Changing Planes
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Changing Planes (ISBN 0-15-100971-6) is a collection of short stories in the best tradition of Ursula LeGuin. More ethnography than science fiction, each chapter describes a different world populated by a society completely unlike and yet eerily similar to our own. Each story is in some way a parable or farce of 20th-Century Western society.
A charming conceit, described in the first story, Sita Dulip's Method, is based on a pun that ties the book together: that the low-level discomfort of forced occupation of an airport while changing planes will, in fact, cause one to change from one plane of reality to another. Because of the different flow of time in other planes, one can spend a week visiting another plane and return in time to make your connecting flight.
During the course of the book, we meet a woman made of corn, a family of "royal" commoners, a people who have replaced biodiversity with language, and a society of nomads who invest tremendous resources creating a labyrinthine castle no one lives in.
[edit] The stories
- Sita Dulip's Method
- Introduction to the premise of the volume.
- Porridge on Islac
- Pun-ridden parable about the problems of genetic engineering taken to extremes.
- The Silence of the Asonu
- About a people who do not speak as adults, their wisdom, and the folly of religious true-believers on Earth who worship them.
- Feeling at Home with the Hennebet
- The Hennebet live multiple lives all simultaneously, accumulating more as they physically age.
- The Ire of the Veksi
- Describes a culture of people whe are angry all the time, and its ramifications: sulking, war, distrust, etc.
- Seasons of the Ansarac
- Beautiful story about a planet with very long years (26 Earth years) within each of which its people migrate to and from the mountains in the north. Parable about effects of high-tech foreigners on their traditional way of life.
- Social Dreaming of the Frin
- In a society where dreams are shared telepathically, shame and emotional hiding do not exist, and the unconscious is the collective unconscious.
- The Royals of Hegn
- A farce of England, this clever story reverses the positions of royalty and commoners.
- Woeful Tales from Mahigul
- Includes four tales: "Dawodow the Innumerable", about a narcissistic and tyrannical emperor who both loved and hated himself; "The Cleansing of Obtry", about a region marked by religious conflict; "The Black Dog", that tells the story of a mysterious black dog that drove two tribes into mayhem; and "The War for the Alon", about two city-states that destroyed themselves over a small piece of land each claimed on divine right (a parallel to the conflict between Israel and Palestine).
- Great Joy
- A sociopathic corporation has turned an entire plane into an enormous shopping mall.
- Wake Island
- Through genetic programming, the need to sleep is removed from a test generation of 22 babies on the plane of the Orichi. Eventually these sleepless children, although physically aware, are never mentally aware. They grow up and reproduce, creating a society within Orichi of zombie-like people.
- The Nna Mmoy Language
- The Building
- The Fliers of Gy
- A plane of feathered people, a few of which develop wings and yet such happening is considered a misfortune, and the wings a handicap. It is a tale about inestability and the sense of freedom.
- The Island of the Immortals
- Confusions of Uñi
- An accurate parody of postmodernism, of being able to tell what is real from what isn't real.
