Changing Planes by Ursula LeGuin

A dedicated fiction writer is driven to create a world of fiction. In Changing Planes, Ursula LeGuin creates worlds of fiction, sixteen to be exact. In our world or plane, a young woman named Sita Dulip initiates this interplanary travel or world hopping after becoming stuck in a constipated airport where her flight is repeatedly delayed. Apparently, the conditions for such travel are extreme boredom and discomfort, a nice touch. Once despised travel hubs, airports become departure points for interplanary tourists. LeGuin takes a tantalizingly anthropological approach to each realm, which is filled with vivid detail, stunning imagination, and biting satire.

As a science fiction nerd, I wanted more detail about changing planes. For example, LeGuin lets the reader know that each plane has an airport-like waiting room to facilitate our journey back while alluding to different but still discomforting and boring techniques that inhabitants of other planes have for traveling. The passage of time is also different for each realm; a traveler with a two hour flight delay might spend a worthwhile day in a tropical plane. However, she does not let the reader know what happens to the travelers’ bodies; do they vanish completely or merely remain in a semi-coma in their own plane while experiencing an extraordinary trip.

Each plane provides a rich history, a fascinating situation that placated my inconvenient question. LeGuin also manages to turn each situation into a smaller, representative story through her first person narrative. Changing Planes is LeGuin in top form working with compelling ideas: inhabitants whose dreams are communal, a land primarily populated by Royals where commoners are celebrities, a conversation over maize soup with a waitress who is four percent corn, and an island where immortality might be achieved through a single fly bite. This is just a small list, but LeGuin hints at an infinite number of planes; the planes aren’t created but discovered.

Occasionally, LeGuin’s biting satire threatens to consume the original content present in each plane. The satire present is an essential component in defamiliarizing us to our “rational” practices, but I’d rather have fewer messages and more planes. Mrs. LeGuin has thought provoking ideas about corporations, sexuality, and war, but she left me greedy for more worlds of fiction.