Recommendations
Books Like Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
For readers of Le Guin's playful airport-layover travel guide
If you loved Changing Planes's sixteen thought experiments disguised as travel writing, the whimsy and seriousness in the same stories, and Le Guin's most approachable mode, these books explore her wider work or the philosophical short SF tradition the collection belongs to.
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Buy on AmazonThe Wind's Twelve Quarters
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's first major story collection — the companion in her short fiction; seventeen stories from the 1960s and 70s, including 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and key Hainish and Earthsea stories.
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Buy on AmazonThe Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's Hugo-winning Hainish SF — the novel-length expression of the thought-experiment mode that Changing Planes works in short-story form; the Gethenian thought experiment is the extended version of what each Changing Planes story does in miniature.
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Buy on AmazonThe Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's anarchist utopia — the companion in her speculative-social-imagination mode; the Anarres thought experiment at full novel length is what Changing Planes stories do in 15 pages.
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Buy on AmazonStories of Your Life and Others
by Ted Chiang
Chiang's debut collection — the most important companion in the thought-experiment short SF tradition; Chiang's stories each pose a speculative premise and trace its implications with the same rigor and care that Le Guin uses in Changing Planes.
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Buy on AmazonInvisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Calvino's speculative fiction — the most important literary predecessor; Marco Polo's cities to Kublai Khan are the closest formal ancestor to Le Guin's planes, both books organized around a traveler describing places that exist outside normal geography.
- 6Buy on Amazon
How Long 'til Black Future Month?
by N.K. Jemisin
Jemisin's debut story collection — the most important recent companion in the short SF tradition; Jemisin's range of premises and tones across her stories is the 21st-century version of what Le Guin demonstrated in Changing Planes.
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Buy on AmazonThe Illustrated Man
by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury's linked short story collection — the predecessor in the form of a framing device linking short SF stories; the illustrated man's tattoo stories are the earlier American version of the linked-stories-as-world-travel that Changing Planes perfects.
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Buy on AmazonA Wizard of Earthsea
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's Earthsea debut — the companion in her world-building imagination; readers who love the conceptual playfulness of Changing Planes and want Le Guin's world-building at novel length should start with A Wizard of Earthsea.
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