"Ursula K. Le Guin's 1975 volume The Wind's Twelve Quarters collects seventeen short stories, offering, as the author puts it in her foreword, 'a retrospective' of her career to date: 'a roughly chronological survey of my short stories during the first ten years after I broke into print.' Le Guin adds that The Wind's Twelve Quarters is 'by no means a complete collection' of her short stories to date, and that the book does not include 'fiction which doesn't fit under the headings Fantasy or Science Fiction.' In addition to her foreword, Le Guin offers brief introductory notes to each of the seventeen tales. For me, these introductions were often as interesting as the stories themselves. In her introduction to 'Semley's Necklace,' for example, Le Guin declares that the 'candor and simplicity' of this early story exemplifies the 'romanticism' characteristic of her early work — a mode that has 'gradually become something harder, stronger, and more complex' as her career developed. In her introduction to 'The Good Trip,' she tells us that her 'only strong opinion about drugs (pot, hallucinogens, alcohol) is anti-prohibition and pro-education' but also admits that 'people who expand their consciousness by living instead of by taking chemicals usually come back with much more interesting reports of where they've been.' In her intro to 'Nine Lives,' which was originally published in Playboy in 1968, Le Guin laments that it appeared 'under the only pen name I have ever used: U. K. Le Guin,' and that it is 'surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important.' In her introduction for 'A Trip to the Head,' Le Guin describes a dark bout of writers block she experienced over a period of two years living in England. ... And it's a good thing Le Guin broke her block: some of her strongest work came after 'A Trip to the Head,' including The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and the first two Earthsea novels. Most of the stories in The Wind's Twelve Quarters that came after 'A Trip to the Head' are quite strong. 1971's 'Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,' part of Le Guin's Hainish universe, tells the story of SPACE MADNESS! and a murderous empathic jungle. 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (1973) is a successful morality experiment (or 'psychomyth,' to use Le Guin's term). ..."
Biblioklept
W - The Wind's Twelve Quarters
The Wind's Twelve Quarters
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