"Solitude"

1994 Le Guin, Ursula K[roeber] (1929-2018). “Solitude.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 87.6 (December 1994): 132-59. Rpt. in The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology. Ed. Edward L. Ferman and George Van Gelder (New York: Tor, 1999), 353-81; in her The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 119-51; U.K. ed. (London: Gollancz, 2002), 119-51; in Diverse Energies. Ed. Tobias S. Buckell and Joe Monti (New York: Tu Books, 2012), 267-305; in her The Real and the Unreal. Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. Volume Two Outer Space, Inner Lands (Easthampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2012), 175-203; in the one volume edition The Real and the Unreal: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (New York: Saga Press, 2016), 519-50; and in Hainish Novels & Stories Volume Two. The World for Word Is Forest Stories Five Ways to Forgiveness The Telling. Ed. Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2017), 290-318 with a “Note on the Text” (781) and “Notes (786). Merril, O, PSt

Complex society in which men and women live separately. The men mostly live near the women’s villages, where the women live in individual huts with extremely limited interaction, the children providing the chief means of contact. Gangs of boys and individual rogue males are dangerous to both the other men and the women, but most of the men live peacefully. Some consider it a feminist eutopia, and the point-of-view character presents the women’s society as a good one. Female author.