Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin

by Jonathan Strahan (Editor), Charlie Jane Anders, Ai Jiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Ann Leckie

Overview

15 brand-new short stories inspired by and in honour of legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

Featuring Ann Leckie, Karen Joy Fowler, Charlie Jane Anders, Kelly Link, Ai Jiang and many others.

Revolution in the Heart is a collection of 15 brand new stories by a group of celebrated authors, all inspired by one of the iconic figures in all of science fiction and fantasy: the legendary and award-winning Ursula K. Le Guin.

From the appearance of her first work of short fiction in 1962 to the publication of the last in 2016, Ursula K. Le Guin was a master storyteller, winning innumerable awards, and achieving both commercial and literary success. She created the beloved stories of Earthsea alongside the urgent and essential stories of the Hain, pushing forward the form and concepts of science fiction and fantasy - reshaping them into forward-thinking genres.

This collection honours her legacy with stories from authors she inspired:

Ann Leckie
Molly Gloss
Kelly Link
Charlie Jane Anders
Sarah Pinsker
Chana Porter
Ai Jiang
Alaya Dawn Johnson
S. Qiouyi Lu
E. Lily Yu
Vandana Singh
Aliya Whiteley
Premee Mohamed
Darice Little Badger
Karen Joy Fowler

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781835412749
Publisher:	Titan
Publication date:	09/22/2026
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

JONATHAN STRAHAN is the recipient of the World Fantasy, Locus, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards, and the nineteen-time Hugo Award nominated editor of more than 70 anthologies, including THE STARRY RIFT, LIFE ON MARS, THE NEW SPACE OPERA (Vols 1 & 2), the best-selling THE LOCUS AWARDS (with Charles N. Brown) and THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OF THE YEAR anthology series, amongst many other anthologies. He is also the Reviews Editor for Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field, producer and co-host of the Hugo Award nominated The Coode Street Podcast, and a consulting editor for Tor.com.

Read an Excerpt

Five-Eyed Jane

Ann Leckie

Once upon a time, there were some cats.

Well, they weren’t actually cats, you understand. Cats evolved on Earth, and these cats—these “cats”—didn’t live on Earth. They lived on another planet entirely. These cats that weren’t cats had lovely silky fur—it wasn’t hair, not really, not technically—and big, liquid chatoyant eyes, and whiskers. The whiskers were a lot more like catfish barbels than like a Terran cat’s whiskers, and even then, to be honest, they were more like tentacles than like barbels. But the humans who had settled on this planet thought they looked like cats’ whiskers, and so cats, and fur, and whiskers were the words they used. Sometimes these cats walked on their two hind legs, and sometimes they walked on all fours—whatever was most comfortable or convenient. They were, on their hind legs, maybe a little shorter than an average sized human.

The planet was a lovely planet. Well, all planets are lovely, each in their particular way. But this planet was full of liquid water, and oxygen, and a delightful variety of climates and terrains and biomes. The cats—of course they did not call themselves cats, they called themselves people—had, over hundreds of millennia, spread over this planet’s continents and archipelagos and made homes everywhere they went, and by now the different ways they lived, and the different words they used for people, were many and quite varied.

But we are interested in one particular cat. I could never in a million years convey the pronunciation of her name with the letters or even the phonemes available to me, and so I will merely call her “Jane.” When Jane’s clutch had been about to hatch, her family had called the midwife, who helped each kitten out of its casing and inspected it closely to see what sort of person it would be. And Jane had not merely the usual four eyes—two in front and two in back—but also a fifth, on the very top of her head. As it happens, about one third of Jane’s people are born with this fifth eye, and in some times and places it hasn’t meant much of anything, but in this particular town, the place where Jane was born, kittens with a fifth eye automatically belong to a distinctive category, with a particular future occupation already assigned them. And so while Jane’s four-eyed clutchmates grew up in the warmest, safest part of the family compound and dined on whatever the family could find that was sweetest and most nutritious for kittens, Jane and her five-eyed sibs lived out back, by the trash heap, and fed themselves with whatever edible scraps they might find there.

Oh! I can hear your gasp of horror and sympathy! Poor Jane! And so you will understand the reaction of the human anthropologist who visited Jane’s town some ten or twenty years before she was born.

“The cats of this town and its subsidiary villages,” wrote the anthropologist, in a letter to a friend, “work copper and bronze, plant gardens, and weave fiber into tapestries and clothing. They trade vegetables and cloth and metal and ideas with each other and with surrounding towns. They are industrious and intelligent. And so I am at a loss to explain their savagery to their five-eyed kittens—thrown on the trash heap at birth, fed nothing but that same trash, doomed to live on the outskirts of whatever town or village birthed them. Not to say that some of these kittens don’t make a half-decent life for themselves from the trash heap, the contents of which are considered to be the legal property of these unfortunates. Still, I can’t account for it. The cats of Catland,” this was the place where the first human ship landed, and where the humans had their first settlement on this planet, and as a consequence the humans thought of the people there as the definitive cats, “of course are often somewhat careless of their five-eyed kittens, but they don’t throw them on the trash heap, for goodness sake! For what, for an extra eye? I asked the mayor of the town why the kittens were treated so, and he told me that it was just nature, and the town would suffer if not for those kittens being in that place. And then tried to tell me they were fine because everyone in the town threw away lots of good food, expressly for them. Ridiculous!”

Of course, the anthropologist knew that it was their job to understand (and report), not to condemn. But it was difficult, and their disapproval absolutely came through in their supposedly dispassionate and academic report, and of course quite a few humans— along with cats from Catland—who read that report were horrified, and felt very strongly that something must be done to help the five eyed kittens of Jane’s country.

But Jane thrived in her family’s trash heap. It was true that the family threw away all sorts of good food, and clothes and tools and toys that were even slightly damaged. Some of this was damaged on purpose so that it could be given to the five-eyed. Some was just worn out, and as it was the five-eyed who learned mending (which was a skill beneath the dignity of the four-eyed), it was they who refurbished those things and either kept them, or sold them on market days. And since cloth is quite a lot of work to make, and making clothes from that cloth is also a great deal of effort, even little Jane did a brisk business in second-hand clothes. But what Jane was really good at was farming.

The staple of Jane’s town’s diet was squash. Which was nothing like the sort of Terran squash that you might bake and eat with butter and salt, or perhaps cinnamon and sugar if your taste runs that way. No, this squash was the fruit of a tree (not really a tree) that, after a few years’ growth, would split apart, peeling away into layers that would separate into bundles of brown strips that would bubble out bright red at one end, full of fruit and seeds. The strips would twitch and kick and after a day or two the whole assemblage, strips and red bubble and all, would stand up and run off, screaming, toward anything that moved. Each other, at first, but eventually they would come upon a person, who, having many other more important things to do than continually fend off a screaming, walking squash, would hit it until it broke apart and stopped moving. Not incidentally, this would spread the seeds all around, and eventually a grove of new squash trees would sprout and the whole cycle would begin again. The squash were very, very annoying but if one took the proper precautions they were good to eat.

Jane knew—because her five-eyed aunties had told her—that long, long ago in the distant past the world had been overwhelmed with squash. It had been a five-eyed cat who had discovered how to make good food from it. She had shared this knowledge with her other five-eyed sibs, who together made up the first Council of Five and negotiated the favored status that the five-eyed now enjoyed. For unprocessed squash, Jane was told, was toxic to the four-eyed. Unless the seeds it was grown from were swallowed and made their way through the digestive system of a five-eyed person before planting. Then, and only then, would the resulting fruit be safe for everyone. Without the five-eyed, the town would be very hungry, or very sick, or both. This was why every person in the town was careful to collect any squash seed they might find and put it on the trash heap. By long tradition the skin and seeds of every squash belonged to the five-eyed, and the meat of the squash belonged to the four-eyed, and it was the five-eyed who planted those seeds (after swallowing them and it’s inevitable sequel, of course), tended them, and harvested them.

Now, I must be very straightforward with you about this—it was not actually true that unprocessed squash was only toxic to the four-eyed. In fact, it was toxic to many four-eyed people, but not all. And some of the five-eyed suffered the effects as well, but most of them tried to conceal it because if you were a five-eyed person who threw up or broke out into a rash after swallowing squash seeds, you would likely be the subject of suspicion and gossip about whether you were lazy, or faking it, or what was your fifth eye even for.

But Jane thrived on it. Her not-technically-fur grew thick and luxurious, her whiskers writhed happily. She enjoyed planting the seeds, and she was very, very good at breaking squash in such a way that all their seeds landed in one small area. She enjoyed mending and worked industriously at it. Everything she turned her attention to seemed to prosper. The aunts murmured to each other that someday Jane would sit on the council, if not chair it.

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