Le Guin's Galaxy Includes Earth -- Sci-Fi Master Displays Talent In New Genre

"Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand" by Ursula K. Le Guin HarperCollins, $20

Critics, like any other readers, have their tastes and blind spots, their lines of ignorance, and it so happens that I have never paid much attention to science fiction. It is likely to my impoverishment that the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of three Nebula and four Hugo Awards, has come my way only in the form of an occasional short story in one or another prestigious anthology.

But "Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand" puts an end to my shame as an alien on the planet of Ursula Le Guin's admirers. It needs to be said that this collection of stories is not science fiction, nor is it utopian fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, or for children. Whatever its roots in her 20-some other books, "Searoad" is quite simply a work of full-blossomed mastery.

Klatsand is an unromantic, non-futuristic and entirely fictional town on the Oregon coast, circa 1990. Its "chronicles" consist of 11 tales, each of which can be read separately, though they share the same locale and swap characters back and forth with an easy grace.

They also share other characteristics of a mature writer, perhaps especially when that writer is a woman: a patient, loving observation of detail; compassion for the small mistakes, and no regret for the big ones; and an awareness of the complexity in even the simplest lives.

Apparent also is Le Guin's ability to tell a story in which

what is transcends any question of right and wrong - and to do it so unobtrusively that all we hear is the wind in the dunes or the distant pounding of waves along a shoreline. Though well-peopled, these stories share an openness, a spareness, a salt astringency and a "sea-light like no other light." The comparisons here are not to Ray Bradbury or C.S. Lewis, but to Eudora Welty.

Go re-read Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen," one of the finest stories of the last 40 years; then read "The Ship Ahoy" or "Hand, Cup, Shell" or "True Love" out of "Searoad," and realize that in 40 more years the same claim could be made for them. Note both Welty's and Le Guin's subtle gift with the shifting points of view that make a third-person narrative so deceptively difficult. Note how bright observations leap like sparks from their story-lines.

Finally, and more obviously in Le Guin, note the fierce, Circean pride both take in being women, the way they wear the fabric woven of grief and fury like party dresses.

Le Guin is a feminist, but what does that mean in a work of imagination? The stories in "Searoad" defy synopsis, but insofar as they share a theme, it is the awakening of her heroines to the fact that men have used them - and that the men who have used them the most were the men they loved, sometimes still love. Men are not the bad guys in these stories, they are just the ones with a lie somewhere inside them - a lie they need to keep their wives, their mothers, their daughters, from overwhelming them.

Le Guin is interested in the moment when the lie is exposed. In the lovely story, "Hand, Cup, Shell," for instance, the aged Rita remembers her father in great detail, but realizes she only saw her mother through his eyes, and hardly knows her. When she asks herself who her mother really was, "the question opened on a blank area that she gazed into, fascinated."

In these stories, so full of insight, so unfull of themselves, Ursula K. Le Guin gives vibrant color to some of that blankness.

"I think that it behooves men, to learn to speak the language of the country we live in, not using us to speak for them," says Virginia Herne in "Hernes," a fascinating novella that manages, in just 65 pages, to span 100 years and four generations. The country she's talking about is the country of feeling. It is Klatsand. It is not in any distant galaxy. It is on Earth, now, and for all time.

Does this mean that science fiction was a mask, a cap and bells, a little girl's promise to be good? Maybe, don't know, haven't read it. But I've read "Searoad," and it took me to the moon.

Seattle writer Ben Groff's short story, "A Call From Kotzebue," is being published this month in the annual collection, "The Pushcart Prize XVI: Best of the Small Presses."