Changing Planes

Literary legend Le Guin weaves together influences as wide-reaching as “Borges”, “The Little Prince”, and “Gulliver's Travels” to examine feminism, tyranny, mortality and immortality, art, and the meaning-and mystery-of being human.

Sita Dulip has missed her flight out of Chicago. But instead of listening to garbled announcements in the airport, she's found a method of bypassing the crowds at the desks, the nasty lunch, the whimpering children and punitive parents, and the blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor: she changes planes.

Changing planes-not airplanes, of course, but entire planes of existence-enables Sita to visit societies not found on Earth. As "Sita Dulip's Method" spreads, the narrator and her acquaintances encounter cultures where the babble of children fades over time into the silence of adults; where whole towns exist solely for holiday shopping; where personalities are ruled by rage, where genetic experiments produce less than desirable results.