FICTION

UNLOCKING THE AIR and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (HarperCollins: $22; 207 pp.). “I know it was not my enchantment,” says a peasant boy who chops and burrows for two years to penetrate the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty’s castle; he waits for his refuge from time and suffering to be destroyed the moment a passing prince cleaves the hedge with “one blow of his privileged, bright sword” and kisses the princess. A medieval doctor escorting a wounded war hero to his island home investigates the legend that dying people there turn into trees. A political “fairy tale” about a make-believe country, Orsinia, sums up what really happened throughout Eastern Europe in 1989: “People sang . . . that old song with words like ‘land,’ ‘love,’ ‘free,’ words that transform the world, when it is sung at the right time by the right people, after enough people have died for singing it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (“The Dispossessed,” “The Lathe of Heaven”) is one of our most distinguished science-fiction writers. These 18 stories are billed as “mainstream,” but only one, about a confrontation at an abortion clinic, could be called conventional. The others, long and short, told in mythic voices or the vernacular or both, are surreal or dreamlike in various ways. “Half Past Four” takes members of a family--older man, older woman, younger woman, retarded child--and shuffles and reshuffles their roles. “Either, Or,” my favorite, overhears the lovelorn, often hilarious musings of residents of a small Oregon town that wanders from the desert to the seashore and back, an “American town” that simply refuses to stay put.