Changing Planes

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Story • A New York Times Notable Book

"A fantastical travel guide, reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, in which the narrator visits fifteen planes and describes the people, language and customs with the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist." —USA Today

In these classic "vivid, entertaining, philosophical dispatches" (San Francisco Chronicle), literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin weaves together influences as wide-reaching as Borges, The Little Prince, and Gulliver’s Travels to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the meaning—and mystery—of being human.

Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she’s found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, a way to skip the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes.

Changing planes—not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence—enables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth in a series of unforgettable allegorical tales. As “Sita Dulip’s Method” spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage; where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results. With “the eye of an anthropologist and the humor of a satirist” (USA Today), Le Guin takes readers on a truly universal tour in this short story collection, showing through the foreign and alien indelible truths about our own human society.