A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week well be covering the first half of the short story collection The Winds Twelve Quarters, from Nine Lives to The Day Before the Revolution, pp. 105 to the end, in the 1975 Harper & Row hardcover edition.

In the last post of the Le Guin Reread we looked at the first half of Le Guins first story collection, The Winds Twelve Quarters, which we continue here. I was pleasantly surprised that no one shamed me (to my knowledge) for my comments about short stories generally (thanks for sparing me, Rich!), and in fact one reader wrote elsewhere in recognition of the feeling of getting lost in a world as opposed to a story.

While the early stories of the collection are something of a retrospective on the first few years of her life as an SFF writer, coming up through the magazine world with increasingly better and more ambitious short storiesseveral of which launched the storyworlds that made her career, quite literallythe second half reflects the difference of a writer finally coming into her own. I (regrettably but, for me, truthfully) called the first half meh, but the nine stories of (my arbitrarily divided) part two are individually and collectively anything but meh. Semleys Necklace and The Good Trip were but a taste of what Le Guin can do with the short story form, and Winds Twelve Quarters culminates with a bevvy of heady, beautiful, and thought-provoking stories composed with a careful, sometimes quiet, power. The stories are as myths or fableslittle bits of truth and reality poured into SFF skins.

Unsurprisingly, a shared set of symbologies unite the stories of the collection, and these meanings are drawn all the more clearly in the later stories. Among these are an abiding interest in and love for the rural and the rustictrees, caves, roads, pathwaysas well as in the myths, mysteries, and psyches of human cultures across time, space, and genres. Indeed, Le Guin labels nearly every story in the second half of Winds Twelve Quarters as a psychomyth, though shes never really clear what she means by it beyond a short description in her foreword to the collection: more or less surrealistic tales, which share with fantasy the quality of taking place outside any history, outside of time, in that region of the living mind whichwithout invoking any consideration of immortalityseems to be without spatial or temporal limits at all.

Whew, a mouthful, but which basically means: a fabilistic or mythological story independent of most temporo-spatial markers that would place it noticeably in, say, medieval Europe or far-future China, and that by virtue of being tempo-spatially (and, to the extent possible, linguistically) unmoored is able to focus on human truths. Of course, the idea of a psychomyth is itself a fantasynot unlike the idea of a shared, universal human experiencebut its a nice fantasy and one allows Le Guin to establish a kind of writing unto herself that helps her carve a literary-intellectual niche for herself. And this isnt a bad thing, since with few other exceptions (at least in this collection!), Le Guins stories that actively aim for being labelled fantasy or science fiction are, well, just OK (a surprising thing, since her SFF novels are fucking fantastic, but every writer is different!). Psychomyth is nonetheless an interesting concept for thinking through these storiesGabrielle Bellot, for example, pinpoints how Omelas uses the psychomyth to defy generic categoriesand at the same time points toward just how much thinkers like Carl Jung (sorry, but blech!) influenced Le Guins writing in the early half of her career.

There are nine stories and psychomyths in this reread, three of which will likely be familiar to Le Guin stans, and the others of which, if unfamiliar, will come as a wonderful surprise. These stories are:

Ill do what I did in the previous reread and cover each story shortly and succinctly, discussing plot and theme, and what the story means for Le Guin as writer-thinker, the idea being to provide a somewhat holistic picture of The Winds Twelve Quarters as a whole. In taking this route, I end up deemphasizing the final two stories, which are no doubt Le Guins most famous, but others have written about those stories at great length and Im not sure I can add much to the din.

Onward, then, to the stories!

To start withno. Nine Lives is not, unfortunately, about cats. Let the disappointment sink in for a moment and remember that Le Guin probably wrote Catwings to correct this immense error, or at least thats my headcanon. So Nine Lives isnt about cats, but the title is probably an immense troll on the storys publication venue: Playboy. Yep, the magazine that built Hugh Heffners empire and made porn mainstream. And its the only story she wrote under a pseudonym (U.K. Le Guin) at the editors insistence. To be sure, theres a lot of sex in Nine Lives, until theres a lot of death. This is the story of a tenclone, a group of five male, five female clones of a brilliant scientist named John Chow.

The clones (theyre actually referred to as a singular) have come to the planet Libra as an elite work-crew for a newly discovered mine; they work better than non-clones because of their intense bond and social cohesion (the nightly sexual pairingsis it sex or masturbation, one non-clone asksbetween male and female clones helps). One accident later, however, and only one of the tenclone is left: Kaph. The nine lives, then, is a reference to the nine lives, the nine selves, Kaph loses when the rest of the tenclone dies; he experiences intense pain and suffering, almost as though a psychic bond is shorn at the others death, and through it all he is aided by two non-clones, who show him the way toward making human connections outside of the clone collective. Its a very sweet story about homosocial (potentially homosexual between the two non-clones, though I dont think thats Le Guins intention) bonding and grief, learning to see other humans as people to share life with.

Things, by turns, is not sweet, but bittersweetand my favorite story in the collection next to Semleys Necklace and The Good Trip. Originally titled The End, altered by Damon Knight from Le Guins preferred title, it is a psychomyth as close to Le Guins definition as possible (or at least as comparable as Omelas); she might have called it a pure psychomyth. The story takes place in a village at the supposed end of all things. The villages are split between the Weepers, those who gather to lament the end, and the Ragers, those who party hard until its all over. The Weepers and the Ragers have left the things that mattered behind, detaching themselves from whatever made meaning in life, what glued together the social order, what made the village a village.

In between these groups are folks like Lif, a former brickmaker, along with the widow of one of Lifs fellow bricklayers. These two havent yet detached from the order of things / Order of Things, and so go on trying to find meaningat first in trying to do what brickmakers and widows do in the normal course of things, and later in one another. Lif turns to a myth of far-off islands to create meaning for life in the end times, but his culture has no boats, so he decides hell chuck all his bricks into the sea in the hopes of making a pathway to islands that may or may not exist. This gives his life meaning and as his relationship with the widow develops, she too becomes interested in his project, and together they build a path. One night, all the villagers are gone, their attachment to the world finally severed. For Lif and the widow, this signals the end, so they decide its time to try the path. Try they do, and soon myths become real.

I love Thingswhich I agree is the better and more thought-provoking titlebecause its beautifully written, short, and simple, evidencing just how well an economy of language and form can create something so amazing. At the same time, its a complex questioning of the relation between lifeways and cultural meaning, between things (as objects, as cultural practices, etc.) and the meaning that has both Buddhist and anti-capitalist overtones (that interact in not-so-easy ways). Its a story that deserves more attention and one Im sure Ill be returning to again and again.

I cant say the same for A Trip to the Head, which demonstrates that an economy of language and form, even in Le Guins hands, dont always produce little works of staggering literary genius. Its another psychomythological story, by her description, in which the object of extrapolation is the question of how powerful an imaginative force is the mind. It pairs well, in this way, with The Good Trip, and also places the mind above psychotropics as a force for creation. In this story a person, Blank, emerges from a forest with no knowledge of their identity (City of Illusions vibes, anyone?). Blank talks to another person, imagines who/what they might have been, and becomes that person, only for it to not feel right, so he (the newly assumed identity) takes off for the forest to forget this iteration of self, starting the cycle all over again. Its a story worth reading once in your life if you have the inclination or if it happens to be in front of you; otherwise, its nothing to go out of your way for. What it has to say about the mind and imagination have already been said, and said better, in the other novels and stories weve covered.

By contrast, Vaster than Empires and More Slow is one of those stories that says what it says well and also resonates powerfully with many of Le Guinsother themes, making it something worth seeking out and wrestling with. Its a novelette in the Hainish cycle that departs from the usual heres how humans evolved on this world fare to instead imagine a world of collectively-sentient arboriforms (tree-like and plant-like organisms). At the same time, its a massively problematicand as a result, critically interestingstory featuring an autistic character (or, really, a character cured of autism).

The set-up of the story is also quite unique among the Hainish stories, since most feature some sort of League representative to a human world, whether before or after their integration into the League. But Vaster is about Terras fundamental dissatisfaction with the fact that all sentient life in the universe was seeded by the Hains; its not a major plot point, nor discussed very often, but Le Guin uses the frame to highlight that Terrans as a group dont deal super well with being told they arent specialreally an allegory for Americans. So Terrans send out Extreme Surveys, crewed by the occasional non-Terran curious about the wider universe, to spend several hundred years traveling in FTL ships to see if anything sentient exists outside of the Hainish sphere of influence. Well, reader, you can guess what happens: they find something. A whole planet of plants that, after many months, the crew discovers has evolved into a collectively sentient lifeform that is terrified of the otherness represented by the humans.

This is all quite interesting, but the real focus of the story is on the cured-autistic crewmember Osden, who has apparently been cured of his inability to parse external emotional stimuli (only one possible manifestation of autism) to such an extent that now he is magnificently empathic, and can feel all sentient beings emotions. As a result, most people are uncomfortable with him and he lives constantly in their disdain, discomfort, and even hate. But its his abilities to sense emotion and feelings that help the crew discover the plant planet is sentient. Its a story that simultaneously does everything wrong you could do when writing about autism, but also demonstrates forcefully and tragically the ways in which neurotypical folks ostracize neuroatypical folks. But Ive never claimed Le Guin is perfect, and the story provides a great deal to think about with regard to disability, ecology, sentience, and emotion. No wonder it has remained one of Le Guins most discussed stories.

The next two stories in the collection are short, intelligent, fun mysteries (of a sort). The Stars Below is a fantasy about an astronomer whose science is considered heretical and who is literally forced underground, to live in the dark of a mine nearing the end of its productivity. The Field of Vision is science fiction about two astronauts who return from an archaeological dig on Mars, one deafened and the other blinded.

Both are, in Le Guins presentation, psychomyths. The Stars Below doesnt have much to recommend it, honestly, except that it is a great example of a person losing their shit because, well, a bunch of priests burned their livelihood and forced them into underground exile as a hereticbuy, hey, at least the astronomer helps the struggling miners find a new vein of silver! Actually, whats great about this story is you can see Le Guin returning with gusto to writing about people learning to live underground and in the dark, as she did so perfectly in The Tombs of Atuan. The Field of Vision is by far the better story, with an Arthur C. Clarke feel to it, what with the giant, unfathomable alien structures and the revelation of Gods reality and immanent presence in the universe. Which isodd?for Le Guin. I wont spoil it; check it out for yourself, since the mystery is worthwhile.

The final story before we get to the Big Two of this collection is The Direction of the Road, a story that like many of her shorter ones grew out of a family moment, a familiar memory, a Le Guinism. In this case, its a tree off Oregon State Highway 18 that Le Guin and her family passed several times a year, a tree that came to define that particular stretch of highway for the family, a part of the Order of Things. And so Le Guin spins a tale of that tree, of its long life among humans, of the coming of cars, the paving and repaving of roads, the explosion of traffic, and, after so many years, the death of a heedless driver at the base of the oak. The story is told in first-person and is at first rather confusing, since the oak speaks of itself as an entity in constant motion, growing and galloping and roaming, but while some of Le Guins language confuses, her intent is purposeful: to bring to life the inner being of an organism that, to many humans, hardly seems to be living but is almost always a backdrop in a world of roads and cars. Le Guins oak is a vibrant being and one who rejects the meanings humans place upon it: when the human dies, he sees in the oak the face of Death, freezing that vision in eternity through his death. But the oak rejects this, refuses to be an eternal symbolof death or elsewiseand instead embraces its ephemerality in the organic sphere, as long and ancient as that may seem to us short-lived humans. Its a great story that leads well into the final two of the collection.

And so we come to Omelas, a story about which I have little to say beyond what has been said by othersand often better (or at least more forcefully). It is not only Le Guins most well-known story, it might also be the most well-known science fiction story of all time, if only because every other philosophy course in college assigns it and (dryly) asks students, So, what would you do? Discuss! I jest, mostly because my partner is a philosopher, but truly Le Guins set up of the moral and ethical dilemma is an important one, and as she notes, its a questionwould you let the child suffer in order to live the dream?at the heart of modernity, whether you understand the modern world as one forged by the industrial revolution, the birth and growth of capitalism, or the expansion of overseas empires through colonial landgrabs. ()Omelas() is a powerful allegory for the ways in which systems of power lift up some at the expense of others.

The particular ways Le Guin tells the story, that utopia exists for all because one person (a child) lives in pain and horror, comes from a critical tradition that frames questions of systemic oppression in individualist tonesin this case the thinking of early psychologist William James. So the utopia of Omelas and the utopian bargain emerge from an intellectual tradition that attempts to understand how people think and why they think, especially with regard to our ethical duties to other people. As a result, walking away seems perhaps radical in this situation, an allegorical disavowal of the system as a whole.

Thats the psychomyth; taken literally, however, as something other than a parable, the decision to walk away looks a lot grimmerand thats exactly what other writers, for example, N.K. Jemisin, who responds in The Ones Who Stay and Fight by suggesting that the more radical thing to do is, well, reread the title; or Egyptian author Mona Namoury, who turns to the agency of the one imprisoned. Omelas is for sure an ambivalent story, one that has no easy solution because there is no solution, because utopia is ambivalent, because utopia doesnt exist, is only ever in the making, just over the horizon, the journey and not the destination, and it always implies the presence of dystopia. For Le Guin: yin and yang, no light without the dark. But, seriously, dont take my word for it; check out one of any several thousand essays on the story.

Though Omelas has become Le Guins most famous story, she ends The Winds Twelve Quarters with a different banger of a tale: the prequel to The Dispossessed, the story of the founder of the anarchist movement that ends up on Anarres. The Day Before the Revolution is the story of Odo, manifester of the Odonian revolution that upset the Urras political world 100 years before The Dispossessed. It isand Im sorry if this sounds repetitive, but its only because its so true of Le Guins shorter fictiona great little piece, particularly for the way it presents this revolutionary icon as a curmudgeonly old woman not all that interested in the final ends of the revolution, in part because the youths have taken it their way. But so it goes, so political movements transform, because a living politics is not defined by an individual, and Odo knows this, too. Through this Le Guin extends her argument in Omelas that utopia is open-ended, ever-changing, not an Eternal force but a Relative one, like the oak by the roadside.

What I particularly love about the placement ofThe Day Before the Revolution in The Winds Twelve Quarters is that Le Guin calls it a story thats actually about the ones who walk away from Omelas, or more precisely that the Anarresti are the ones who made the decision to leave the utopia of a lush, verdant planet for the harsh desert of the moon. Its honestly not a great parallel between Omelas and Urras, butlets go with it?Le Guins forcing of the parallel reveals who got left in the wake of the Odonian movement. After all, when Shevek visits Urras, he finds that there are many anarchists and revolutionaries fighting against the violence of two oppressive statesthe folks who, in Jemisins words, stayed and fought.

In all, The Winds Twelve Quarters is a multifaceted, intellectually rich, and artistically transformative collection of short stories that showcase the vibrancy of an artist becoming an artist. As a collection, its a fascinating microcosm of the same pattern of transformation and growth we see across the novels already covered in the Reread. Some stories are forgettable, many are worth a reread every couple of years, and a few stick tenaciously to the mind like a utopian parasite. Whatever the aesthetic judgmentshey, maybe you found these stories pretty boring, and thats all goodthe historical one is clear: here is a story collection that serves as a foundation for the larger storyworlds, themes, and political concerns that make up our collective cultural memory of Le Guin.

Join me in two weeks on Wednesday, September 9 as we read Le Guins not-very-SFF YA novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. Be seeing you!

Sean Guynes is an SFF critic and professional editor. For politics, publishing, and SFF content, follow him on Twitter @saguynes.

The rest is here:

The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Part II: Le Guin's Psychomyths and Those Who Walk Away - tor.com