"Edges" edited by Ursula K. Le Guin & Virginia Kidd

Anthologies are a fun gamble that arguably widens the odds for a reader landing a valuable story over slogging through longer forms that may or may not end in satisfaction. Finding Ursula K. Le Guin sharing the cockpit with Virginia Kidd as editors of “Edges” seemed like a worthy ride to take, as well as Le Guin’s pitch for the collection aiming to explore and sink into and eat the boundaries of experimentation at the time.

I opened it up to see what did and didn’t hold to the claim 43 years later, and while certainly odd across the board, there are definite homers and strikes, the misses flexing desperately, making good on steering for breaking boundaries, but losing purchase on the reader in the process, making a javelin out of what needs to be a needle to hook and thread the reader through this or that garment, feel out for its warmth, a texture of interest, and/or an original style.

That said, I’m not mad at the unique rides and lessons I got out of the duds, but the stories that do work here more than justify the journey.

For me, the three big winners start with “Touch the Earth” by Scott Sanders, wherein a gang of brave souls trade safety for unfettered life on a future Earth that has grown much more dangerous than it is now.

This is more than a hefty quota of risk, by any estimation, and the adventure sees a the group wrestle with the price that is inherent with the conceit, then doomed to pay as Sanders puts us right there with the resolute, the heroes on a journey that reads tactile and lush, with gems like our main character feeling real temperatures for the first time:

“She had never been this hot, this lathered with sweat, this lost in her body.”

Firing on the visceral with similar strength and bravery, Luis Urrea’s “Father Returns from the Mountain” is another rich dig into the visceral experience of loss exposed and cast under a speculative lens.

The timeline of a father’s death is haunted and run through back and forth, squeezed and dilated in a poem with slashes standing in for breaks and/or stanzas, strikingly so with haymakers like:

“His mouth is a thickened traitor that will not function. It fills slowly with liquid. When it reaches its lips there is a slow, endless snail of red slipping down his cheek and hiding in his ear.”

The crown of the book sits fittingly atop the closer, “The Oracle” by M. J. Engh, a mesmerizing, heartbreaking novella about the figurative monsters our world moves on, and the literal dragon that dominates the life of the protagonist by way of the searing, violent loss of her son, continued possession by an otherworldly augur and a capitalist just-this-side of paranormal, all while the mother we follow grapples with causation and freewill, issues have no time for philosophy in Engh’s telling, as her hero’s life and an uprising in the Philippines keep this nightmare both grounded and vaulting into depths of a journey that makes one wonder why everyone hasn’t read this yet.

Engh’s mastery of language and pacing can be cited with any number of quotes from the story, but I’ll stick with the one for now, and leave people with an urging to pick up the collection for this piece, if nothing else:

“What God?” the oracle asked derisively, “What is a God?”

She wet her lips. She knew an answer; its dry ammoniac stench (outriding tendrils stirred from its unquiet lair) burned her shut eyes.