/5
the first report... - 2/5
the diary of the rose - 4/5
the white donkey - 5/5
the phoenix - 1/5
intracom - 1/5
the eye altering - 5/5
mazes - 3/5
the pathways of desire - 3/5
gwillan's harp - 4/5
malheur county - 3/5
the water is wide - 4/5
the wife's story - 4/5
some approaches to... - 2/5
sur - 1/5
semley's necklace - 2/5
april in paris - 3/5
the masters - 1/5
darkness box - 5/5
the word of unbinding - 4/5
the rule of names - 5/5
winter's king - 1/5
the good trip - 1/5
nine lives - 1/5
things - 4/5
a trip to the head - 1/5
vaster than empires - 4/5
the stars below - 5/5
the field of vision - 4.5/5
direction of the road - 1/5
the ones who walk away from omelas - 5/5
the day before the revolution - 2/5
the author of the acacia seeds - 3/5
the new atlantis - 1/5
schrodinger's cat - 4/5
two delays on the northern line - 1/5
sq - 1/5
small change - 5/5
the first report... - 2/5
the diary of the rose - 4/5
the white donkey - 5/5
the phoenix - 1/5
intracom - 1/5
the eye altering - 5/5
mazes - 3/5
the pathways of desire - 3/5
gwillan's harp - 4/5
malheur county - 3/5
the water is wide - 4/5
the wife's story - 4/5
some approaches to... - 2/5
sur - 1/5
November 1, 2017
In her shorter pieces, Ursula K. Le Guin blends her insights into the psyche and her tranquil, compassionate observations of the human condition with expressions of emotional variety, wit, and unbridled imagination. Compared to her longer novels, the short stories allow her greater freedom and diversity in the writing style.
November 15, 2020
This will be a fairly brief review because it took me almost a year to finish this collection of short stories, due to various distractions and other books. Therefore I don't really remember enough to comment on individual stories.
Overall it's all good stuff. Le Guin is an excellent writer and if you're a fan of her other work you'll like these stories as well. Some of them are set in one of the universes from her other books, but they're standalone stories and you don't need to have read any of her other work to enjoy these.
How much individual stories appealed to me varied - some I thought were very powerful, others were well written and solid but didn't capture my imagination as much. At some point maybe I'll come back to reread the collection in less sittings, and see if I can do a more detailed review with some commentary on particular stories - frankly this review doesn't do the collection justice.
Overall it's all good stuff. Le Guin is an excellent writer and if you're a fan of her other work you'll like these stories as well. Some of them are set in one of the universes from her other books, but they're standalone stories and you don't need to have read any of her other work to enjoy these.
How much individual stories appealed to me varied - some I thought were very powerful, others were well written and solid but didn't capture my imagination as much. At some point maybe I'll come back to reread the collection in less sittings, and see if I can do a more detailed review with some commentary on particular stories - frankly this review doesn't do the collection justice.
January 3, 2022
Cette collection de deux volumes des nouvelles de Usula K. Le Guin vaut vraiment le coup.
Je n’ai jamais été une grande fane de nouvelles – j’ai tendance à ne rentrer que tardivement dans les histoires, et reste donc souvent sur ma faim avec ce format, mais le talent et le style de Le Guin sont parfaitement adaptés à du court. Si toutes les histoires ne m’ont pas touchées -il serait difficile de l’être dans un recueil aussi important, certaines, comme Labyrinthes, sont un véritable coup de cœur pour moi. Je ne saurai que vous recommander de vous procurer ce recueil (sous cette forme ou séparé dans le cas de la VF), qui élaborent en plus certains des univers de l’autrice, comme Earthsea ou La Main Gauche de la Nuit. Appréciable quand on a aimé ses œuvres, d’avoir une petite pépite en plus à se mettre sous la dent. Et une bonne surprise pour ce premier livre terminé en 2022 !
Je n’ai jamais été une grande fane de nouvelles – j’ai tendance à ne rentrer que tardivement dans les histoires, et reste donc souvent sur ma faim avec ce format, mais le talent et le style de Le Guin sont parfaitement adaptés à du court. Si toutes les histoires ne m’ont pas touchées -il serait difficile de l’être dans un recueil aussi important, certaines, comme Labyrinthes, sont un véritable coup de cœur pour moi. Je ne saurai que vous recommander de vous procurer ce recueil (sous cette forme ou séparé dans le cas de la VF), qui élaborent en plus certains des univers de l’autrice, comme Earthsea ou La Main Gauche de la Nuit. Appréciable quand on a aimé ses œuvres, d’avoir une petite pépite en plus à se mettre sous la dent. Et une bonne surprise pour ce premier livre terminé en 2022 !
March 23, 2024
I enjoyed every single story in this collection. Each story has its own exquisitely constructed setting and poignant messages - even when that message is that readers find too many messages where they aren't intended. The anthology also has a lot to offer for those who are interested in Le Guin as a writer and how her style changed over time. From her early sketches of distant worlds (that then became her famous novels) to her varying and deeply vibrant philosophies and ideologies, this book contained the whole lot. You go from feeling rather uncomfortable in your place in the world among other living beings, to interrogating your own morals and assumptions, to chuckling at biting social witticisms, all in varying amounts throughout the book. A thoroughly enjoyable trip through the work of Ursula Le Guin that won't fail to provoke and envelop you at every turn.
September 26, 2020
Favoriete verhalen:
Semley's necklace
Winter's King
The ones who walk away from Omelas
The day before the revolution
SQ
The diary of the Rose
Mazes
The pathways of desire
The wife's stort
Sur
Semley's necklace
Winter's King
The ones who walk away from Omelas
The day before the revolution
SQ
The diary of the Rose
Mazes
The pathways of desire
The wife's stort
Sur
July 18, 2025
The Wind's Twelve Quarters was a great collection of short stories. The compass Rose was weaker ( if I can use this word ).
Overall, reading Ursula brings me joy.
What a mind she had..
Overall, reading Ursula brings me joy.
What a mind she had..
December 14, 2023
Some of these stories are amazing, the others merely fantabulous!
July 28, 2025
Gollancz’s ‘SF Masterworks’ is mostly a clearing-house for backlist, and this is one of the odder entries in the canon it creates: obviously on a binary is-she-or-isn’t-she Le Guin is definitely one of the ‘Masters’ of SF; I don’t think anyone would say their favorite Le Guin is Simultaneously Both The Mid-70s And Mid-80s Baggy Short Fiction Collections. Especially since they’re such weirdly different collections: the first one, from 1975, is something of a capstone on her career as Very Much A Genre Writer, containing both ‘Earthsea’ stories and ‘Hainish’ or ‘Ekumen’ stories, from her odd first-juvenile-then-not fantasy sequence and her idiosyncratic space-opera universe; the second, 1982, is from about the halfway point of her sojourn as Homegrown Feminist Magical Realist, at just the point where she transitioned from getting published in small presses to getting published in The New Yorker, and most of the time there’s any kind of explicitly SF or genre-fantasy riff she’s putting the eyebrows on it.
So I started reading this something more than two years ago out of completist reasons, thinking I’d set the early Earthsea stories in a class in place of A Wizard (bad idea); my momentum wholly foundered in the second volume, and I put it down until I picked it up and read through the last two hundred pages of stories in The Compass Rose in a day or two. And I will probably reread all of these, if I find a nice old paperback copy of either book, but I will be very happy to get rid of this aggressively ugly and nonsensical volume.
—
So. In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters—which frustratingly does not have twelve stories in it—‘Semley’s Necklace’ is the seed for Rocannon’s World, in which a ‘primitive’ goes back to a sort of British Museum Of Space to demand the repatration of an artefact, not understanding that the NAFAL (as Le Guin calls it) journey will mean returning to her home planet many years later—a first occurrence of the Rip Van Winkle / Fisherman of the Inland Sea theme that shows up a couple of other places. It’s a good story. It’s also the first chapter of that novel, and probably better read there. ‘The Word of Unbinding’ and ‘The Rule of Names’ are formative workings-out of the laws of magic in Earthsea: I like the latter a great deal, which gives us the Deep Lore Rule about magic and then immediately breaks it. It’s also very clearly writing through Tolkien, with a dragon and a ‘Mr Underhill’. ‘Winter’s King’ is a first stab at Karhide, the planet from Left Hand of Darkness, and another Fisherman of the Inland Sea story; we see a lot of the jargon of Hain show up. ‘The Day Before The Revolution’ is a coda to The Dispossessed. These are all collected elsewhere with the other stories of their respective universes, and probably make more sense there than here, unless you happen to be reading this collection in 1975, when it’s Le Guin’s first chance at a The Stories Of.
Some of them are kind of apprentice work, though that feels slightly disrespectful of someone who was in her thirties when she started getting published. As I look through I remember some and not others. In ‘The Masters’ we’re in a post-apocalyptic world where arabic numerals are a forbidden technology; in ‘April in Paris’ we have accidental time travel. ‘The Good Trip’ is a hallucinogen story by a teetotaller, but might not have been obviously so had her note to it not declared that; it fits in with a lot of other 60s SF about the same things, taking drugs and consensus reality, the latter of which is quietly one of Le Guin’s big themes. Vanished in that two-year gap: Darkness Box,’ ‘Things,’ ‘A Trip to the Head,’ ‘The Stars Below,’ ‘The Field of Vision,’ ‘Direction of the Road’.
The (I think well-anthologised) ‘Nine Lives’ and ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ are bigger in word count, in ambition, and in success, frankly; the first is the story of two researchers who are supplemented by cloned nonuplets, and the different ways they look at reality; the latter is, though not particularly crucially, another Hainish story, and about psychic trees. The much-discussed ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is what it is; it’s not one of Le Guin’s ten or twenty best pieces of writing.
—
The Compass Rose is somewhat irritatingly sorted into six sections: the four directions you might expect, plus ‘Nadir’ and ‘Zenith’: “Many of the American peoples who were dispossessed by the compass-guided invaders from the East structured their world,” she writes in the preface, “upon the four wind directions (or half-directions) and two more, Above and Below, also radial to the centr/self/here and now, which may sacramentally contain the other six, and thus the Universe. This is the compass in four dimensions, spatial and temporal, the Rose of the New World.” Probably the biggest fault of this volume is a certain glibness about the generally fairly heavy themes (gender discrimination, totalitarian governments, the inevitabilities of age and death); after all that she later admits her assigning stories to one direction are often unserious, almost arbitrary. The second-biggest fault is that it has jokes: “As a guide to sailors this book is not to be trusted.” Le Guin doing comedy mostly reminds you why she doesn’t do comedy very much.
Generally the compass directions have one longer piece and some shorter ones, so bagatelles, sketches, jeux d’esprit, pieces for the left hand, etc, surround ‘proper’ stories. In ‘East’, for example, the dystopian psychology of ‘The Diary of the Rose’ is insulated by one comic piece that’s mostly an excuse to write about Venice, and followed by a three-page palate-cleanser that’s a version of the unicorn myth in Le Guin’s anthropological mode, then a slighter dystopian fiction. There are a few of these dystopian fictions, of which ‘Diary’ comes the closest to being in a recognisably SF mode; it features a ‘psychoscope’, a device which can present the thoughts of a subject in recognisable visual form; that’s as close as we get. Le Guin refused the Nebula for ‘Diary’ in protest over anti-communism from the SF Writers of America, incidentally, which is an indication of where her head was at.
(The ones I read two years ago, those in ‘Nadir’ and ‘North,’ are all lost in time, tears in rain, etc.; I realise now that I partly trailed off reading the volume is that I hadn’t keyed into this organisational schtick and it just felt like a miscellany.)
‘Zenith’: a Star Trek parody in dialogue; a story about Jewish settlers on another planet, which is a weird decision, to do specifically Jewish settlers on an empty planet with no-one to displace; a story from the point of view of a mouse dying in a lab who’s annoyed that the researcher doesn’t recognise he’s sapient; a more major story about anthropologists on another planet who come to realise that the physical reality they’ve found on this new frontier has something deeply odd about it—again, one of her recurring themes—and when I found myself thinking ‘maybe this could have been a novel’ I started to realise what I found frustrating reading all of these. Le Guin's people are often well-observed but schematic: the digressive space of the novel is necessray for them to register as personalities. In much of the rest of the volume I found myself thinking, yes, this emotionally hits the tone, I am affected, but it’s often too nakedly a story written specifically to land the punch.
The first story in ‘West’—‘Gwilan’s Harp’—is very much this: it expertly creates a celtic-mythic bard culture you believe in in a handful of pages, and where it ends you think, yes, aging is hard, but I was here for the celtic-mythic bard culture. ‘Malheur Country’ is the same thing but in a realist story about a widower and his mother-in-law. ‘The Water is Wide’ is the same thing in a surrealist piece about an ailing academic. It’s impressive as a demonstration of skill and range and at the same time diminishing. ‘South’ has a story about werewolves that is the same sort of rhetorical move as the lab mouse one—how terrible that they turn into humans, the pack thinks—and a collection-of-ideas story-sketch which was actually a format in some of the ones I’ve forgotten, come to think of it, which is to say, not entirely my mental degradation to blame, there’s something inherently forgettable about them—and then ‘Sur’, the first thing she’d published in the New Yorker, in which a South American upper-class housewife reminisces about the time she and her friends reached the South Pole, before Scott or Amundsen did, as it happens. I wrote a paragraph expaning my one-sentence note on it, and then realised actually it needs a couple of thousand words or nothing, so I’m just going to go with the one-sentence version: I wrote ‘is this just lazy second-wave feminism or is something interesting going on.’ Well, I look forward to forgetting this story exists and rediscovering it some time in the future.
So I started reading this something more than two years ago out of completist reasons, thinking I’d set the early Earthsea stories in a class in place of A Wizard (bad idea); my momentum wholly foundered in the second volume, and I put it down until I picked it up and read through the last two hundred pages of stories in The Compass Rose in a day or two. And I will probably reread all of these, if I find a nice old paperback copy of either book, but I will be very happy to get rid of this aggressively ugly and nonsensical volume.
—
So. In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters—which frustratingly does not have twelve stories in it—‘Semley’s Necklace’ is the seed for Rocannon’s World, in which a ‘primitive’ goes back to a sort of British Museum Of Space to demand the repatration of an artefact, not understanding that the NAFAL (as Le Guin calls it) journey will mean returning to her home planet many years later—a first occurrence of the Rip Van Winkle / Fisherman of the Inland Sea theme that shows up a couple of other places. It’s a good story. It’s also the first chapter of that novel, and probably better read there. ‘The Word of Unbinding’ and ‘The Rule of Names’ are formative workings-out of the laws of magic in Earthsea: I like the latter a great deal, which gives us the Deep Lore Rule about magic and then immediately breaks it. It’s also very clearly writing through Tolkien, with a dragon and a ‘Mr Underhill’. ‘Winter’s King’ is a first stab at Karhide, the planet from Left Hand of Darkness, and another Fisherman of the Inland Sea story; we see a lot of the jargon of Hain show up. ‘The Day Before The Revolution’ is a coda to The Dispossessed. These are all collected elsewhere with the other stories of their respective universes, and probably make more sense there than here, unless you happen to be reading this collection in 1975, when it’s Le Guin’s first chance at a The Stories Of.
Some of them are kind of apprentice work, though that feels slightly disrespectful of someone who was in her thirties when she started getting published. As I look through I remember some and not others. In ‘The Masters’ we’re in a post-apocalyptic world where arabic numerals are a forbidden technology; in ‘April in Paris’ we have accidental time travel. ‘The Good Trip’ is a hallucinogen story by a teetotaller, but might not have been obviously so had her note to it not declared that; it fits in with a lot of other 60s SF about the same things, taking drugs and consensus reality, the latter of which is quietly one of Le Guin’s big themes. Vanished in that two-year gap: Darkness Box,’ ‘Things,’ ‘A Trip to the Head,’ ‘The Stars Below,’ ‘The Field of Vision,’ ‘Direction of the Road’.
The (I think well-anthologised) ‘Nine Lives’ and ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ are bigger in word count, in ambition, and in success, frankly; the first is the story of two researchers who are supplemented by cloned nonuplets, and the different ways they look at reality; the latter is, though not particularly crucially, another Hainish story, and about psychic trees. The much-discussed ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is what it is; it’s not one of Le Guin’s ten or twenty best pieces of writing.
—
The Compass Rose is somewhat irritatingly sorted into six sections: the four directions you might expect, plus ‘Nadir’ and ‘Zenith’: “Many of the American peoples who were dispossessed by the compass-guided invaders from the East structured their world,” she writes in the preface, “upon the four wind directions (or half-directions) and two more, Above and Below, also radial to the centr/self/here and now, which may sacramentally contain the other six, and thus the Universe. This is the compass in four dimensions, spatial and temporal, the Rose of the New World.” Probably the biggest fault of this volume is a certain glibness about the generally fairly heavy themes (gender discrimination, totalitarian governments, the inevitabilities of age and death); after all that she later admits her assigning stories to one direction are often unserious, almost arbitrary. The second-biggest fault is that it has jokes: “As a guide to sailors this book is not to be trusted.” Le Guin doing comedy mostly reminds you why she doesn’t do comedy very much.
Generally the compass directions have one longer piece and some shorter ones, so bagatelles, sketches, jeux d’esprit, pieces for the left hand, etc, surround ‘proper’ stories. In ‘East’, for example, the dystopian psychology of ‘The Diary of the Rose’ is insulated by one comic piece that’s mostly an excuse to write about Venice, and followed by a three-page palate-cleanser that’s a version of the unicorn myth in Le Guin’s anthropological mode, then a slighter dystopian fiction. There are a few of these dystopian fictions, of which ‘Diary’ comes the closest to being in a recognisably SF mode; it features a ‘psychoscope’, a device which can present the thoughts of a subject in recognisable visual form; that’s as close as we get. Le Guin refused the Nebula for ‘Diary’ in protest over anti-communism from the SF Writers of America, incidentally, which is an indication of where her head was at.
(The ones I read two years ago, those in ‘Nadir’ and ‘North,’ are all lost in time, tears in rain, etc.; I realise now that I partly trailed off reading the volume is that I hadn’t keyed into this organisational schtick and it just felt like a miscellany.)
‘Zenith’: a Star Trek parody in dialogue; a story about Jewish settlers on another planet, which is a weird decision, to do specifically Jewish settlers on an empty planet with no-one to displace; a story from the point of view of a mouse dying in a lab who’s annoyed that the researcher doesn’t recognise he’s sapient; a more major story about anthropologists on another planet who come to realise that the physical reality they’ve found on this new frontier has something deeply odd about it—again, one of her recurring themes—and when I found myself thinking ‘maybe this could have been a novel’ I started to realise what I found frustrating reading all of these. Le Guin's people are often well-observed but schematic: the digressive space of the novel is necessray for them to register as personalities. In much of the rest of the volume I found myself thinking, yes, this emotionally hits the tone, I am affected, but it’s often too nakedly a story written specifically to land the punch.
The first story in ‘West’—‘Gwilan’s Harp’—is very much this: it expertly creates a celtic-mythic bard culture you believe in in a handful of pages, and where it ends you think, yes, aging is hard, but I was here for the celtic-mythic bard culture. ‘Malheur Country’ is the same thing but in a realist story about a widower and his mother-in-law. ‘The Water is Wide’ is the same thing in a surrealist piece about an ailing academic. It’s impressive as a demonstration of skill and range and at the same time diminishing. ‘South’ has a story about werewolves that is the same sort of rhetorical move as the lab mouse one—how terrible that they turn into humans, the pack thinks—and a collection-of-ideas story-sketch which was actually a format in some of the ones I’ve forgotten, come to think of it, which is to say, not entirely my mental degradation to blame, there’s something inherently forgettable about them—and then ‘Sur’, the first thing she’d published in the New Yorker, in which a South American upper-class housewife reminisces about the time she and her friends reached the South Pole, before Scott or Amundsen did, as it happens. I wrote a paragraph expaning my one-sentence note on it, and then realised actually it needs a couple of thousand words or nothing, so I’m just going to go with the one-sentence version: I wrote ‘is this just lazy second-wave feminism or is something interesting going on.’ Well, I look forward to forgetting this story exists and rediscovering it some time in the future.
August 4, 2025
Lots of interesting and thought-provoking stories. I especially enjoyed the reoccurring idea of 'time slippage'. My favourites were Semley's Necklace, Darkness Box, The Word of Unbinding, The Field of Vision, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Schrödinger's Cat, The Diary of the Rose, Intracom and Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time. Definitely made me want to read more by Ursula Le Guin!
February 7, 2026
Wow this book turned out to be a beast to finish. I originally wanted to read a short story a day but would often stop for months. And before I knew it, it had been over a year. It's finally done...
This collection is a combination of two short story collections. On the whole I enjoyed The Wind's Twelve Quarters more than The Compass Rose because it dealt with more sci-fi / fantasy stories. The Compass Rose dealt with somewhat more esoteric sociopolitical stories.
After I finished each story I wrote down a sentence or two of my impressions. I put a ** for my favourite stories, and a * if I liked the story or thought it was notable.
THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS
**Semley's Necklace - in a few pages she can draw you into a vivid world. Simple yet made complex by her telling. The underground world gave me C.S. Lewis "The Silver Chair" vibes.
April in Paris - It's a simple story but sweet. Not that notable. Honestly would have been better if they both realized they were gay.
The Masters - Takes a while to understand what this is about. Not my favourite.
Darkness Box - Liked the visual descriptions and the magical concept. Doesn't progress much.
**The Word of Unbinding - Lovely fantasy but I'm a bit worried it spoiled the end of Earthsea for me.
**The Rule of Names - Another solid fantasy, a bit more pastoral, I liked it.
*Winter's King - Very trippy story that was rather hard to follow.
*The Good Trip - Not the most innovative but I really like the distinct voice and writing style.
*Nine Lives - Interesting view on cloning and identity
**Things - I really liked the atmosphere! You don't get much explanation on this supposed end of the world. You're just thrown into the moment.
A Trip to the Head - Can't say I understood it.
**Vaster than Empires and More Slow - Loved this one! So eerie and existential. Felt a bit like a Doctor Who Episode such as Silence in the Library.
*The Stars Below - It got more interesting as it went along, but not one of my favourites
**The Field of Vision - I loved this one. It was experimental and such a creative concept told in a very compelling way. It's simultaneously exciting and devasting to read Le Guin's work, because you can't help but realize that you'll never be able to write something as creative as her work.
Direction of the Road - I didn't fully get the point of this one but I did like the ending.
**The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - I already knew the plot going into it but still it lingers. It may not have surprised me yet it stays in my mind. Because Omelas is all around us. How many of us truly walk away?
The Day Before the Revolution - A solid story that breaks down a fictional revolutionary into a regular aging woman.
THE COMPASS ROSE
NADIR
*The Author of the Acacia Seeds Another interesting concept by Le Guin. Perhaps not the most engaging read but I love the poetry of animals having a translatable language. The final quote was also quite beautiful.
*The New Atlantis Another somewhat trippy short story. An unexplained dystopian future where climate change is destroying the Earth. It's interspersed with excerpts from an unknown narrator that is left up to interpretation. I like how she experiments with style.
Schrödinger's Cat Can't say I understood what she was going for but I appreciate how weird she gets with her stories.
NORTH
Two Delays on the Northern Line Similar to the one above, I appreciated how she plays around and just drops us into a story. Some moments about life and grief did hit home, but overall the story didn't stand out.
*SQ An interesting character to be sure. You really can't beat that opening sentence. (quoted below). Rather interesting story about how a fanatic can corrupt society and then get swept up in his own wave of insanity. And what an ending.
*Small Change A sad rather odd story about death and grief that I didn't fully understand but again had a solid ending.
EAST
*The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb A bit too many abstract stories in a row, but I did quite enjoy these vignettes of life on Earth.
*The Diary of the Rose Another interesting glimpse into a dystopian world. With the journal entries there's a lot that needs to be read between the lines.
The White Donkey A sad little story.
The Phoenix Somewhat confusing tale about one woman's perception of a civil war and a librarian.
ZENITH
*Intracom This one grew on me. It's an off-beat almost comedy about a spaceship possibly invaded by an alien. Or maybe it's just misogyny. Who knows!
The Eye Altering I really hope Le Guin isn't a Zionist.
Mazes I figured out the twist pretty early on in regards to who was the alien and who was in a maze, but still a decent sad story.
*The Pathways of Desire A decent lengthier story that goes in an interesting direction about desire and imagination. The reveal at the ends makes the uncomfortable aspects of the story more clear.
WEST
Gwilan's Harp Rather unmemorable story about a talented harpist and the trajectory of her life.
Malheur County I felt the writing style rather clunky in this one, which is something I haven't noticed with her other stories. Maybe this story of grief will hit harder when I'm older.
*The Water Is Wide I actually kinda liked it. Again another one that I don't fully understand, but I felt the water imagery as relating to depression was rather impactful.
SOUTH
The Wife's Story A somewhat interesting twist but not a standout story.
Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time Kinda fun little extrapolation about wasting time.
Sur I liked the premise of an all women exploratory historical voyage, yet I didn't find the writing style very engaging.
This collection is a combination of two short story collections. On the whole I enjoyed The Wind's Twelve Quarters more than The Compass Rose because it dealt with more sci-fi / fantasy stories. The Compass Rose dealt with somewhat more esoteric sociopolitical stories.
After I finished each story I wrote down a sentence or two of my impressions. I put a ** for my favourite stories, and a * if I liked the story or thought it was notable.
THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS
**Semley's Necklace - in a few pages she can draw you into a vivid world. Simple yet made complex by her telling. The underground world gave me C.S. Lewis "The Silver Chair" vibes.
April in Paris - It's a simple story but sweet. Not that notable. Honestly would have been better if they both realized they were gay.
The Masters - Takes a while to understand what this is about. Not my favourite.
Darkness Box - Liked the visual descriptions and the magical concept. Doesn't progress much.
**The Word of Unbinding - Lovely fantasy but I'm a bit worried it spoiled the end of Earthsea for me.
**The Rule of Names - Another solid fantasy, a bit more pastoral, I liked it.
*Winter's King - Very trippy story that was rather hard to follow.
*The Good Trip - Not the most innovative but I really like the distinct voice and writing style.
*Nine Lives - Interesting view on cloning and identity
**Things - I really liked the atmosphere! You don't get much explanation on this supposed end of the world. You're just thrown into the moment.
A Trip to the Head - Can't say I understood it.
**Vaster than Empires and More Slow - Loved this one! So eerie and existential. Felt a bit like a Doctor Who Episode such as Silence in the Library.
*The Stars Below - It got more interesting as it went along, but not one of my favourites
**The Field of Vision - I loved this one. It was experimental and such a creative concept told in a very compelling way. It's simultaneously exciting and devasting to read Le Guin's work, because you can't help but realize that you'll never be able to write something as creative as her work.
Direction of the Road - I didn't fully get the point of this one but I did like the ending.
**The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - I already knew the plot going into it but still it lingers. It may not have surprised me yet it stays in my mind. Because Omelas is all around us. How many of us truly walk away?
The Day Before the Revolution - A solid story that breaks down a fictional revolutionary into a regular aging woman.
THE COMPASS ROSE
NADIR
*The Author of the Acacia Seeds Another interesting concept by Le Guin. Perhaps not the most engaging read but I love the poetry of animals having a translatable language. The final quote was also quite beautiful.
And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventure - the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.
*The New Atlantis Another somewhat trippy short story. An unexplained dystopian future where climate change is destroying the Earth. It's interspersed with excerpts from an unknown narrator that is left up to interpretation. I like how she experiments with style.
Schrödinger's Cat Can't say I understood what she was going for but I appreciate how weird she gets with her stories.
NORTH
Two Delays on the Northern Line Similar to the one above, I appreciated how she plays around and just drops us into a story. Some moments about life and grief did hit home, but overall the story didn't stand out.
*SQ An interesting character to be sure. You really can't beat that opening sentence. (quoted below). Rather interesting story about how a fanatic can corrupt society and then get swept up in his own wave of insanity. And what an ending.
The people who called him a power-seeker and a dictator were just the same ones who used to say that Hitler was insane and Nixon was insane and all the world leaders were insane and the arms race was insane and our misuse of natural resources was insane and the whole world civilisation was insane and suicidal. They were always saying things like that. And they said it about Dr. Speakie.
*Small Change A sad rather odd story about death and grief that I didn't fully understand but again had a solid ending.
EAST
*The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb A bit too many abstract stories in a row, but I did quite enjoy these vignettes of life on Earth.
*The Diary of the Rose Another interesting glimpse into a dystopian world. With the journal entries there's a lot that needs to be read between the lines.
The White Donkey A sad little story.
The Phoenix Somewhat confusing tale about one woman's perception of a civil war and a librarian.
ZENITH
*Intracom This one grew on me. It's an off-beat almost comedy about a spaceship possibly invaded by an alien. Or maybe it's just misogyny. Who knows!
The Eye Altering I really hope Le Guin isn't a Zionist.
Mazes I figured out the twist pretty early on in regards to who was the alien and who was in a maze, but still a decent sad story.
*The Pathways of Desire A decent lengthier story that goes in an interesting direction about desire and imagination. The reveal at the ends makes the uncomfortable aspects of the story more clear.
WEST
Gwilan's Harp Rather unmemorable story about a talented harpist and the trajectory of her life.
Malheur County I felt the writing style rather clunky in this one, which is something I haven't noticed with her other stories. Maybe this story of grief will hit harder when I'm older.
*The Water Is Wide I actually kinda liked it. Again another one that I don't fully understand, but I felt the water imagery as relating to depression was rather impactful.
SOUTH
The Wife's Story A somewhat interesting twist but not a standout story.
Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time Kinda fun little extrapolation about wasting time.
Sur I liked the premise of an all women exploratory historical voyage, yet I didn't find the writing style very engaging.
June 16, 2020
Ursula K le. Guin was phenomenal - seminal, even. The Compass Rose had a much quieter effect on me, more of a delayed reaction, really; it's stories are quiet, but they don't overwhelm you, which is a good thing and a less good thing. I may only be saying that because compared to The Wind's Twelve Quarters, a collection which has some of the greatest short stories ever to be written in the language - I'm deadly serious, it objectively fucking slaps - there's a long way to come down from. Both are astonishing and unthinkably good. They're sincere, and never careless with it. Le Guin wasn't a writer who wasted words; everything mattered. It won't waste your time, either.
June 9, 2023
Ursula K Le Guin is one of those authors who is probably as well known for her short stories as for her novels. Or, in particular, one short story which appears in the first half of this collection: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". An expansion of an idea Le Guin encountered in William James (and, forgotten, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov), this short story addresses the question of the scapegoat, the one upon whom suffering is heaped to alleviate that of others.
"Omelas" is famous for good reason, but I don't especially rate it as a story in isolation. There's no narrative; it's what Le Guin in The Wind's Twelve Quarters calls a psychomyth, a seemingly timeless story that's meaning is malleable. Later, she would call it a fable. I think of it as a key. If one reads this volume in order, after "Omelas" comes "The Day Before the Revolution", which Le Guin describes as being "about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." We are invited throughout Le Guin's work to look at the world a different way, to "walk away", metaphorically, from the world we know. To reconsider what is and why it might be so.
Thus, in the second volume of this collection, we start to find stories from a host of different perspectives that might encourage us to think differently about the world. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds", "Mazes", and "The Wife's Story" encourage us to think about how we, as humans, view animals, and how animals might view us back. We have already read, at this point, "Direction of the Road", a story from the perspective of a tree. Changes of perspective are also integral to "The Field of Vision" and "The Eye Altering".
I'm generally more drawn to Le Guin's more traditional narratives than to the psychomyths. These two volumes contain many classics of her oeuvre, from the original Earthsea stories to those set in what is known as the Hainish Cycle. "The Day Before the Revolution" is probably my favourite of these as a rich character portrait of someone who came to embody an ideal. In the latter half of the 1970s and through the '80s Le Guin moved away from these shared worlds and so The Compass Rose contains only isolated narratives (and one story from the fictional European country Orsinia). These stories show how much of a mistake it would be to only focus on those shared worlds. I think that "The Author of the Acacia Seeds", "The Diary of the Rose", "The Eye Altering", and others are among her finest works. There are other stories here that I find it more difficult to get a handle on, but the general feeling is excellence.
While the only real selection principle in either of the two collections bundled here is time, and a little quality, I do think that there is a clear difference between the collections. Perhaps it is the lack of Earthsea or Hainish stories in The Compass Rose, or perhaps it is because at that point Le Guin had become a familiar enough name that she was more able to focus on her own preoccupations. Perhaps it is simply because science fiction as a genre had gone through significant changes in the early '70s, and that Le Guin herself was no longer constrained to that genre. The result here is that we have a wide variety of stories on display here, showing Le Guin's talent, her development, and her way of thinking. A key part of that way of thinking is to walk away from what you know and what you assume, and to explore something new.
"Omelas" is famous for good reason, but I don't especially rate it as a story in isolation. There's no narrative; it's what Le Guin in The Wind's Twelve Quarters calls a psychomyth, a seemingly timeless story that's meaning is malleable. Later, she would call it a fable. I think of it as a key. If one reads this volume in order, after "Omelas" comes "The Day Before the Revolution", which Le Guin describes as being "about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." We are invited throughout Le Guin's work to look at the world a different way, to "walk away", metaphorically, from the world we know. To reconsider what is and why it might be so.
Thus, in the second volume of this collection, we start to find stories from a host of different perspectives that might encourage us to think differently about the world. "The Author of the Acacia Seeds", "Mazes", and "The Wife's Story" encourage us to think about how we, as humans, view animals, and how animals might view us back. We have already read, at this point, "Direction of the Road", a story from the perspective of a tree. Changes of perspective are also integral to "The Field of Vision" and "The Eye Altering".
I'm generally more drawn to Le Guin's more traditional narratives than to the psychomyths. These two volumes contain many classics of her oeuvre, from the original Earthsea stories to those set in what is known as the Hainish Cycle. "The Day Before the Revolution" is probably my favourite of these as a rich character portrait of someone who came to embody an ideal. In the latter half of the 1970s and through the '80s Le Guin moved away from these shared worlds and so The Compass Rose contains only isolated narratives (and one story from the fictional European country Orsinia). These stories show how much of a mistake it would be to only focus on those shared worlds. I think that "The Author of the Acacia Seeds", "The Diary of the Rose", "The Eye Altering", and others are among her finest works. There are other stories here that I find it more difficult to get a handle on, but the general feeling is excellence.
While the only real selection principle in either of the two collections bundled here is time, and a little quality, I do think that there is a clear difference between the collections. Perhaps it is the lack of Earthsea or Hainish stories in The Compass Rose, or perhaps it is because at that point Le Guin had become a familiar enough name that she was more able to focus on her own preoccupations. Perhaps it is simply because science fiction as a genre had gone through significant changes in the early '70s, and that Le Guin herself was no longer constrained to that genre. The result here is that we have a wide variety of stories on display here, showing Le Guin's talent, her development, and her way of thinking. A key part of that way of thinking is to walk away from what you know and what you assume, and to explore something new.
July 11, 2023
This is a big book, containing a fair sample of Le Guin's writing from the 1960s and 70s, into the early 80s. The first volume, The Wind's Twelve Quarters covers the earlier period from 1963 to 1974 and the second from 1974 to 1982. Personally, I think I mostly preferred the stories in the earlier volume, which are, for want of a better word, more traditional. The author is experimenting, but still working in a traditional storytelling format here. In the latter volume, there's a number of more experimental works, that I'd call part of the New Wave of science fiction. I've never really got on with the New Wave, and struggle with its forms and functions, so stories like Schrödinger's Cat or Intracom didn't really work for me. The first volume also has author prefaces to each story, which I always enjoy, since it helps put them in context and give you an idea of what the author was thinking when a story was written. These are missing from the second volume.
But there's a huge amount to like, from the classic The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, to the humorous Direction of the Road and several set in established worlds, whether that be Ekumen stories or the ones set in Earthsea. Le Guin was a very versatile storyteller, turning her hand to many different genres and styles, but more often than not, with her well-honed anthropologist's eye. If you're not familiar with Le Guin's work, this is a great place to start, and if you already are, you'll find lots to enjoy.
But there's a huge amount to like, from the classic The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, to the humorous Direction of the Road and several set in established worlds, whether that be Ekumen stories or the ones set in Earthsea. Le Guin was a very versatile storyteller, turning her hand to many different genres and styles, but more often than not, with her well-honed anthropologist's eye. If you're not familiar with Le Guin's work, this is a great place to start, and if you already are, you'll find lots to enjoy.
March 22, 2018
Det här med omnibusar kan vara krångligt och jag har inte sedan Penguin Classics samling med Dunsany sett det lika tydligt som med den här. Kastet är inte lika tvärt här men det skaver duktigt minst sagt. Inte för att "The Winds..." skiljer sig jättemycket från innehållet i "The Compass Rose" men stilistiskt (och det lite mer experimentella) är det lite som att gå med ansiktet rakt in i en vägg. Det hade varit bättre att ge ut dem som två olika volymer då den första halvan är vida överlägsen den andra. Nåväl. Le Guin tror jag funkar bäst för mig när hon arbetar med de kortare formerna som här, snarare än i romanform eller i kortromanerna. För "The Winds Twelve..." var riktigt bra, det bästa jag läst av Le Guin. Flytande, så gott som genomgående, riktigt bra språk på olika vis, väldefinierade karaktärer och intressant tematik (med "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" som glimrande stjärna). Bra spännvidd från fantasy från Earthsea-universumet till tyngre SF som "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" och "Winter´s King". Det finns absolut missar här med. "Nine Lives" var jättetråkig och "Semleys Necklace" likaså.
"The Compass Rose" skall få en chans till men tyvärr så fungerar det inte alls ihop med den första halvan. Hoppet i kvalité och stil fungerar inte alls. Krocken är för stor. Men den skall läsas igen, separat, vid senare tillfälle. Dock så måste novellen "Intercom" från nämnda samling nämnas som riktigt bra.
July 26, 2024
This book gave me so much!
+ Delightful writing style - I'm not native English speaker, so sometimes Le Guin's style gets very complicated to read and understand. After a paragraph or two I usually got the gist of it and we're able to get on board the story.
+ There are no dull beginnings! Le Guin throws you in the middle of events and characters to start the story, but then gently guides you to the punchline.
+ There are different main and side characters, things get diverse. There are many archetypes, too (eg. beautiful princess, old wizard).
+ The scope of themes is vaster than I had expected. There's linguistics, physics, chemistry, geography, etc., and none of that is applied without some insight on how they affect human psychology.
My favourite stories had something to do with the psyche, one-ness and other-ness, what we expect human-ness to mean.
Some stories had a clear "reason" to be there, some less. The latter I found frustrating and boring, but they were a minority.
To get the idea of how many different topics and styles/ways of storytelling Le Guin has touched I'd especially recommend the stories Nine lives, Vaster than empires and more slow, Direction of the road, The rule of names, The author of the acacia seeds, Intracom, and The pathways of desire.
+ Delightful writing style - I'm not native English speaker, so sometimes Le Guin's style gets very complicated to read and understand. After a paragraph or two I usually got the gist of it and we're able to get on board the story.
+ There are no dull beginnings! Le Guin throws you in the middle of events and characters to start the story, but then gently guides you to the punchline.
+ There are different main and side characters, things get diverse. There are many archetypes, too (eg. beautiful princess, old wizard).
+ The scope of themes is vaster than I had expected. There's linguistics, physics, chemistry, geography, etc., and none of that is applied without some insight on how they affect human psychology.
My favourite stories had something to do with the psyche, one-ness and other-ness, what we expect human-ness to mean.
Some stories had a clear "reason" to be there, some less. The latter I found frustrating and boring, but they were a minority.
To get the idea of how many different topics and styles/ways of storytelling Le Guin has touched I'd especially recommend the stories Nine lives, Vaster than empires and more slow, Direction of the road, The rule of names, The author of the acacia seeds, Intracom, and The pathways of desire.
October 25, 2017
The first part of the book "The wind's twelve quarters" was just overwhelming. So many worlds, so many ideas and all most marvellously put into short stories!
The second part of the book "The Compass Rose" seemed a lot more experimental, more ideas and thoughts than actual stories. I struggled a lot more to follow these and despite them being science fiction masterpieces (as it claims on the cover) without a doubt, I was rather disappointed they were not each introduced(as the first part had been) with some words by the author, as a possible help to understand the thought behind each story.
4 stars for the second, 5 for the first part. And the compromise to 4 because the authors genius asks for a more critical rating than the work of a less skilled writer.
It certainly reads like something to treasure and come back to every now and then.
The second part of the book "The Compass Rose" seemed a lot more experimental, more ideas and thoughts than actual stories. I struggled a lot more to follow these and despite them being science fiction masterpieces (as it claims on the cover) without a doubt, I was rather disappointed they were not each introduced(as the first part had been) with some words by the author, as a possible help to understand the thought behind each story.
4 stars for the second, 5 for the first part. And the compromise to 4 because the authors genius asks for a more critical rating than the work of a less skilled writer.
It certainly reads like something to treasure and come back to every now and then.
July 14, 2024
Ursula K Le Guin is one of my favourite authors and this collection of her short stories showcases her ability to tell many different kinds of narratives. The inclusion of introductions by Le Guin at the beginning of each story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters also provides an insight into her process and the evolution of her writing style. Once I started reading The Compass Rose I found that I missed these introductions and it took a bit longer for me to engage with each story. There is a mix of fantasy and science fiction and most of them I really enjoyed. However there were a few that I just couldn't get on with and didn't make sense to me. I think I prefer to read Le Guin's novels where she has had the chance to fully explore themes and flesh out the characters and narrative arc. But overall I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of Le Guin already.
December 18, 2024
This collection contains two volumes of the author’s short fiction in the science-fiction and fantasy genres. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters was originally published in 1975 and The Compass Rose was originally published in 1982. The collection has an original introduction by someone I’ve never heard of but seemingly influential.
TWTQ contains seventeen stories, a foreword, and a note on each story, all by the author. Some stories are set in the Hainish universe, others in Earthsea, and others in neither. This is a superb collection to be read and reread with pleasure.
* Semley’s Necklace - a powerful mixture of fantasy myth-making and hard sci-fi with a relativistic twist. Five stars.
* April in Paris - a sweet and funny time travelling romance. Four stars.
* The Masters - a post apocalyptic tale of science vs religion. Four stars.
* Darkness Box - dreamlike and surreal, a meditation on time. Three stars.
* The Word of Unbinding - a superb wizardly duel. Five stars.
* The Rule of Names - an early visit to Earthsea and its dragon lore. The fabulous concise yet detailed storytelling of this series is already there, making this a welcome return to familiar ground. Top drawer stuff. Five stars.
* Winter’s King - a story with its own interesting history. This version has been altered to make the feminine the default gender of the Gethenians, to match the subsequent novel, The Left Hand Of Darkness, set in the same world. This is one aspect of the story, but the concept of mindhandling is just as startling, as is the effect of relativistic travel on dynastic succession. The writing is very stylised, making for a difficult read, but this is high art. Four stars.
* The Good Trip - this is neither Sci-Fi nor Fantasy but a contemporary slice of life short story (hence immediately losing my interest) about an acid trip, or possibly not. Quite surreal. Not my cup of tea. Not my scene. Didn’t do anything to change that. Two stars.
* Nine Lives - another story with an interesting editorial history of its own. This is a meditation on cloning, identity, solitude, and empathy. Three stars.
* Things - a curious meditation on religious apocalypse, hope, and suicide. Three stars.
* A Trip To The Head - a surreal experiment? Not for me. Two stars.
* Vaster Than Empires And More Slow - reminiscent of Gaia theory and Lem’s Solaris, this sentient planet story explores consciousness and empathy. Very deep. Very effective. Five stars.
* The Stars Below - a beautiful tale of the conflict between science and religion and of human kindness. Four stars.
* The Field Of Vision - a meditation on alienness interpreted as divinity? Very strange and unsettling. Three Stars.
* Direction Of The Road - ever heard about the accident report “car hit by tree”? This explains it. With relativity. Unsettlingly funny but dizzying. Three stars.
* The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - a deep, poignant reflection on the price of happiness and the willingness to pay it. Five Stars.
* The Day Before The Revolution - a tale of revolution and ageing, a whole world-changing life in retrospect in a few emotional, poignant, vibrant pages. Simply magic storytelling. Five stars.
TCR is a much more eclectic collection and much darker, more pessimistic, in tone. After a brief introduction by the author, it contains the following:
* The Author of the Acacia Seeds - a mockumentary about animal language and literature. Really funny and intriguing. Four stars.
* The New Atlantis - an experimental stream of consciousness dystopia. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Schrödinger’s Cat - very experimental musings on quantum theory. Really didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Two Delays on the Northern Line - atmospheric but just not interesting. Two stars.
* SQ - humorously dystopian musings on what is normal and what is not in mental health, and the perils of conformity. Three stars.
* Small Change - emotional musings on death. Three stars.
* The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb - a stream of consciousness about describing our world to an alien. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Diary of the Rose - a dystopia of politicised mental health treatment. A darker version of SQ. Three stars.
* The White Donkey - an innocent’s view of a unicorn? Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Phoenix - a dystopia of revolution, resistance, and loyalty to personal values. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Intracom - an actual science fiction work, some kind of stage play. Really could not get on with this. Nonsensical and unpleasant. One star.
* The Eye Altering - another science fiction about adaptation to a new planet. This one had depth and whimsical charm. Four stars.
* Mazes - the point of view of the mouse in the experimental maze? Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Pathways of Desire - anthropologists exploring a primitive planet convince themselves it was created in the dream of an immature teen. Bizarre but well fleshed out and engaging. Four stars.
* Gwilan’s Harp - a sweet fantasy or historical tale. Very pleasant. Four stars.
* Malheur County - a domestic drama. Just not interesting to me. Two stars.
* The Water is Wide - very experimental. Didn’t get it at all. One star.
* The Wife’s Story - a fun reverse werewolf tale. Three stars.
* Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time - an entertaining parody of scientific and economic journalism, similar to the first story in this collection. Three stars.
* Sur - an account of a secret all female expedition to the South Pole prior to Amundsen. Three stars.
Overall I enjoyed The Compass Rose much less than The Wind’s Twelve Quarters but that’s mostly because of my expectation to read fantasy or sci-fi from the author rather than anything else.
TWTQ contains seventeen stories, a foreword, and a note on each story, all by the author. Some stories are set in the Hainish universe, others in Earthsea, and others in neither. This is a superb collection to be read and reread with pleasure.
* Semley’s Necklace - a powerful mixture of fantasy myth-making and hard sci-fi with a relativistic twist. Five stars.
* April in Paris - a sweet and funny time travelling romance. Four stars.
* The Masters - a post apocalyptic tale of science vs religion. Four stars.
* Darkness Box - dreamlike and surreal, a meditation on time. Three stars.
* The Word of Unbinding - a superb wizardly duel. Five stars.
* The Rule of Names - an early visit to Earthsea and its dragon lore. The fabulous concise yet detailed storytelling of this series is already there, making this a welcome return to familiar ground. Top drawer stuff. Five stars.
* Winter’s King - a story with its own interesting history. This version has been altered to make the feminine the default gender of the Gethenians, to match the subsequent novel, The Left Hand Of Darkness, set in the same world. This is one aspect of the story, but the concept of mindhandling is just as startling, as is the effect of relativistic travel on dynastic succession. The writing is very stylised, making for a difficult read, but this is high art. Four stars.
* The Good Trip - this is neither Sci-Fi nor Fantasy but a contemporary slice of life short story (hence immediately losing my interest) about an acid trip, or possibly not. Quite surreal. Not my cup of tea. Not my scene. Didn’t do anything to change that. Two stars.
* Nine Lives - another story with an interesting editorial history of its own. This is a meditation on cloning, identity, solitude, and empathy. Three stars.
* Things - a curious meditation on religious apocalypse, hope, and suicide. Three stars.
* A Trip To The Head - a surreal experiment? Not for me. Two stars.
* Vaster Than Empires And More Slow - reminiscent of Gaia theory and Lem’s Solaris, this sentient planet story explores consciousness and empathy. Very deep. Very effective. Five stars.
* The Stars Below - a beautiful tale of the conflict between science and religion and of human kindness. Four stars.
* The Field Of Vision - a meditation on alienness interpreted as divinity? Very strange and unsettling. Three Stars.
* Direction Of The Road - ever heard about the accident report “car hit by tree”? This explains it. With relativity. Unsettlingly funny but dizzying. Three stars.
* The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - a deep, poignant reflection on the price of happiness and the willingness to pay it. Five Stars.
* The Day Before The Revolution - a tale of revolution and ageing, a whole world-changing life in retrospect in a few emotional, poignant, vibrant pages. Simply magic storytelling. Five stars.
TCR is a much more eclectic collection and much darker, more pessimistic, in tone. After a brief introduction by the author, it contains the following:
* The Author of the Acacia Seeds - a mockumentary about animal language and literature. Really funny and intriguing. Four stars.
* The New Atlantis - an experimental stream of consciousness dystopia. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Schrödinger’s Cat - very experimental musings on quantum theory. Really didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Two Delays on the Northern Line - atmospheric but just not interesting. Two stars.
* SQ - humorously dystopian musings on what is normal and what is not in mental health, and the perils of conformity. Three stars.
* Small Change - emotional musings on death. Three stars.
* The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb - a stream of consciousness about describing our world to an alien. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Diary of the Rose - a dystopia of politicised mental health treatment. A darker version of SQ. Three stars.
* The White Donkey - an innocent’s view of a unicorn? Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Phoenix - a dystopia of revolution, resistance, and loyalty to personal values. Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* Intracom - an actual science fiction work, some kind of stage play. Really could not get on with this. Nonsensical and unpleasant. One star.
* The Eye Altering - another science fiction about adaptation to a new planet. This one had depth and whimsical charm. Four stars.
* Mazes - the point of view of the mouse in the experimental maze? Didn’t get it. Two stars.
* The Pathways of Desire - anthropologists exploring a primitive planet convince themselves it was created in the dream of an immature teen. Bizarre but well fleshed out and engaging. Four stars.
* Gwilan’s Harp - a sweet fantasy or historical tale. Very pleasant. Four stars.
* Malheur County - a domestic drama. Just not interesting to me. Two stars.
* The Water is Wide - very experimental. Didn’t get it at all. One star.
* The Wife’s Story - a fun reverse werewolf tale. Three stars.
* Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time - an entertaining parody of scientific and economic journalism, similar to the first story in this collection. Three stars.
* Sur - an account of a secret all female expedition to the South Pole prior to Amundsen. Three stars.
Overall I enjoyed The Compass Rose much less than The Wind’s Twelve Quarters but that’s mostly because of my expectation to read fantasy or sci-fi from the author rather than anything else.
March 11, 2020
Well, technically my average for the all the stories in this collection works out at 3.27. But I'm feeling generous and rounding up; the good stories are good enough to drag the average up anyway!
Le Guin is a beautiful writer as always, and here she expresses a wide-ranging imagination, but often expresses similar themes. I was however surprises by the lack of consistency overall- there are some genuine duds in amongst the gems.
Too much really going on to discuss in detail or I'd be here forever, so I'll just highlight some of my faves: Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time, Sur, The Diary of the Rose, Direction of the Road, Vaster than Empires and More Slow
Le Guin is a beautiful writer as always, and here she expresses a wide-ranging imagination, but often expresses similar themes. I was however surprises by the lack of consistency overall- there are some genuine duds in amongst the gems.
Too much really going on to discuss in detail or I'd be here forever, so I'll just highlight some of my faves: Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time, Sur, The Diary of the Rose, Direction of the Road, Vaster than Empires and More Slow
September 9, 2023
For quite some years now, Ursula K. Le Guin has been my favourite author because of her intelligence and way of describing persons and worlds, known and unknown. I enjoy both her novels and short stories and this book, which consists of her two short story collections "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" and "The Compass Rose", shows why she is such an important author. There is quite a variety in the stories, sci-fi, dystopia, humour, fantasy etc, and not a bad one among them. My personal top five:
1. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
2. The Eye Altering
3. The New Atlantis
4. The Day Before The Revolution
5. Sur
1. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
2. The Eye Altering
3. The New Atlantis
4. The Day Before The Revolution
5. Sur
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