A Son of the Rock

Plume, 1988. 196p.

In her preamble to this collection of stories and poems which feature animals Le Guin refers to the denigration talking-animal tales receive at the hands of “grown-up” critics and theorists. They are seen as children’s fare and not worth serious consideration. But of course it is in pointing up the differences and similarities between species and their use in morality tales that their usefulness lies. And that usefulness is no small thing. It is to the credit of fantastic fiction – perhaps its glory – that only in its area can such things be fully explored. To know what it is to be truly human we must contemplate the non-human.

Le Guin has of course investigated the many different ways in which humans can be human beings, and in particular altered in sexuality, throughout her career, so this is no departure.

The lead tale here, the award winning novelette Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight, is I suppose a fantasy wherein a human girl, never named throughout, the sole survivor of a plane crash, is taken in by a community of animals. The animals appear to her to live as humans – and they talk of course – but have animal behaviours, especially in terms of waste disposal and sex. Their attitudes and behaviour are the norm here though and it is this simple transference that highlights the peculiarities of our species, our detachment from nature, our oddness. The strangeness of the milieu, the fact of the animals being animals, their kindness and the child’s simple acceptance of things is essential to the story’s success. It is, in the original sense of the word, fabulous.

The Wife’s Story and Mazes are stories of transference in which we get almost to the end before the true natures of the protagonists are revealed. The Direction Of The Road has an unusual narrator, a tree, and is a fine exemplar of the working through of an initial premise.

Trees are something of a Le Guin theme. There was of course The Word For World Is Forest and in (Hugo Award nominee) Vaster Than Empires And More Slow – in this collection – there are arboriforms which turn out to be part of a planet wide intelligence.

The White Donkey and Horse Camp are slighter tales which are nevertheless effective. Schrödinger’s Cat considers a third outcome to the famous thought experiment beyond the either/or that quantum theory appears to suggest. The Author of the Acacia Seeds and other extracts from the Journal of Therolingiustics is an amusing dissection of the academic style as well as a thorough exploration of the possibilities of language in the non-human world. May’s Lion is presented first as a true story then as fiction while She Unnames Them is a strange piece about the power of names to circumscribe, or provoke, thoughts and actions.

Included in the nineteen poems by Le Guin is one which is her own translation of one of Rilke‘s.