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A review by sraev19
Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
3.0
If I had read [b:Gulliver's Travels|16102452|Gulliver's Travels|Jonathon Swift|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1350926376s/16102452.jpg|21913167], I would probably be able to tell you that Changing Planes is very similar in style and content. Since I have not read Gulliver’s Travels, and only know that it is a novel my fiction workshop professor detested but recommended to me in a heartbeat for its ethnographic style, I will hazard to say that Changing Planes is similar to Gulliver’s Travels.
Each chapter takes the reader into an alternate plane of existence inhabited by creatures not so dissimilar to humans. The chapters are short – only a few are longer than twenty pages – but illuminate each alternate plane with colourful images and vivid details so that every chapter becomes a story unto itself. Well, the seeds for a mighty story waiting to be watered, bathed in sunlight, and let blossom.
Although the book jacket describes the protagonist, Sita, discovering the method of changing planes and then encountering cultures and “exotic landscapes whose denizens are fundamentally human,” there is ultimately no plot to the novel. Instead, Changing Planes is a collection of beautiful ideas. The narrator of each chapter, sometimes Sita, sometimes her nameless friend or another plane traveller, is a curious and observant guide who explores the histories, peoples, cultures, and customs of the planes with the patient acumen of an anthropologist. And the planes are fascinating: extreme bioengineering to the point that one woman’s DNA is part corn; the restricted Holiday Plane where its inhabitants were coerced to make the ultimate holiday travel destination; the natural, random ability of flight is a crippling disability to be feared; and so on.
You will be disappointed if you read Changing Planes expecting a typical storyline following a set of characters overcoming obstacles leading to the final climax. The novel does not deliver the ‘normal’ reading experience – and for that, and the book jacket’s misleading copy, I detracted some rating points. Changing Planes does, however, deliver the imaginative seeds of ideas. Be sure to bring your watering can and sun hat.
Each chapter takes the reader into an alternate plane of existence inhabited by creatures not so dissimilar to humans. The chapters are short – only a few are longer than twenty pages – but illuminate each alternate plane with colourful images and vivid details so that every chapter becomes a story unto itself. Well, the seeds for a mighty story waiting to be watered, bathed in sunlight, and let blossom.
Although the book jacket describes the protagonist, Sita, discovering the method of changing planes and then encountering cultures and “exotic landscapes whose denizens are fundamentally human,” there is ultimately no plot to the novel. Instead, Changing Planes is a collection of beautiful ideas. The narrator of each chapter, sometimes Sita, sometimes her nameless friend or another plane traveller, is a curious and observant guide who explores the histories, peoples, cultures, and customs of the planes with the patient acumen of an anthropologist. And the planes are fascinating: extreme bioengineering to the point that one woman’s DNA is part corn; the restricted Holiday Plane where its inhabitants were coerced to make the ultimate holiday travel destination; the natural, random ability of flight is a crippling disability to be feared; and so on.
You will be disappointed if you read Changing Planes expecting a typical storyline following a set of characters overcoming obstacles leading to the final climax. The novel does not deliver the ‘normal’ reading experience – and for that, and the book jacket’s misleading copy, I detracted some rating points. Changing Planes does, however, deliver the imaginative seeds of ideas. Be sure to bring your watering can and sun hat.