Unlocking the Air and Other Stories

Le Guin's recent collection of stories take place in a wide range of her personal territories, from fantasy worlds to the Pacific Northwest to her fictional country of Orsinia. The title story is in my opinion among the most powerful and moving of all of Le Guin's short stories. I read it five times and each time it brought tears to my eyes. It draws on real events from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, to bring up to date the vital interactions within the family of Stefan Fabre, who with his ancestors was one of the chief protagonists in her earlier Orsinian Tales. In doing so she reminds us of the difficulty and ambiguity of the continuing struggle for a just society, a struggle in which stones take on power as they are thrown as weapons, rutted by tanks, and sometimes run red with blood. In the real Prague of 1989, protesters and their leaders (Vaclav Havel among them) jingled their keys as a sign of protest and to symbolize the opening of hitherto locked doors. Le Guin's story ends: This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.

Unlocking the Air is an interesting collection of stories that crosses over genres in LeGuin's style of bridging the misty realm of dreams with the sun-bright daytime world of movement and activity. To me she is an absolutely amazing artist.

No one can claim more breadth of talent that Ursula K. Le Guin. She's known to science fiction for her brilliant social-science fiction and to the fantasy world for her world of Earthsea, making her one of the few truly original writers in each of those fields. But here she proves that she is not limited by the stereotypes and discriminations of genre writing. They might call this "mainstream" compared to her other writing: it generally doesn't involve other worlds; but Le Guin is entirely incapable of doing anything "mainstream;" it's still her, and she's still the best. These stories are beautiful to read. They are never too light, never too serious: always playful, always pointed. She flirts with ideas of reality, throwing the traditional existential questions out the window. "Ether, OR" tells the story of a town in Oregon that moves from place to place from multiple perspectives. "Unlocking the Air" is about wars and rumors of wars in a small, nonexistent European country (the same Orsinia from "Orsinian Tales" and "Malafrena"). "Sunday in Summer in Seatown" is a simple prose poem. She's always pushing the edge, pushing herself. It seems that she's succeeded again.