Excellant. Far better than the last collection of her short stories I read changinf planes which was distinctly average. Each of these stories makes you stop and think.

Although all nominally set within the Hain universe, the stories aren't really united by much of a common theme. There is a lot of love, sex and different styles of society present, as anyone passingly familiar with the Hain universe might expect. We return to some of the worlds featured in novels, and explore some new ones. I haven't always been impressed with the Hain novels: the ideas are good, but they fail to capture the reader as a detailed story. These shorter works are much better - the essance of the world's society is distilled into one episode of a character's life with a much higher connection for the reader. We get to revisit Gethan from Left Hand of Darkness, and two stories set in the multiple person and moity marrige world of O, as well as my personal favourite Paradises Lost, set on a generational colony ship.

The styles of the stories vary, from 3rd person narratives to epistolary exerts of reports back to Hain. The prose is at times, blunt, with none of the victorian prudishness about body parts that the US sometimes displays. This sin't surprising given the inspection into human sexuality and modes of relationship that the first few stories detail.

Well worth reading with an open mind and enjoy the variety of the possible human conditions. ( )

This book got better and better. Couldn't put down. ( )

my first expose to ursula le guin was reading this book. le guin's writing is always challenging and rewarding to read, and this book is no exception. phenomenal. ( )

I've been using "The Birthday of the World" as my bed-time reading for the past week, and that was probably a very bad idea. Firstly, because these are more novellettes than short stories (there are only eight stories in the collection). Secondly, because after finishing one of the stories, I had to lie there awake for a couple of hours just *thinking* about it.

This are gloriously written stories with very deep themes, exploring race and gender and belief, each one set in a wonderfully evocative culture. The first six stories are explicitly set in Le Guin's loose Ekumen universe, the others not quite, and they are mostly in the nature of worldbuilding experiments - set up initial conditions, and see what humanity builds on them. And while I loved this book, and loved how much it made me think, some of these stories do fall into the "uncanny valley" for me - while I can happily read the most kitschy Golden Age sf, where characterization is non-existent, the hard science is ludicrous, and the social sciences are ignored - I start having problems when the author gets it *almost* right, but there's one or two things I just can't accept. Most of my issue with this book fall into that category. That said, there's a bit on each story (possible spoilers):

"Coming of Age in Karhide" is essentially a plot-what-plot fanfic set on the world of Gethen, from The Left Hand of Darkness. It's the story of the sexual initiation of a young Gethenian androgyne, and it's mostly sex. I liked it a lot! What I found most intriguing about it is the contrast with the original Gethen stories from the '70s - while she doesn't contradict the other stories, in this one, suddenly sex is so much more open, homosexuality is present, gender becomes less gendered. That's something that continues in all these stories - in every one of the worlds she explores here, bisexuality is taken as the norm.

"The Matter of Seggri": This is the story of a world where men are rare and valued, and so given "all of the privilege and none of the power", kept protected and separated while the women live on their own and run the society. It's set up as a collection of papers by different authors, which give you a good variety perspectives on the society. I found it fascinating and immersive and compelling, and while many of the characters you only meet for a small time (the duration of their contribution to the archive) they become very convincing as people. The moral of this story is about the ways in which a segregated society leads to injustice both from the top down, and among the subordinated people. I would have like to see, however, some hints of the way in which it also creates inhumanity among the ruling class itself. While there are small hints, in places, of less-than-friendly relationships withn the women's world, that part of it reads far too much like a lesbian utopia to me, and leaves the story oddly unbalanced.

"Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways" are both lovely, short romances set on the world of O, in which marriages all have four people, and gender is less important than other dualities. They're probably the lightest stories in the volume, but also probably the two that I enjoyed most, and they made me want to go find the novel (Fisherman of the Inland Sea) which she wrote about O.

"Solitude" is another story, like Seggri, of first contact; on the planet where it takes place, cultural transmission is only given to children, so the first aliens who learn about the culture are a brother and sister who were raised there. I liked this story- -there were places where it approached sheer beauty, and the concept of making your soul, to become a person but never a people; and the way their concept of magic is slowly defined really stayed with me, It feels truly like a foreign but still human culture, the way anthropological accounts often do but SF stories don't, nearly enough. I had issues with this story which I didn't manage to articulate until I went back to the introduction and read her account of its writing. She says that it was intended to explore the idea of a culture that valued introversion as the prime virtue; those were the parts of the story I liked. But she also gives this culture a system of gender segregation not unlike Seggri's, and especially coming where it does in the anthology, it feels like it ought to be about gender - but the gender issues never really get explored here, and expecting the gender questions makes it difficult to get to the meat of story.

"Old Music and the Slave Women" is a story I wanted to like more than I did. It's gorgeous and evocative and sad, set in a decaying mansion among the people who have been left behind as a devastating civil war slowly destroys their world. It's also something of a fanfic to the previous four stories set on this world, and I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd read those stories already and come to know and love the character and his setting before they were all ruined. As it was, I was really starting to miss actual plot by this point in the anthology, and it came off too much as a sermon on the topic of "War is bad. So is slavery. And there's nothing you can do about it." Which, while far too true, is both depressing and not news to me.

"The Birthday of the World" is based vaguely on pre-contact American empires; it's the first-person account of a girl who was born to inherit Godhood, and what happened when she didn't. This story was once again beatifully written, and wonderfully strange right down to its bones, but it was often too strange - I never really connected with it; I felt like I was only ever seeing this world through a thick fog; and I also found it hard to believe in. It's the same basic plot as Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, which I recently read; somehow I found that over-the-top treatment to come to a much more probable conclusion than this one, which posits that a faith strong enough to build an empire on is so weak that it can be toppled like a house of cards. People may be from very foreign cultures, but in the end they're still people. (The fact that it's never made explicit whether the people here are, actually, human or not doesn't help with my feelings of disorientation.)

"Paradises Lost" is also, in the end, a story about the nature of faith. It comes out in the negative. "Paradises Lost" is essentially a case study of a generation ship; and while I disagree with some of the conditions in her study, I love the people she populated it with, and the suprising ways they love each other. Unfortunately, there's another big problem with story; it spends the first three-quarters building up the tension to a big, dramatic, catastrophic climax, it reaches the very edge of the climax, where everything's going to have to change -- and then it skips in one line-break to six months later, after it's all pretty much resolved. For all the beauty of the ending, I was still left deeply unsatisfied.

So, in summary: I adored this book, and it make me think a lot, which is why I had to sit and tease out all the things that kept it from being absolutely perfect. ( )

Complex, interesting, challenging. A fascinating selection of short stories focused on gendered behaviour over different worlds. Thoughtful and interesting as well as entertaining reading.