I'm pretty sure I've read one book by Le Guin before (this would have been ~15+ years ago so I'm not sure on the details): "Changing Planes," a collection of various worldbuilding descriptions of fantasy worlds accessed from the liminal space of airport terminals. Not much plot, just descriptions. The K. in Ursula K. Le Guin is for
Kroeber; her father was an anthropology professor at Berkeley who, among other topics, studied
Ishi, an indigenous man from California who was the last of the Yahi people. So this is quite the setup for SF as anthropology.
The reason "The Birthday of the World," in particular, was on my radar was because it contains two of Le Guin's three stories about "sedoretu," a complex social structure where culturally-sanctioned marriages are in groups of four; this premise has taken off in the fanfiction world, because sometimes you're like "this character has a hard enough time trying to find one partner, how would they handle it if they were expected to marry three?" So I wanted to know how more about how worldbuilding worked in that setting--how are names handed down? That kind of thing.
There are eight stories in this collection, most of which are set in the "Ekumen" universe she's used as a setting for many of her novels and short fiction. And several share the themes of "slice of life that's more about revealing the setting than a big plot or conflict."
"Coming of Age in Karhide"--same world as "The Left Hand of Darkness" (which I haven't read), about a planet where the people are mostly human but experience gender and sexuality very differently from Earth people. The changes that come with puberty (or menopause) are weird and scary for everyone, no matter where you are in the galaxy; part of why we have rituals is to help us cope with that. It raises some questions I've seen in a contemporary context about "what kinds of things do people tolerate if they believe they're inevitable, but would rebel against if they thought an alternative was available?"
"The Matter of Seggri"--snapshots from a planet with a very skewed sex ratio and how it evolves over the centuries. One thing that this and "Coming of Age" both did well was depict how children's play is a mirror of what they see in adult society--when kids on our world "play house" or act out stories with their stuffed animals, they're imagining what it means to be "the mother" or "the father," and even if this is a very limited understanding, it still tells you something about the world they live in. Which is oftentimes more interesting or revealing than just depicting the adults doing adult things.
"Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are the sedoretu stories. In this world, you can only have sex with someone of your same
moiety. This is a very big taboo; cross-dressing to adopt a different gender is okay, if that helps with the marriage balance, but the moiety division is more fundamental.
What is a moiety? a Gethenian asked me, and I realised that it’s easier for me to imagine not knowing which sex I’ll be tomorrow morning, like the Gethenian, than to imagine not knowing whether I was a Morning person or an Evening person. So complete, so universal a division of humanity — how can there be a society without it? How do you know who anyone is? How can you give worship without the one to ask and the other to answer, the one to pour and the other to drink?
I wanted to know more about the stereotypes associated with these. Are Morning people or Evening people the ones who ask, or pour? When you meet someone new in a big city, how do you tell their moiety--would people introduce themselves the way some people in our world make a point of introducing themselves with gender pronouns? I didn't feel like the stories really fleshed that out for me. (Which means I'll just be left to my own devices if I ever decide to write fanfiction with this conceit.)
In the introduction (which is great, and has some very funny asides), Le Guin describes "Solitude" this way:
the concern of the story...is about survival, loyalty, and introversion. Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extraverts rule. This is really rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts.
We have been taught to be ashamed of not being “outgoing.” But a writer’s job is ingoing.
I'm not sure I would agree! The premise, at the start, is that this is another anthropological story; Leaf wants to learn more about the world of Eleven-Soro, but finds it very difficult to talk with the people there, because they barely have any social structure. Her Hainish colleagues think it might be easier for children who grow up in Sorovian culture to understand and make sense of it, and so Leaf raises her son Borny (eight) and daughter Ren (five) on Soro. Years later, Leaf and Borny want to go back to their spacefaring society, but Ren wants to stay. The Sorovians are not "a people;" they are "persons," and Ren wants to be a (solitary) "person." Leaf is aghast and believes she's failed if her child is rejecting all the opportunities of high-technology life in favor or an isolated existence in the jungle.
In some ways, women have a stronger social structure and slightly better lives than men on Soro, so the fact that Borny wants to go back to the Hainish ship and Ren doesn't is understandable in light of that. But I think their ages at the beginning are also significant. Borny can remember a time before Soro, and appreciate what the space station has to offer, much more clearly than Ren. Everything Leaf experiences makes lots of sense--if an ethnographer can never really get an objective, bird's-eye, view, the only way to understand a culture is to live in it authentically, then maybe the only way to do that is to do it from childhood...she wouldn't want to interfere with the native Sorovians and abduct them away from their home, but it feels different leaving her daughter to experience what seems to be a much lower quality of life.
If it was just a story of "extraverts versus introverts," then I might feel more aligned with Ren's attitude of "I don't need a big social structure, I'm just me." But I think there's an asymmetry in that it would be easier (not easy, but easier) for a Hainish person to choose a life more like the isolated Sorovians, than for a Sorovian to make the reverse decision. There's a lot of discourse about "is it a weakness of liberalism that it doesn't tell people what the good life is, or is it a strength that it allows different people and different subcultures to pursue different versions of the good life?" Our world, and Hainish spaceships, are not perfect, but I'm grateful for the different opportunities and technologies they allow.
"Old Music and the Slave Women" is a follow-up to "Four Ways to Forgiveness" (haven't read that either), stories about a Hainish observer on a world full of slavery and, in this installment, civil war. He gets captured by the pro-slavery government, spends some time getting tortured, then awkwardly tries to make small talk with the (former?) slaves like "haha, I, too, have been tortured in the cages!" Is this trauma dumping as bonding opportunity, or cringey "guy who has only been tortured for a couple hours can't possibly understand people who have been slaves their entire lives?" I don't know. There were some poignant reflections on what it means for a family of slaves to have a child born into freedom, even if he only lives for a few years, but on the whole it was very bleak.
This isn't specific to any particular story but I will note that Le Guin is extremely blunt and to-the-point about the facts of life. Societies and family units differ widely across all the settings, but I found a lot more explicit discussion of penises, vulvas, fucking, and rape than in most of what I read. Which can be useful and illustrative, but sometimes gets wearing. (The sedoretu stories were probably the least explicit in this regard. Yeah, their rituals and structures are different from ours, but these are very conservative, socially considerate and rule-following people.)
"The Birthday of the World" is about a society that worships their monarchs as deities (but then it falls apart). There's a first-contact story going on behind the scenes, but the narrator is only observing it at a distance, so her interpretations are intriguing but we only get a little of it. Inbreeding is bad? IDK. It's not exactly "slice of life with no plot" but neither is it "characters making meaningful decisions and traditional plot." Slice of death.
"Paradises Lost" is longer than the others, explicitly set close to Earth and not part of the Hainish continuity. And it's also great. The setting is a generation ship that's going to travel for 200 years to explore a new planet, and how the people who spend their whole lives in transit might (or might not) find purpose. The contrast between how the original ("Zeroes") generation who left Earth fear they may have cheated their descendants, versus how the descendants actually feel about the whole thing, is fascinating. The beginning is a stream-of-consciousness about how a fifth-generation spacefarer might try and fail to conceptualize Earth:
The blue parts were lots of water, like the hydro tanks only deeper, and the other-colored parts were dirt, like the earth gardens only bigger. Sky was what she couldn’t understand. Sky was another ball that fit around the dirtball, Father said, but they couldn’t show it in the model globe, because you couldn’t see it. It was transparent, like air. It was air. But blue. A ball of air, and it looked blue from underneath, and it was outside the dirtball. Air outside. That was really strange. Was there air inside the dirtball? No, Father said, just earth. You lived on the outside of the dirtball, like evamen doing eva, only you didn’t have to wear a suit. You could breathe the blue air, just like you were inside. In nighttime you’d see black and stars, like if you were doing eva, Father said, but in daytime you’d see only blue. She asked why. Because the light was brighter than the stars, he said. Blue light? No; the star that made it was yellow, but there was so much air it looked blue. She gave up. It was all so hard and so long ago. And it didn’t matter.
I mean, this is fantastic:
The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder — that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
There's one part that's like "what if there are two types of people, people who need religion and symbolism and those who don't" that, like Anathem, was pretty iffy. But the narrative undercuts that: some characters try to tell "noble lies," if only by omission, in order to work against a potentially dangerous religious faction. One of the main characters points out that this is very contemptuous of the ordinary people who they're trying to convince, and potentially just as dangerous as the religious extremists themselves.
There are some abrupt jumps when it seems the most interesting stuff is happening offscreen (Luis' friend argues with him about religion; a moment later, Luis is elected council leader because everyone likes him, even the religious people). But overall, this one was really compelling.
Bingo: Five short stories. Hot take: at least some of the stories ("Coming of Age in Karhide," the sedoretu ones) are sufficiently slice-of-life, "low stakes, minimal conflict" to meet the spirit of "Cozy SFF." (I don't think "Old Music and the Slave Women" counts in any sense of the word.) I have no idea what I'm actually going to use for that square, something like "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" doesn't do it for me.
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