A Fisherman of the Inland Sea:
Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Last Story Just Stays With Me
The winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Kafka Award, and the National Book
Award, Ursula K. Le Guin has created a profound and transformational
literature. The award-winning stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
range from the everyday to the outer limits of experience, where the
quantum uncertainties of space and time are resolved only in the depths of
the human heart. Astonishing in their diversity and power, they exhibit both
the artistry of a major writer at the height of her powers and the humanity
of a mature artist confronting the world with her gift of wonder still intact.
Personal Review: A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories by
Ursula K. Le Guin

This little book is what LeGuin calls a "story suite", a set of interconnected
short stories with overlapping themes and characters. The connecting
theme of Four Ways to Forgiveness is, no surprises here, forgiveness--
specifically, forgiveness between men and women trapped in the evils of
gender domination. The connecting theme of Fisherman is narrative--story
as a way to organize reality, story as revelation, story as truth.
All of the stories in Four Ways are set in LeGuin's Hainish universe, or the
Ekumen. This is not the case with Fisherman; the three longest stories are
set in the Ekumenical universe, but there are other, shorter pieces,
including several humorous ones. "The Ascent of the North Face"
describes climbing a gigantic skyscraper as if it were Everest. "The First
Contact with the Gorgonids" makes an unexpected heroine of a
browbeaten wife. "The Kerastion" demonstrates what an inspired writer
can do with a list of items generated at a workshop; it's a story about a
musical instrument that makes no sound.
The three Ekumenical stories, include the title story, revolve around the
invention of a new technology, churten theory. Hitherto LeGuin has obeyed
Einstein in this universe; her spaceships travel Nearly As Fast As Light, but
never faster. People who wish to travel between worlds must accept that a
trip which seems to them to take four days may amount to four hundred
years on their home planet. Now, however, the Cetian and Hainish
physicists have come up with churten, which is instantaneous travel,
transilience: from here to there in no interval, no time. LeGuin, as always,
is interested in how people deal with the implications of such technology,
rather than in how it works.
In "The Shobies' Story", the first group of people to travel by churten *as* a
group deals with a chaotic experience of their trip by weaving a single
coherent story. "Dancing to Ganam" is a classic story example of the
unreliable narrator: What do you do when the hero you admire seems to
be telling a story that makes no sense? Finally, my favorite story, "Another
Story, or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", explores the problem of churten
and the marriage arrangements of the people of the planet O, who marry
by sedoretu, a bond between two men and two women.
"Another Story" is, I think, LeGuin's only time-travel story to date, and it is
unlike any other time-travel story I've ever read. Hideo leaves the farmhold
where he grew up, son of a Japanese woman who married into this ancient
culture, to study churten theory on Hain and its neighboring planet of Ve.
His one visit home makes him realize how much he has given up in order
to do so; he is deeply shaken by seeing his germane Isidri, child of the
other parents in the marriage, married but without children. After many
years of study, he uses churten to travel from Hain to O and discovers he
has gone back in time eighteen years; he has the opportunity to reclaim
the life he gave up.

The title of the story is based on a traditional Japanese folktale which
Hideo's mother used to tell, about a handsome young fisherman who
spends a night with the Queen of the Sea and returns to his village four
hundred years later. I read the same story as a child in one of my many
fairy tale books, where it was called "Urashima and the Turtle". Urashima's
magical experience of time dilation is the same as Hideo's mother's
experience of it--the loss of all she held dear in her decision to work for the
Ekumen. Churten is the overcoming of that loss, which requires the
creation of a new story, another story, in order to understand the universe.
Once again, Le Guin offers new stories by which we can come to new
understandings of our own universe.
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