LETRAS

This 7th volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s works presents 5 remarkable standalone novels that showcase her boundless creativity and literary range. In the Locus Award–winning The Lathe of Heaven (1971), one of Le Guin’s most admired works of science fiction, George Orr begins have effective dreams: dreams that change reality itself. But when he turns to the sleep researcher William Haber for help, the doctor sees an opportunity to use Orr’s strange gift for his own ends. A former Terran prison colony on the planet Victoria seems destined for revolution in The Eye of the Heron (1978), when the authoritarian leaders in the City try to assert control over the peaceful farmers who have been sent to live around them. The Beginning Place (1980) is a parable-like story in which Hugh and Irena have both found their way to the Beginning Place, a gateway to another world. The two initially become enemies, but must learn to work together when the utopia they’ve found turns out to have a shadow. The long out-of-print Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (1991) is a Winesburg, Ohio-like series of linked stories set in a small vacation town on the Oregon coast, where some of the characters have come for a weekend and some for longer, but all are pilgrims in the grip of inexpressible longings.

While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines. For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow. As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.

Isaac Asimov empezó a escribir la saga de la Fundación a los veintiún años, sin saber que un día esta obra se convertiría en la piedra angular de la ciencia ficción del siglo XX, ni que con ella cautivaría a lectores de todas las edades durante más de siete décadas. ¿Por qué surgen y caen los imperios? La Trilogía Fundación es una historia con múltiples capas cuya lectura sigue siendo tan apasionante hoy como cuando se publicó por vez primera en la década de 1950. Incorporando infinitos elementos de la política contemporánea, la historia antigua y las matemáticas, la obra maestra de Asimov explora el declive del Imperio Galáctico, una civilización que gobernó sobre casi veinticinco millones de planetas habitados. Esta edición única de la Trilogía Fundación, ilustrada y en un solo volumen, es el mejor homenaje a la mayor saga de la ciencia ficción universal.