Changing Planes Stories |
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Author:
| Le Guin, Ursula K. |
Illustrator:
| Beddows, Eric |
ISBN: | 978-0-15-100971-8 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2003 |
Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $25.00 |
Book Description:
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The misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport (sitting for hours "on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor") leads to the discovery of a way to visit other planes. Note: we are changing not airplanes here but planes of existence. Le Guin's humorous premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who has mastered Sitka Dulip's Method. The fanciful descriptions of bizarre societies and cultures sometimes mirror--and...
More DescriptionThe misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport (sitting for hours "on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor") leads to the discovery of a way to visit other planes. Note: we are changing not airplanes here but planes of existence. Le Guin's humorous premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who has mastered Sitka Dulip's Method. The fanciful descriptions of bizarre societies and cultures sometimes mirror--and satirize-our own, sometimes open puzzling doors into the alien.
In these delightful, wry short stories, Le Guin combines Gulliver's Travels, Borge's fictions, and Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince to treat war, tyranny, the middle class, folly, Disney, mortality and immortality, dreams, art, technology, and the meaning--and the mystery--of being human.