Summary

"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 PlanesThe 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

Author Biography

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929, in Berkeley, California. Winner of the National Book Award and the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Stories, she is a novelist, poet, and essayist, and she has written more than a hundred short stories. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Contents of Changing Planes with a little description
Note The author acknowledges the readers' discomfort with air travel after 9
Sita Dulip's Method How Sita Dulip, sitting between flights in an awful airport, learned to travel to other planes of existence by focusing her mind in a certain way
The result: a more interesting kind of tourism
The Porridge on Islac On Islac, people are physically very different from one another: the aftermath of an unfortunate boom and crash in genetic engineering
Cautionary, humorous, with a touch of poetry (bearwigs are recombinant teddy bears that developed a taste for book glue and paper)
The Wisdom of the Asonu The Asonu become silent as they mature: their total abstinence from language is unsettling
Questioning the Hennebet The Hennebet look just like us, but their minds (sort of Taoist) are totally alien
The traveler tries to but cannot communicate with them; a glimpse of their worldview makes her less sure about her own
The Angry Veksi A society torn by violence, which, however, has its human rules of conduct(It's about human violence, of course)
Social Dreaming of the Frin A society in which dreaming is communal, not personal
Fascinating examination of the idea that some loss of self is necessary for selfhood
The Royals of Hegn Satire of the Brits and their absurd fascination with royalty
In Hegn, everyone is royal and comeletely dotty about the very few Commoners (who are really low-class)
Tales of Blood from Mahigul Histories that are political allegories of man's inhumanity to man
All about war, tyranny, self-destruction (Male-dominated, of course)
Wake Island An experiment to make children smarter by having them require less sleep, then no sleep at all, backfires: without sleep, people become mindless animals (Another approach to the loss-of-self idea)
The Nna Mmoy Language A language so alien and complex, it contains an entire culture (its speakers live primitively)
The traveler's vain attempts to use a translating machine
The Building This account of two cultures and of a migration to build a mysterious building, generation after generation, touches on the question, What is art? That is, the transcendental, nonutilitarian strivings of human beings (Influence of Borges here)
The Gyran Hatred of Wings The blessing and the curse (more curse than blessing) of growing wings and flying
The Gyr put up with-try to ignore-their affliction, going about their business as lawyers, accountants, etc
Yet the inspiring image of flight remains
The Island of the Immortals A horror story, worse than "Wake Island," and probably from Gulliver's Travels: some people, bitten by a fly, cannot die
Buried alive, after centuries, they turn to diamonds, still alive
Confusion in Untilde;i A virtual reality satire taken from the pages of Stanislaw Lem: the traveler becomes lost in a VR machine and passes from one ridiculous dream to another
Great Joy Big business and the travel industry produce a monstrous Disneylike theme park, exploiting the natives
Humorous (a village full of Santa Clauses that speak with an accent), but also acerbic, being close to home
The Seasons of the Ansarac A society that alternates between city life and country life, each having its joys and miseries
Commentary on the mortality of humanity: its sorrow alleviated by a sexual dance
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Excerpts

SITA DULIP'S METHODTHE RANGE OF THE AIRPLANE-a few thousand miles, the other side of the world, coconut palms, glaciers, the poles, the Poles, a lama, a llama, etc.-is pitifully limited compared to the vast extent and variety of experience provided, to those who know how to use it, by the airport.Airplanes are cramped, jammed, hectic, noisy, germy, alarming, and boring, and they serve unusually nasty food at utterly unreasonable intervals. Airports, though larger, share the crowding, vile air, noise, and relentless tension, while their food is often even nastier, consisting entirely of fried lumps of something; and the places one has to eat it in are suicidally depressing. On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility. In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell. These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats. So far, then, the airport and the airplane are equal, in the way that the bottom of one septic tank is equal, all in all, to the bottom of the next septic tank.If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.It was Sita Dulip of Cincinnati who first realised this, and so discovered the interplanar technique most of us now use.Her connecting flight from Chicago to Denver had been delayed by some unspeakable, or at any rate untold, m

Excerpted from Changing Planes: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
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