Ahead of the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, we’re reflecting on some of Le Guin’s works in a series of blog posts: Le Guin and Her Legacy.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018) was an author and poet who wrote science fiction and fantasy for adults and young adults. Her works garnered her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and many, many more accolades. 2023 marks the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The award is intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech — realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now. The Prize is given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work, including but not limited to: hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world.
Much of Ursula’s writing focused on those who had been othered by society in some way, because of their gender, race, sexuality or culture. She did not write in such a way that the reader was bludgeoned by her thoughts or opinions, but in reading her books, her personal philosophies became apparent.
“Changing Planes” is a collection of loosely related stories, told as narrative anthropological reports, as well as first-person perspectives of travelers to other planes of existence. In the fiction of the book, a woman named Sita Dulip develops the method of interplanar travel while sitting in an airport waiting for a flight. “She had discovered that, by a mere kind of twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere-be anywhere-because she was already between planes.”
In “Seasons of the Ansarac,” the sixth story of the collection, the narrator relays their experience speaking with Kergemmeg, an Ansar who plays host and guide to interplanar travelers. Within the first paragraph, the narrator informs the reader that the only place travelers are allowed on the plane is on a large island far away from the migration patterns of the Ansarac, and Kergemmeg is the only Ansar that travelers will ever meet; most travelers are uninterested in the culture or history of the plane. Our narrator however shows interest in the Ansarac, and so Kergemmeg tells them the story of how his people had once strayed from their Way; “the way of my people, the way things are done, the way things are, the way to go, the way that is hidden in the word always: like ours, his word all held those meanings.”
The Way of the Ansarac involves mass migration, shifting between the heat of the southern continent near the equator, where people live communally in cities. Families exist, but are not the primary structure around which the Ansarac coalesce in the cities. When the cities become too hot, they make the long trek to the northern continent, near the north pole, and partners reunite, or unite with new people, and children are born. The community structures are smaller during this time, less interaction with people outside of the immediate familial unit, until the time comes for everyone to return to the cities.
Much of the story is in the description of this migratory process and how the Ansar society is shaped around this pattern, almost to the point that the reader forgets that the Ansarac left their Way at one point. Then Kergemmeg mentions the Bayderac, and tells the narrator, “When the Bayderac came to our plane, they told us our Way was mere instinct and that we lived like animals. We were ashamed.” The Bayderac encourage the Ansarac to have children all year round, to reduce the time spent on migration by building highways and cars. The work was only to be done by the men however, with the women staying at home, raising the children; medicine offered by the Bayderac would allow Ansarac women to have more children than they normally would.
As Ansarac society begins shifting, the women reach out to the men, highlighting the inequalities in workload, and asking why such a change needs to occur, when there was nothing wrong with the way things had been before. When the Ansarac bring this concern to the Bayderac, they respond, “‘All that will change. You will see. You cannot reason correctly. It is merely an effect of your hormones, your genetic programming, which we will correct. Then you will be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns.’ We answered, ‘But will we be free of your irrational and useless behavior patterns?'” The Bayderac threaten violence, and Kergemmeg muses that the Ansarac likely could have been wiped out entirely, but ultimately the Bayderac move on, leaving the Ansarac to continue in their Way.
It is not a great leap to imagine the Ansarac as native or Indigenous peoples, and the Bayderac as colonizers, telling the Ansarac that their way of living is wrong, and the Bayderac know better, will civilize them, will introduce them to technology, will better their lives. Was there anything wrong with the Way of the Ansarac? Or was it just different, did it not meet the expectations of “civilized” societies and their people? Certainly, the interpersonal and family dynamics of the Ansarac are not what Western readers are used to, even by today’s standard of what families and relationships can look like. Ursula gave readers much to chew on with this story. Ultimately, this story ends on a positive note, with the native people keeping their traditions, and the colonisers leaving them in peace. Then again, it is fiction.
Image credit: Ursula Le Guin photo by Marian Wood Kolisch, Oregon State University via Flickr (license)
