I picked up A Fisherman of the Inland Sea on a whim one day while browsing through a used bookstore. Le Guin, winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the American National Book Award, is widely known to be a very queer-positive writer. Her most famous, and widely acclaimed novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is a thoughtful tale about the struggle of a human ambassador to the planet Gethen to come to terms with his romantic attraction to one of the genderless Gethenians. Many of Le Guin's other works, such as the Taoist-inspired The Dispossessed, feature queer characters of one stripe or another.
I have read several of Le Guin's novels and enjoyed them all immensely, not only for their queer content, but for Le Guin's unmistakable prose style; Le Guin stories are not the mere unfoldings of plots, but the birthings of myths and legends. Often I find myself drawn to Le Guin by her titles, which always seem so clever and so perfect, inspiring such acute curiosity: The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, Four Ways to Forgiveness. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea grabbed me with its title, but it was the stories that kept me reading, with only briefly flagging interest, until the end..
The opening story, The First Contact With the Gorgonids , drew me
in with its levity and humour. After the second story, Newton's Sleep
, I was still engaged, though somewhat less so. After the third
story, The Ascent of the North Face , I was starting to worry, but
things picked up quickly.
But it is the last three stories in the set-- The Shobies' Story, Dancing to Ganam , and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea , collectively constituting more than half the book--which build in a truly magical crescendo to a marvellous final movement. These three stories, all set in the same Hainish universe as, for example, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed , are really one more or less continuous arc. They document the emergence of a new propulsion technology, called transilience, which allows a ship or person to travel from one point to any other instantaneously. Despite the technological theme that links them, all three stories are in the fine tradition of Le Guin's best character-driven science fiction. The first two stories, while good, have no really developed queer content, other than a few Gethenian characters here and there (recall that the Gethenians are, most of the time, androgynous, and only develop genders when it comes time for procreation). The title story and finale, however, stands apart from the others, both as the best of the eight stories in the book, and as one featuring substantial quantities of queerness.
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (also titled simply Another Story ) is set primarily on the planet O, where social attitudes toward sexuality and marriage are quite a bit more complex than on some of the other Hainish worlds, including nearby Hain itself. On O, the population is divided into halves or moieties: the Morning People and the Evening People. As Le Guin writes of the people of O, the ki'O, "One's identity as a Morning or an Evening Person is as deeply and intimately part of oneself as one's gender, and has quite as much to do with one's sexual life." A ki'O marriage--a sedoretu--comprises four persons: a Morning woman and man, and an Evening woman and man. There are four interrelationships: the heterosexual ones are called Morning and Evening, according to the woman's moiety, and the homosexual ones are called Day and Night for the lesbian and gay male relationships respectively. (Sorting through the terminology for brothers and sisters born of the various relationships, and for members of the extended family, is one of the most entertaining parts of the story). Among the ki'O, bisexuality is so much the norm that it is not referred to as such. It's just the way people are. Though the story focuses primarily on the love between the main character, Hideo, an Evening male, and his germane--his Morning sister (to whom he is not biologically related), it has several notable queer diversions. One of the most touching is Le Guin's description of how the main character's parents came together to form a sedoretu. Hideo's Evening father and mother had asked Tubdu, a Morning woman to help them form a sedoretu but, while Tubdu was in love with Hideo's mother, she did not care for the proposed Morning male, Kap. "Kap's long love for my father led him to woo Tubdu earnestly and well," says Hideo. It's one of many sensitive portrayals of same-sex love, even though it is in the context of an alien form of marriage.
On balance, I was impressed with this collection. Reading Le Guin is often something of an investment--to really get everything out of her stories, you may find yourself doing a lot of re-reading and head-scratching. In the end though, the head-scratching always pays off, and that's the case here too. The positive and thoughtful treatment of queer characters in the last three stories, while certainly not a dominant theme in the collection, will undoubtedly be an appealing feature for queer readers.