Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Searoad (1995) isn’t science fiction or fantasy, it’s a set of interlocking stories about the small Oregon town of Klatsand. Most of it is modern day vignettes, little moments of people’s lives in the town, or as they pass through it or connect to it. The last third is the intertwined history of a family and the town from 1899 to 1983.

It’s a strange book, a book about place and people and glimpses of them from inside and outside and the way everything connects up. It’s a slim book that’s deeper than it seems, it skims along with hints and images and very precise descriptions of very small things and makes of them a wider lens than you’d think you could possibly get from something like this. I picked it up for the same reason you’re interested in reading about it, because Le Guin is one of the greatest writers of fantasy and science fiction, and I’m going to buy whatever she writes. But this is something else, something elusive that comes at you sideways. I love it. But I find it hard to wrap words around what it is.

There’s a woman who remembers text appearing on clothes as decoration and isn’t all that surprised when she sees it appearing in the foam along the water’s edge. There’s a man who goes away for a few days and finds out that everybody sees him as retired, as old, and it shakes his worldview. There’s a woman who reads science fiction every afternoon in the empty units of her motel. There’s a man who makes beautiful things out of clay. There’s a rape and a murder and love and a bookshop and celebrity and shopping lists. There are people who think they see each other, there are surfaces and depths, there is time and place, especially place, and at last we come to the Hernes, who are easier to talk about, four generations of women who outlived or outgrew their men and lived alone and brought up daughters who each came a little further.

It’s more of a kaleidoscope than a mosaic, and you might not like it unless you like poetry, because although it is prose I respond to it from the same place I respond to poetry. It’s beautiful.

The family arrived and dispersed. Having come to be together over the weekend, they fled one another without hesitation, one to the garden, one to the bookshelf, two north up the beach, one south to the rocks.

You’re constantly meeting and parting, in Searoad. I like it, but I can see how if you didn’t like it it might feel like a handful of foam, the more you try to grasp it the less you’re holding. It’s a book on a strange edge, on a coast I know only by repute. I often read it when I can’t sleep, because there’s a way it’s drifting and dreamlike and helps unwind my thoughts. So it has become for me a book I begin in the middle of nights and finish in mornings. I don’t think she intended it that way.

If you haven’t read any Le Guin for goodness sake don’t start here, this isn’t what she’s usually like. But you could do a lot worse than give it to a poetry reading science fiction avoidant friend—they might pick up The Left Hand of Darkness afterwards, and they might like it.


Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently Among Others, and if you liked this post you will like it. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Learn More About Jo
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
8 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments