People have sometimes compared this book with Philip K. Dick’s work with shifting realities, especially Ubik and Eye in the Sky. The real difference is that Dick liked to torture his characters, and he often didn’t distinguish them enough for anyone to care about them anyway. Le Guin wrote a novel about the effect of world-changing on three-dimensional characters. Philip Dick wrote world-changing from the point of view of alienated, miserable people nobody could care about. Le Guin wrote from a position of hope and Dick from a position of existential despair. There may not be any difference,
...more
