Introduction

Choosing and Dividing

I begged people—editors, friends, third cousins once removed—to help me select stories for this collection, but nobody would. So all the credit for good choices and all the blame for bad ones is mine. If something you rightfully expected to find here isn’t here, I’m sorry. I had to leave out a lot of stories, because I’ve written a lot of them.

The first way I found to reduce the mob to a manageable size was: limit it to short stories. No novellas—even though the novella is my favorite story-form, a lovely length, in which you can do just about what a novel does without using all those words. But each novella would crowd out three, four, five short stories. So they all had to be shut out, tearfully.

There were still way too many stories, so I had to make arbitrary restrictions. I mostly avoided stories closely tied to novels, set on Gethen or on Anarres, etc.—and stories forming an integral part of story-suites, where the pieces are linked by characters, setting, and chronology, forming an almost-novelistic whole. But “May’s Lion” is closely tied to Always Coming Home, and three of the stories from Orsinian Tales form a loose, many-decade sort of suite. . . . Oh well. Consistency is a virtue until it gets annoying.

So there I was with enough stories, still, to make a book about the size of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. I therefore developed extremely scientific and methodical criteria for my choices.

The first criterion was: Do I like the story?

The answer was almost invariably Yes, so it wasn’t much of a criterion. I refined it to: Do I really like the story a lot? That worked better. It resulted in a very large pile of stories I liked a lot.

I then exercised the next criterion: How well would this story work with all the others? which was very difficult to put into operation, but did eliminate some. And by then a further principle of selection had appeared as a question: Should I put a story in this collection because I think it has been overshadowed, has received less attention than it maybe deserved?

That’s a tricky call. Luck, fashion, literary awards, and other uncontrollable factors play a part in when and whether a story gets noticed. The only near certainty is that the more often it’s reprinted, the more often it will be reprinted. Familiarity sells. “Nine Lives” was republished more often than any of my other stories for years, until “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (after a slowish start despite winning the Hugo Award) took a handy lead and is still galloping happily along like Seabiscuit.

I did decide to include some stories partly because I wanted to bring them back into the light. Most of them, but not all, are in this first volume.

And here we arrive at the next choice I had to make, once I had chosen all the stories I wanted in the collection. They were to go in two volumes. How should I divide them?

At first I thought I should simply put them in chronological order as written. I tried it, and didn’t like the effect. I ended up sorting them into the two parts I call Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands.

I think the two titles are sufficiently descriptive and need no further explanation. Some people will identify the first volume as “mundane” and the second as “science fiction,” but they will be wrong. All the science-fiction stories are in the second volume, but not all the stories in the second volume are science fiction by any definition. I’ll talk more about all that in the introduction to the second volume. Let’s now find out where on earth we’re going.

The Stories In This Volume

When I was a sophomore in college, I came upon or discovered or invented a country in central Europe called Orsinia. Orsinia gave me an entry to fiction. It gave me the ground, the room I needed. I had been writing realistic stories (bourgeois-U.S.A.-1948) because realism was what a serious writer was supposed to write under the rule of modernism, which had decreed that non-realistic fiction, if not mere kiddilit, was trash.

I was a very serious young writer. I never had anything against realistic novels, and loved many of them. I am not theory-minded, and did not yet try to question or argue with this arbitrary impoverishment of literature. But I was soon aware that the ground it offered my particular talent was small and stony. I had to find my own way elsewhere.

Orsinia was the way, lying between actuality, which was supposed to be the sole subject of fiction, and the limitless realms of the imagination. I found the country, drew the map, wrote stories about it, wrote two novels about it, one of which was published later as Malafrena, and revisited it happily now and then for many years. The first four stories in this volume are Orsinian tales, and the first of them, “Brothers and Sisters,” was the first story I wrote that I knew was good, was right, was as close as I could come. I was in my mid-twenties by then.

Since the story “Unlocking the Air,” written in 1990, I have had no word from Orsinia. I miss hearing from my people there.

I don’t think “The Diary of the Rose” takes place in Orsinia, it seems more like South America to me, but the protagonist has an Orsinian name.

By the early Sixties, when I finally began getting stories published, I was quite certain that reality is often best represented slantwise, backwards, or as if it were an imaginary country, and also that I could write about anywhere and anything I liked, with a hope though no expectation that somebody, somewhere, would publish it.

I could even write realism, if I wanted to.

The stories “Texts,” “Sleepwalkers,” and “Hand, Cup, Shell,” all from the collection Searoad, take place in present-day Oregon, in a semi-disguised beach-town I call Klatsand. The protagonist of “The Direction of the Road” still lives beside Highway 18, near McMinnville, in Oregon. “Buffalo Gals” is set in the high desert of Eastern Oregon. “Ether, OR” moves between the dry East side and the green West side of the state in a peaceful, improbable, taken-for-granted way that I think is something I learned from living in Oregon for fifty years.

“The White Donkey” seems to be in a dreamed India, and “Gwilan’s Harp” somewhere along the borders of a fantasy-Wales. Spatial location of stories like “The Water is Wide” or “The Lost Children” is irrelevant, other than that they are in America—reflections of a moment in American time. “May’s Lion” is set in the Napa Valley of California, where I spent the timeless summers of my childhood, and “Half Past Four” is mostly in Berkeley, where I grew up.

“Half Past Four” is pure realism, but in a somewhat unusual form. In a one-day writing workshop in San Jose, the poetry teacher and I traded classes after lunch: he got my fiction-writers and made them write poems, and I got his poets, to whom I was supposed to teach story-writing. They put up a huge fuss—poets always do. No, no, I am a Poet and cannot possibly tell stories! I said yes you can. I’ll give you the names of four people and tell you their relative status; and you’ll put them together in a specific place, and look at them for a while, and see that their relationship gives you the beginning of a story. (I made this all up on the spot.) The four character names I gave them were: Stephen, an older man in a position of relative power or authority; Ann, young, without authority; Ella, older, without much authority; and Todd, young or very young, without any authority.

One brave poet went home and did the assignment; she sent me her story, and it was good. I went home and did the assignment eight times, using those same four names (plus a few extras, such as Marie and Bill). I sent it to The New Yorker. They were game and published the piece. The feedback I got showed that many readers tried hard to make the eight Stephens into one Stephen, the eight Ellas into one Ella. It can’t be done. The eight brief stories in “Half Past Four” are about thirty-two different people, thirty-two different characters, plus Marie and Bill sometimes. All eight stories have to do with power, identity, and relationship; certain themes and images recur in them and interweave; and they all take place at about four-thirty in the afternoon. I’m still pleased with my assignment.

—Ursula K. Le Guin. August 2012
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