The New Atlantis was originally published in The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg and published by Hawthorn Books in May, 1975.  It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and won the Locus poll.

The story opens with Le Guin’s narrator, Belle, returning home from a Wilderness Week aboard a bus where another passenger attempts to engage her in conversation, noting that a new continent is rising in the ocean, either the Atlantic or Pacific, but scientists have little information about it to go on. This exchange allows Le Guin to provide the reader with information about the climate change that is affecting her world. Manhattan underwater and parts of San Francisco are flooded.

Belle’s story really gets underway when she arrives home to find her husband, Simon, lying in bed. He has been released from a Rehabilitation Camp, although it is clear that he could be collected again at any moment and his release is conditional of the whims and desires or the authoritarian government which now controls what is left of the United States. Their relationship reveals more about the current state of the world. Marriage is frowned upon and Simon’s research, which could lead to cheap and available energy, is considered subversive, with Belle worrying about continued surveillance even as Simon works with his partner, Max, to move their research forward.

Belle’s story is interspersed with another story, apparently that of a sea creature who is living through the rising of its continent and dealing with the changes in its environment as the deep sea pressure decreases and light begins to enter its world. While there are many stories that look at ecological change from the point of view of the negative impact rising sea levels might have on humans who live on the coast, Le Guin flips the tables by focusing more on the social changes to human culture and looking at the environmental changes that would impact the sea creatures who must deal with the changes from the other side.

The submarine narration is provided more as an almost stream of conscious look at the changes that are occurring, without attaching meaning, plot, or full understanding to what is happening to them. The sparsity of details offered in these sections allows the reader to make their own assumptions. It also means they have a more utopian potential than the human dystopia Le Guin is portraying in the love story of Belle and Simon, which is constantly fraught with danger and the threat that Simon, and possibly Belle, will be returned to the Rehabilitation Camps.

The title, New Atlantis, harkens back to the seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon used the title for his own utopian novel which envisioned a golden age of discovery for mankind. In Le Guin’s version, humanity has turned its back on discovery, preferring to control how people live and what they knew. The suggestion is that the submarine creatures whose story is only really hinted at are about to enter into their own age of discovery as they world is uplifted from the ocean depths.

Although Le Guin does not explore the first contact between the humans and the submarine race, the existence of the two race also hints at further strife in the future as they discover the other. With the humans already living under an authoritarian regime, the situation from the human side will only get worse when there is a non-human party to take into account. Not enough is known about the submarine race to predict their own response to the discovery of humans, but they will surely respond to violence in a similar manner.

Ending the story less than two weeks after Simon and Belle were reunited and returning to Belle hearing news about a possible new continent arising from the depths, The New Atlantis ends on a pessimistic note, not only for Belle and Simon’s relationship, but for humanity and those they may soon be sharing the world with.

The Blind Geometer was originally published as a chapbook by Cheap Street Press in December, 1989. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter. This is an expanded edition of the Cheap Street publication and the version previously in August 1987 in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. This volume also includes Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1987 novelette The Return of the Rainbow Bridge, which originally appears in F&SF, August 1987. The Blind Geometer and The Return from the Rainbow Bridge are the second and third of four Robinson stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series, which he helped launch with Green Mars.

Carlos Oleg Nevsky is the titular character of The Blind Geometer. Carlos’ lack of sight has led to his decision to study geometry as must imagine the way the world fits together and without vision, using points, angles, and lines allows him to better mentally recreate the spaces through which he must move. His work at George Washington University brings him into contact with numerous colleagues, many of whom are intrigued by how he navigates through the world. One of those colleagues, who Carlos is less than fond of, is Jeremy Blasingame.

Blasingame introduces Nevsky to a problem he is dealing with related to some work Blasingame is doing for the pentagon. The problem centers on a woman, Mary Unser, who is providing incoherent information that seems to contain important information for national security. Mary provides a sketch, recreated on page 12 (and repeated on page 40) of The Blind Geometer illustrating Desargues’ theorem, which plays a major role in the novella, not least by providing the source for chapter titles, which are named for points, lines, and angles in the diagram.

Against his better judgment, Nevsky becomes intrigued not only by the mathematical problem Mary and Jeremy present him with, but also with Mary as an individual. As he delves into the mathematical and geometric questions, he realized that Mary’s involvement is due to the government drugging her and the project is aimed at developing a particle beam weapon.

Robinson does a good job of depicting someone who is blind in a field which one would think relies on sight. He discusses the steps Nevsky must take to overcome his lack of sight, from using a device to convert writing and drawings into embossed forms that he can feel. At times, it almost feels as if The Blind Geometer should have been paired with the previous volume’s He Who Shapes in dealing with blindness as a linking theme.

However, The Blind Geometer is not an easy volume to read. The concepts of geometry are tightly woven into the narrative, as is demonstrated by the chapter titles and the references to the Desargues’ theorem. Robinson adopts the jargon of geometry throughout the story, which can put a distance between the narrator and the reader. The problems that vex Nevsky have a parallel for the reader who must work through initial confusion about the way the structure of the novella mirrors and highlights the action of the novella.

Le Guin’s The New Atlantis is short enough that the editors elected to include a second story by Robinson in this Tor Double (Tor Triple?), the third time this has happened. In the previous cases, they included an excerpt from a novel and a short story. In this case, The Return from Rainbow Bridge is actually longer than the Le Guin cover story.

Robinson tells the story of a young boy visiting his great aunt on a Navaho Reservation in northern Arizona in the early 1960s. Upon arriving at the reservation, he meets a Native American named Paul, who invites him to join in a basketball game. Throughout his visit, which focuses on his family and kids around his own age, the narrator sees Paul at various places and eventually, the narrator’s friend, Luke, suggests that the two of them, along with the narrator’s younger brother, David, and Paul could make a trek out to see the Rainbow Bridge.

In some ways, The Return to Rainbow Bridge is reminiscent of Green Mars. Like that story, it is essentially a travelogue of a journey, in this case across an Indian Reservation near the Colorado River to visit the Rainbow Bridge, a natural arch that is threatened by flooding by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. Robinson offers lovingly crafted descriptions of the canyons the group pass through on their way to Rainbow Bridge and offers a pretty straightforward juvenile adventure tale that could have been written contemporary to the time in which it takes place.

On the return from Rainbow Bridge, the action tends to go off the rails a little. David discovers that he has pushed himself to the limit and Luke offers to stay with him so the narrator and Paul and continue home, partly to make sure people knew that David and Luke were okay. The narrator and Paul continue on and when they argue about the best path to take, Paul wanting to follow a trail and the narrator wanting to go up a canyon wall that appears easier and more direct, leading the two to split up in what would become a learning moment for the narrator.

The fantastic element that exists in The Return from Rainbow Bridge is minor, and perhaps a bit on the predictable side, although whether anything fantastic actually happens is a question the narrator wrestles with long after the main narrative takes place. The story is the most straightforward of the three in the volume and in some ways it is the most satisfying, even if it lacks the depth, complexity, and nuance of the other two stories.

The cover for The New Atlantis was painted by  Michael Böhme. The cover for The Blind Geometer was painted by Peter Gudynas.

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Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.