A Fisherman of the Inland Sea [Mass Market Paperback]

In her introduction to this reprint collection of eight of her more recent SF stories, Le Guin (Tehanu) defends the best work of the genre as "beautiful." It is critics and reviewers, she claims, who miss that beauty by emphasizing SF's role as an expositor of ideas. In any case, it's clear that the stories presented here show the softer side of the genre at its best. "The First Contact with the Gorgonids" and "The Ascent of the North Face," the two entries that Le Guin calls "funny stories, silly stories," are just that-witty, satirical and amusing. Yet it is the author's more serious work that displays her talents best, as she employs recurring themes and elements-cultural diversity, unlikely heroes and heroines, power's ability to corrupt, love's power to guide-and considers characters and types (women, children, the differently sexed and gendered) so often disenfranchised by other, more technologically oriented SF writers. From the briefest nonhumorous story here ("The Kerastion," about a silent flute made of human skin) to the longest, eponymous one, Le Guin ponders the nature of art and how life should be lived. Always, her stories are about people, not technologies, and it is this emphasis, as well as her accomplished prose, that makes this such a classy and valuable collection.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A collection of stories highlight such objects of the imagination as a starship that sails on the wings of song, musical instruments that are played at funerals only, and orbiting arks designed to save a doomed humanity. Reprint. PW.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more than one hundred short stories, two collections of essays, four volumes of poetry, and nineteen novels. Her best-known fantasy works, the Earthsea books, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epochmaking in the field because of its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity.

Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are the National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, the Kafka Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Harold D. Vursell Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.