More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Most of the straight narrative stories in this volume are in fact connected with my novels, in that they fit more or less well into the rather erratic “future history” scheme which all my science fiction books follow. Those that don’t fit in are the early fantasies, and then later the ones I call psychomyths, more or less sur-realistic tales, which share with fantasy the quality of taking place outside any history, outside of time, in that region of the living mind which—without invoking any consideration of immortality—seems to be without spatial or temporal limits at all.
Yin laughed, an old man’s short, soft laugh. “Welcome, Ganil. From now on, come here when you please. We’re all necromancers here, we practice the black arts. Or try to . . . Come freely, day or night. And go freely. If we’re betrayed, so be it. We must trust one another. Mystery belongs to no man; we’re not keeping a secret, but practicing an art. Does that make sense to you?”
She was filthy, she was trembling, and her face was blank and mad, for she had lost that minimal confidence in the world which is called sanity.
She was led, by all the machines and devices and experiences and (simplest and most demanding) words that the Ekumen had at its disposal, into an intimation of what it might be to understand the nature and history of a kingdom that was over a million years old and trillions of miles wide. When she had begun to guess the immensity of this kingdom of humanity and the durable pain and monotonous waste of its history, she began also to see what lay beyond its borders in space and time, and among naked rocks and furnace-suns and the shining desolation that goes on and on she glimpsed the sources of
...more
It was hard to explain that he had already come back from the trip he had not made.
“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?” From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?
