"Gardner Dozois & Sheila Williams - Isaac Asimov's Utopias" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

may have been the most influ-ential SF novel of its decade, and shows
every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—even
ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on
future SF and fu-ture SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968
fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on
future generations of High Fantasy writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness
won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental
novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her
another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards
and two Nebula Awards for her short fiction, as well as the National Book
Award for Children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of
her ac-claimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile,
The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning
Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, and
the controversial multimedia novel Al-ways Coming Home. She has had
six collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The
Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Pres-ences, A Fisherman
of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, and, most recently,
Unlocking the Air. Upcoming is a new novel, and a collection of fantasy
stories set in the Earthsea universe.

Le Guin has probably examined the theme of Uto-pia in more
depth, and from more angles, than any other SF writer of her generation
—in fact, the Utopian ideal (and all the things that can go wrong with it)
has been explored in most of her work, from The Dispossessed to The
Eye of the Heron, as well as in stories such as “Forgiveness Day” and
“The Matter of Seggri,” and many others. In the vivid and evoca-tive story
that follows, she takes us to a Utopian society on the distant planet of O
—which may have the most intricate and bizarre marriage customs in
the universe—for a typically compelling and unflinching examination of
the question: What do you do when your only chance of happiness
violates everything you’ve ever believed in, and in order to take that
chance, you have to do something that all your values and your training
tell you is unforgivably wrong?

****

Note for readers unfamiliar with the planet O:

Ki ’O society is divided into two halves or moieties, called (for
ancient religious reasons) the Morning and the Evening. You belong to
your mother ’s moiety, and you can ’t have sex with anybody of your
moiety.

Marriage on O is a foursome, the sedoretu — a man and a woman
from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening
moiety. You ’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other
moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So
each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two
expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual