Short Story Reviews: Vaster Than Empires And More Slow by Ursula Le Guin

I read this as part of a writing course on the subject of character building- so much of my reaction and response to this short story revolves upon this subsection of fiction. I will say in terms of the work as a Le Guin piece- I was rather pleasantly surprised. I had read The Dispossessed earlier this year and while I remain impressed and in awe of what it was able to accomplish I had very little experience of joy while reading it. This story I felt nearly the opposite- I feel there are some half-baked or less thought out elements (some of which are of the time) that didn't connect with me but as a whole I really enjoyed reading it.

The plot cadence and character building was adept but most importantly Le Guin's humor really shone through in regards to this piece. I was laughing for almost my entire read. As a story within the Hainish cycle I'm not sure it adds much to my understandings or regards toward Hain but fits with the larger trope of colonizers going to planets to be anthropologists and sometimes succeeding and sometimes not at leaving positive impressions on their surroundings. 

So with that-the characters. This story is only 35 pages or so but does a better job at fleshing out characters than most novels can accomplish in 400+ pages. The ingenious way that Le Guin sometimes tells you about characters in underlying ways was as impressive as it was enjoyable to read. The way she relates a single character to their study- soft science vs. hard. My favorite characterization was when she balked at a Hainishmen for being teleological as antithetical to his society but then he "didn't take the bait." 

I did think this story's use of autism (the word) as just a general lack of empathy was both inaccurate and kind of dated but also had little effect on the story as a whole. In place of when Le Guin used the term I was still able to garner the idea of what she meant- and the existence of this form of processing on an alien planet was not mirrored in impact to that with how it interacts on earth. Should Le Guin be held to a higher standard given her knowledge of psychology and anthropology ? Maybe, but she's been dead a few decades now so the ultimate effect is quite little. Maybe now its my turn to be teleological in nature. 

I really appreciated the progression of the story, how it evolved the characters in relation to both each other and the environment . The end felt very inevitable, not only kind of as a metaphor for there being a lack of possible "curing" of Osden's inability to connect with his peers but also how everyone is sort of taken out by their personal achilles heel. Everything that happens in the beginning of the story and onward perfectly causes the inevitable end.