Get new reading guides by email
New guides and a few books from each. Occasional, never noisy.
Changing Planes: Stories - Paperback
$17.49
Skip to product information
Changing Planes: Stories
$17.49
Returns: if a book arrives damaged or isn't the one you ordered, email us within 7 days of delivery and we'll replace it or refund you, usually with nothing to send back. Refund policy
Is this book for you?
- Feels
- Whimsical, Thoughtful, Funny
- Kind of story
- Short stories, Literary science fiction, Satire
- About
- Identity, Power
- Pace
- Steady
- How dark
- 1 of 5. Light: spooky or sad at most
- Romance
- None to speak of
Shipping is $5.00 on orders under $25 and free at $25 and over. Every book ships by USPS from a US book warehouse, and you get a tracking number by email the day it ships.
Questions? Email hello@spineboundbooks.com. We reply within one business day.
An independent online bookstore in Richmond, Virginia. About us Reading guides
Featured in our reading guide: Where to Start with Ursula K. Le Guin
The premise is a pun, and it's still one of her best books.
Sita Dulip discovers that the particular misery of an airport delay (the boredom, the bad chair, the indigestion) can be used to slip sideways into other planes of existence entirely. The Interplanary Agency issues guidebooks. Travelers file reports.
What follows is fifteen dispatches from societies Le Guin invented to think with. A world where everyone is descended from royalty and the social calculus is unbearable. A people who never sleep. Corn genetically spliced with human DNA. An island where the residents are slowly, contentedly turning into birds.
Each is short, sly, and doing real philosophical work underneath the comedy, as Le Guin uses the shape of the traveler's tale to ask what a culture is and what it costs to be inside one. It's her gentlest, most playful book, and a good one to hand someone who doesn't think they like science fiction.
Details
- Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Introduction: Karen Joy Fowler
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN: 9780358380023
Praise
-
Le Guin is a splendid short story writer. [Her] fiction, like Borges's, finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
-
The people, places and emotions in Le Guin's stories are typically strange, but her careful, sudden turns toward the familiar... seem like revelations of what's really important or fascinating about human life.
Salon
-
An accomplished stylist... Even Le Guin's overtly cautionary tales have a delicacy that disarms resistance. Outstanding among these are the almost unbearably poignant 'Fliers of Gy' and 'The Island of the Immortals, ' which break new ground in exploring the dangers of getting what you wish for.
New York Times Book Review
-
Vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches.
San Francisco Chronicle
Reader reviews on Goodreads
Real reviews and star ratings from Goodreads readers, shown as Goodreads publishes them. We do not edit or select them.
See this book on Goodreads (opens in a new tab)