Billdude turned me on to this in comments.
Super-duper short story by Ursula Le Guin.
BD said he had it assigned in high school.
Wish to Hell I had. Wish we'd gotten ANY Ursula Le Guin.
It's so short, to even say what it's about is a spoiler.
Okay, I'll dummy it down best I can.
A seeming utopia hides a dark secret.
Sounds like fifty Star Trek episodes, doesn't it?
In fact, "Strange New Worlds" ripped it off for an episode.
The story is better. Skip the episode, and read the story.
You can read the story right here for free.
It's really a quickie; you can burn through it before your coffee is done.
I've got the PDF on the ol' HD, but I'd prefer a paper copy.
It comes in "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" along with "The Day Before The Revolution" a prequel to "The Dispossessed".
So, I plan on getting "The Wind's Twelve Quarters".
"The Day Before The Revolution" is about Odo (not the Star Trek shapeshifter), the female anarchist who founded the society that begat Shevek from "The Dispossessed".
If Shevek is the Hainish-verse's Einstein, then Odo is Shevek's Jesus.
Le Guin said Odo walked away from Omelas.
That's the connection.
There's a collection of Hainish-verse stuff that has "The Day Before the Revolution" but not "Omelas".
And, to get just TDBTR I have to get repeats of everything I already have so far.
If I'm gonna get TDBTR, I want "Omelas" to go with it, since that was Le Guin's intention.
So "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" it is.
Stay tuned!
2 comments:
It was actually my sophomore year of college, this would have been fall 2002. It was read concurrently with "The Left Hand Of Darkness."
What stuck with me most about the story is the idea that nothing can be done for the "secret." You can only walk away. Pretty brutally honest on UKLG's part.
I dunno, I probably need to read more short story anthologies or something. A number of the big classic short stories never did that much for me, like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," for some reason (maybe because that one's been ripped off so much that it's hard to appreciate the material.)
I'm thinking about reading a whole bunch of Edgar Allen Poe after I watch the 1961 version of "The Pit And The Pendulum." I wonder how long that would take? Not very long, I hope.
I seem to recall you can get all of Poe crammed into one volume. It's about as thick as "IT". Shakespeare on the other hand, that takes an installment plan.
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