The misery of waiting for a connecting flight at an airport (sitting for hours "on a blue plastic chair with metal tubes for legs bolted to the floor") leads to the discovery of a way to visit other planes. Note: we are changing not airplanes here but planes of existence. Le Guin"s humorous premise frames a series of travel accounts by the tourist-narrator who has mastered Sitka Dulip's Method. The fanciful descriptions of bizarre societies and cultures sometimes mirror—and satirize-our own, sometimes open puzzling doors into the alien.
In these delightful, wry short stories, Le Guin combines Gulliver"s Travels, Borge"s fictions, and Saint-Exupery"s The Little Prince to treat war, tyranny, the middle class, folly, Disney, mortality and immortality, dreams, art, technology, and the meaning--and the mystery—of being human.