Name: Changing planes
ISBN: 9780441011568

Changing planes

The misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport leads to the accidental discovery of alighting on other planes--not airplanes but planes of existence. Ursula Le Guin's premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who describes bizarre societies and cultures that sometimes mirror our own, and sometimes open puzzling doors into the alien.

What Hacker News says

madhadronDec 2019

Or go dip into her novellas. There's a collected edition out now ('The Found and the Lost'). I think my favorite stuff of hers is in there. Or, if you just want fun, 'Changing Planes' is a delightful romp inspired by the misery of sitting in airports.

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skybrianAug 2016

I haven't read this series but if you want a good introduction to Le Guin you might try Changing Planes, a 2005 book of short stories. Fairly light reading, but some stories are pretty mind-bending in an anthropological sense.

It's pretty hard to say why some stories click with some readers. I found some of her earlier stories fairly didactic, but then again they were written in the 60's.

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dtgriscomMar 2022

In Ursula Le Guin's book "Changing Planes", there's a story called "The Island of the Immortals." Spoiler alert: living forever is no fun.

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PolandKidMay 2021

Reminds me of a story from Ursula Le Guin's Changing Planes short story collection - Porridge on Islac.

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imrehgNov 2019

Reminiscent of "The War for the Alon" in Ursula Le Guin's Changing Planes.

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teraflopOct 2016

Or how about this, from the introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin's collection Changing Planes:

> If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?

> In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.

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