I’m not a huge fan of short story collections – they’re hard to rate, I don’t like reading stories bunched together all that much, it’s just not for me. So giving A Fisherman of the Inland Sea 4/5 stars means a lot – Ursula Le Guin always manages to show deeply familiar human sides to technological developments. Here I was impressed with her ability to show groups (families and other groups) interact and evolve. The deep understanding of individuals growing older, away from home or at home, was touching too, and terribly well executed. Oh, the humanity, you know?
I'm currently behind on reviews, so don't be surprised if the recent reviews are a bit sparse.
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
| author: | Ursula K. Le Guin (1994) |
|---|---|
| series: | Hainish Cycle #9 |
| date added: | 2018-10-02 |
| date read: | 2018-11-30 |
| pages: | 224 |
| author: | gender:female, origin:us |
| awards: | otherwise-award-nominees |
| genre: | fantasy |
| rating: | ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ |
Quotes
A chain of command is easy to describe; a network of response isn’t.
A chain of command is easy to describe; a network of response isn’t. To those who live by mutual empowerment, “thick” description, complex and open-ended, is normal and comprehensible, but to those whose only model is hierarchic control, such description seems a muddle, a mess, along with what it describes. Who’s in charge here? Get rid of all these petty details. How many cooks spoil a soup? Let’s get this perfectly clear now. Take me to your leader!
He had acted with grace, with wit, with patience, reliability, resilience, trickiness, and good humor.
What [he] did might be called supervising or overseeing if that didn’t suggest a hierarchic function. Interseeing, maybe, or subvising.
I turned out the light and darkness filled me as it filled the room. Where was I? Alone in a room among strangers. As I had been for ten years and would always be. On one planet or another, what did it matter? Alone, part of nothing, part of no one. Udan was not my home. I had no home, no people. I had no future, no destiny, any more than a bubble of foam or a whirlpool in a current has a destiny. It is and it isn’t. Nothing more.
I turned the light on because I could not bear the darkness, but the light was worse. I sat huddled up in the bed and began to cry. I could not stop crying. I became frightened at how the sobs racked and shook me till I was sick and weak and still could not stop sobbing.
Staking everything on it, because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.
Related books Books related to the whole series are linked at the first part of the series.
The Telling
by Ursula K. Le Guin · published 2000 · read 2019-04-02
The previous book in the series.
