Author
: Ursula K. Le Guin
Title
: The Shobies’ Story
Date
: April 1990
Foreword
In my crustier moments I’ve been known to assert that, while science fiction boasts any number of enthralling yarn spinners, brilliant visionaries, and witty satirists, it has produced only one wholly literary voice. That’s not true, of course. It’s certainly not fair to Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Lucius Shepard, Karen Joy Fowler, Judith Moffet, Michael Bishop, and perhaps a dozen others. And yet if SFWA ever got itself into a literary jousting tournament with some rival guild, the prize being a government grant or a small planet or a subscription to The New Yorker or something, there’s no question whom I’d want to send onto the field.
Ursula K. Le Guin received the National Book Award for The Farthest Shore, the third novel in the Earthsea cycle, as well as a Hugo and a Nebula for The Left Hand of Darkness and the same pair of trophies for The Dispossessed. This volume celebrates her most recent literary honor—a Nebula for Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea—by offering up another Le Guin work from the final ballot, a complex and audacious novelette called “The Shobies’ Story.”
Even if Tehanu had not taken the top prize, I would have accorded “The Shobies’ Story” a prime spot in this volume, for I believe that—through its marvelous conceit of “churten” travel— it raises crucial questions about social hierarchies, interspecies bonding, and the consensus model of reality. Le Guin aficionados will quickly notice that it belongs to the “Hainish League” saga, her ongoing narrative of galactic exploration.
“This story grew out of an idea I have been chewing on for years about the importance of story, of narrative,” Le Guin reports. “Speaking not metaphorically but fairly literally, it seems that people who can see their life as a story, with a ‘plot’ or at least narrative continuity (possibly even a happy ending), get along okay, while people who lose that narrative sense are in a lot of trouble, maybe to the point of psychopathy. I’m not talking about personal control, being the ‘author of your fate,’ because in cultures where individuals don’t control their lives much at all, people can be totally content with the cultural narrative, and live it beautifully. Even if the story itself is stupid or psychopathic, like the war story or the white-supremacy story, if we believe in it and it makes some sense to us we get along, we stay alive, we even think we know what we’re doing.
“Well, then, the idea of using narrative as a means of travel is really just an extension of this basic idea of narrative as means of existence. So the Shobies showed up and started telling their story. Their stories. Of course they were science fiction stories, what else?”
The Shobies’ Story
They met at the Port more than a month before their first flight together, and there, calling themselves after their ship as most crews did, became the Shobies. Their first consensual decision was to spend their isyeye in the coastal village of Liden, on Hain, where the negative ions could do their thing.
Liden was a fishing port with an eighty-thousand-year history and a population of four hundred. Its fisherfolk farmed the rich shoal waters of their bay, shipped the catch inland to the cities, and managed the Liden Resort for vacationers and tourists and new space crews on isyeye (the word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two). The fisherwomen and fishermen of Liden were as weathered as driftwood and about as talkative. Six-year-old Asten, who had misunderstood slightly, asked one of them if they were all eighty thousand years old. “Nope,” she said.
Like most crews, the Shobies used Hainish as their common language. So the name of the one Hainish crew member, Sweet Today, carried its meaning as words as well as name, and at first seemed a silly thing to call a big, tall, heavy woman in her late fifties, imposing of carriage and almost as taciturn as the villagers. But her reserve proved to be a deep well of congeniality and tact, to be called upon as needed, and her name soon began to sound quite right. She had family—all Hainish have family—kinfolk of all denominations, grandchildren and cross-cousins, affines and cosines, scattered all over the Ekumen, but no …