Product Description

"Then came a child trotting to school with his little backpack. He trotted on all fours, neatly, his hands in leather mitts or boots that protected them from the pavement; he was pale, with small eyes, and a snout, but he was adorable."
--from Changing Planes

The misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport leads to the accidental discovery of alighting on other planes--not airplanes but planes of existence. Ursula Le Guin's deadpan premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who describes bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own, and sometimes open puzzling doors into the alien.


Winner of the PEN/Malamud for Short Stories

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #310747 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
At first, readers may find Ursula K. Le Guin's collection Changing Planes rather light, if not slight. However, as the reader continues through its sixteen stories (ten of which are original to this volume), the collection achieves considerable weight and power.

A punny conceit links the stories and provides the title of Changing Planes. Conceived before September 11, 2001, this conceit now, unfairly, looks odd. Trapped too many times in the misery of pre-terrorist airports, Sita Dulip discovered how to change planes: not airplanes, but planes of existence. Now the people of Sita's earth travel between alternate universes.

The stories in Changing Planes are strong expressions of Le Guin's considerable anthropological and psychological insight. However, these tales don't follow traditional plot structures or character-development methods. They read more like travelogues, or socio-anthropological articles on foreign nations or tribes. They explore exotic literary planes lying somewhere between Jorge Luis Borges's ficciones and Horace Miner's anthropological satire Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. However, unlike Miner's parody, Le Guin's wise tales are rarely satirical, though "The Royals of Hegn" sharply skewers the absurdity of royalty-worship, and "Great Joy" rightly attacks the boundless corporate criminality familiar to anyone who's read a newspaper since 2001.

One of America's greatest authors, Ursula K. Le Guin has received the National Book Award, the Newberry Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, five Nebula Awards, and five Hugo Awards. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly
When most people get stuck for hours in an airport, nothing much comes of it but boredom. When a writer like Le Guin (The Other Wind, etc.) has such an experience, however, the result may be a book of short stories. In "Sita Dulip's Method," a bored traveler, a friend of the narrator, discovers that if she sits on her uncomfortable airport chair in just the right way and thinks just the right thoughts, she can change planes-not airplanes, mind you, but planes of existence. Each of the linked stories that follows recounts a trip by the narrator or someone of her acquaintance to a different plane. "The Silence of the Asonu," for example, describes a world where the people speak only half a dozen words in any given year, and "The Ire of the Veksi" recounts a visit to a plane where virtually all the natives are angry virtually all of the time. The majority of these stories are allegorical to some degree. Most have a satiric edge, as in "Great Joy," for example which features an entire world devoted to the commercial side of various holidays, with lots of great shopping in quaint little towns like No‰l City, O Little Town and Yuleville. Many of the tales echo, or take issue with, other works of fantastic fiction. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is clearly an influence, and one story, "Wake Island," can be seen as a re-examination of the basic premise of Nancy Kress's classic superman tale, "Beggars in Spain." This is a fairly minor effort, but like everything from Le Guin's pen, a delight. B&w illus. by Eric Beddows.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
"The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes." In Le Guin's series of 16 vivid stories, an airport-bound woman with an inquiring mind visits assorted other planes of existence. With dispassion, wry humor, and a keen eye, and aided as well by research conducted in libraries of various kinds, she describes those excursions in hopes of inducing the reader to try interplanary travel. Each story features a different society and culture, and some of these settings allow telling commentary on the foibles of our world. Hegn, for example, is a small plane on which everyone belongs to the royal family, except for one, carefully nurtured family of commoners. In Asonu, adults rarely say even one word, though the children chatter until they hit their teens, when they start becoming more and more silent. As for Hennebet, do its people experience reincarnation, or are they living again? The narrator's expectations of identity and time become very confused trying to grasp the slippery concept upon which that plane is based. And then there is unusually tenuous Zuehe, which imparts the feeling of being in a landscape created by the artist Escher. Eric Beddows' black-and-white illustrations perfectly complement Le Guin's wildly inventive array of societies and cultures. Sure to delight fans of the unusual travelogue, this is just plain good airport reading. Sally Estes
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Looking for some fun at the airport? Read this book!
Ursula Le Guin is funny. I mean, she has a deep, cosmic sense of humor --- a good thing for a writer of speculative fiction. Her new book, CHANGING PLANES, has a near-universal complaint for a premise (the tedium of waiting in airports for delayed/canceled flights) and a play on words for the title (instead of changing to flying machines bound for Memphis or Boise, people transport themselves to different planes of existence). The key to "interplanary travel," the anonymous narrator explains, is the very awfulness of the airport experience: "a specific combination of tense misery, indigestion, and boredom." You might call CHANGING PLANES the ultimate in escape reading.

After this clever set-up, the book becomes a sort of glorified travelogue. Granted, the civilizations on the various planes aren't real --- but they could be, and Le Guin's gift for inventing plausible and detailed alternative societies is as brilliant as ever. In the tradition of her eminent anthropologist parents, she creates a succession of strange lands and customs that overturn our assumptions about what is standard, settled, and normal. It's cultural relativism as you've never seen it before: witty, sophisticated, and gloriously human.

"The Silence of the Asonu" shows us a civilization in which adults don't speak. In "The Nna Mmoy Language," words have ever-shifting meanings ("Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water," a puzzled outsider says) and "Feeling at Home With the Hennebet" challenges our notion of identity and the individual soul. Often the stories are vehicles for social criticism and satire: rampant consumerism ("Great Joy"), genetic engineering gone nuts ("Porridge on Islac"), pointless wars ("The Ire of the Veksi"; "Woeful Tales from Mahigul"), and celebrity worship ("The Royals of Hegn"), to name a few. Some are surreal ("Confusions of Uñi"), while others are quietly mysterious, such as "The Building," in which a "primitive" people builds an enormous, uninhabited, apparently purposeless palace of green stone, or "The Fliers of Gy," one of Le Guin's most moving stories, which imagines a race in which a few people in every generation grow wings. Are they handicapped or godlike? The parallels to our own fear of (and yearning for) flying, risk and death are inescapable and poignant.

A strong theme in several of the stories is a mistaken idea of progress, an attempt to "fix" social systems that aren't broken. "Seasons of the Ansarac," my favorite of the collection, shows us a migratory culture in which the people, gripped by a powerful sexual drive, trek periodically from the south (seat of cities and cultural institutions, where they live in random, close-packed groups and talk all night, but never make love) to the rural north, where they have sex and procreate and cleave to their families. When the Beidr --- an aggressive, technologically advanced civilization --- sets out to save them from hormonal enslavement . . . well, you can guess the rest. The upshot is that the Ansarac no longer allow visitors to their plane; it is closed off to humans in the time-honored tradition of lost paradises (from Dante to Shangri-La), and the story ends on a note of profound longing.

"Seasons of the Ansarac" is up to Le Guin's finest work (THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE EARTHSEA TRILOGY, and more), but I can't say the same for all of the tales in CHANGING PLANES. It's true that they are vastly intelligent and adroit, often written in a style that combines the detached, slightly stuffy observations of a scientist in the field with an attractive fable-like cadence (they'd be great read aloud). Many of them, however, seemed slight --- sketches rather than the real, completed thing. After a while I began thinking of them as fictionalized essays rather than stories. (Nor did I appreciate the line drawings by Eric Beddows. This is not a criticism of the artist; I simply think it is more fruitful for the reader to create his or her own inner vision of a character or setting --- including alien species --- than to be confronted with somebody else's version.)

I don't mean to carp, though; I'd rather read Le Guin in any form than most writers working today. That's why I picked up CHANGING PLANES while sitting in JFK last month, waiting for a flight to France. I couldn't help laughing at the irony. I'd rather have passed the time in interplanar travel, of course, but this book was the next best thing. Try it if you're shackled to a plastic airport chair or stalled on a runway and you're looking for provocative, intelligent diversion (it's small enough to fit in the seat pocket). Or read it if you have no intention of going anywhere, but are in the mood for mental adventure. You'll return home with new eyes.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Gulliver's New Travels
Waiting in airports can be interminable tedium, OR, a passage to other planes of existence, fascinating new worlds. In fact there is a whole world of such worlds, linked by a loose-knit Interplanary Agency, with Interplanary Hotels for travelers, and Rornan's Handy Planary Guide for guidance. Such is the premise for this collection of fantastic allegorical stories.

Strange stories they are, too, stories of people just a little different from ourselves, people whose foibles and fallacies are just a little different from our own. Stories of people wracked by pointless ethnic conflicts that go on for centuries; people who have ruined their worlds and destroyed their ecologies; worlds in which ancient cultures and traditions are fading away. There is a quality of wistful longing in these stories, longing for a simpler, saner world that has been lost or ruined. LeGuin's beautiful writing is complemented by the inventive, Escher-like drawings of Eric Beddows.

Author Ursula K. LeGuin is a master story-teller. These stories are easy to read, compelling, humorous, engaging, and hard to forget. They will get you to thinking and they will haunt you. I recommend this book highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

A nice read: Ursula Le Guin in an unexpected mood!
Who among us has not experienced the misery of long waits at airports, trapped in a slow-moving time-warp between flights? Le Guin starts this quaint book with a horribly accurate word picture of what such a wait can be before segueing into a neat fantasy. Imagine if, just as we change airplanes on connecting flights, we could switch between different planes of existence (the pun is entirely intentional!) and discover alternate worlds? Sit back then for an enchanting ride as Le Guin lets her imagination create 16 wondrous alternate worlds which this book explores almost like a travelogue. Take the world of the Asonu, where children speak less and less as they mature, till as adults, their communication is entirely silent. The only sounds are those of nature and people going about their business - no conversation at all. (I could go for that!). Contrast that peaceful world with that of the Veksi who are always angry and quarrelsome, or the Hennbet who are either reincarnated beings or multiple personalities (or maybe both!). Even more imaginative are the long migratory cycles and courtship dances of the Ansarac (much to the disapproval of the efficient tech-specialists who try to colonize them) and the slow evolution of Mahigul. The book is not all light hearted fun however. Porridge on Islac looks at the dangers of genetic engineering. The land of Hegn, where everyone is part of the royal family and hence all attention is on the one family of commoners, neatly inverts the usual fascination for royalty, enabling Le Guin to gently skewer the monarchical concept. And Great Joy is a searing look at corporate behavioral ethics (or the lack of them). I must also credit the illustrator, Eric Beddows for some very apt images, including a couple that are startlingly reminiscent of the peerless M. C. Escher. A nice read, though very different from what one usually expects from Ursula Le Guin. (I wonder if she dreamed this one up at an airport!)