Changing Planes – Ursula K. Le Guin Free Audiobook

Written by Ursula K. Le Guin
Format: MP3

Changing Planes is a 2003 collection of short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin.[1] Each chapter describes a different world and the society that inhabits it; these societies share similarities with Earth’s cultures in some respects, but may be notably dissimilar in other respects. Many of the chapters are brief vignettes or ethnographic profiles of the societies they describe.

The conceit of the collection, described in the first story, “Sita Dulip’s Method”, is based on a pun that ties the book together: that the low-level discomfort of forced occupation of an airport while changing planes can, in fact, cause one to change from one “plane” of reality to another. Because of the different flow of time in other planes, one can spend a week visiting another plane and return in time to make a connecting flight.

One scholar notes that the stories explore an underlying, unifying theme around the “inherent difficulties in translations and understanding other cultures.”

The style of the collection has been compared to the literary style of Jonathan Swift and Jorge Luis Borges.