Today I want to recommend the short story collection Changing Planes by Ursula Le Guin. It centers around a theme of world building, where she visits a new world with new societal structures for each story. Really, it is almost like it is a peak into her creative process as it feels like she is playing around with ideas and worlds, exploring them to see what kind of stories they contain. This might just be how she comes up with the fantastic worlds in her other novels.
Le Guin usually has a way with words, but in the titular short story Changing Planes in particular she really gets to play with them. I’d love to have a quote to show you what I mean, but I’d end up pulling in the entire story. If you’re going to just read one of these stories, this is definitely the choice. The rest don’t feature as much word play, but instead the focus of her play shifts over to the worlds. They focus on world play instead of word play, and are just as lovely.
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