| Contents of Changing Planes with a little description | |
| Note The author acknowledges the readers' discomfort with air travel after 9 | |
| Sita Dulip's Method How Sita Dulip, sitting between flights in an awful airport, learned to travel to other planes of existence by focusing her mind in a certain way | |
| The result: a more interesting kind of tourism | |
| The Porridge on Islac On Islac, people are physically very different from one another: the aftermath of an unfortunate boom and crash in genetic engineering | |
| Cautionary, humorous, with a touch of poetry (bearwigs are recombinant teddy bears that developed a taste for book glue and paper) | |
| The Wisdom of the Asonu The Asonu become silent as they mature: their total abstinence from language is unsettling | |
| Questioning the Hennebet The Hennebet look just like us, but their minds (sort of Taoist) are totally alien | |
| The traveler tries to but cannot communicate with them; a glimpse of their worldview makes her less sure about her own | |
| The Angry Veksi A society torn by violence, which, however, has its human rules of conduct(It's about human violence, of course) | |
| Social Dreaming of the Frin A society in which dreaming is communal, not personal | |
| Fascinating examination of the idea that some loss of self is necessary for selfhood | |
| The Royals of Hegn Satire of the Brits and their absurd fascination with royalty | |
| In Hegn, everyone is royal and comeletely dotty about the very few Commoners (who are really low-class) | |
| Tales of Blood from Mahigul Histories that are political allegories of man's inhumanity to man | |
| All about war, tyranny, self-destruction (Male-dominated, of course) | |
| Wake Island An experiment to make children smarter by having them require less sleep, then no sleep at all, backfires: without sleep, people become mindless animals (Another approach to the loss-of-self idea) | |
| The Nna Mmoy Language A language so alien and complex, it contains an entire culture (its speakers live primitively) | |
| The traveler's vain attempts to use a translating machine | |
| The Building This account of two cultures and of a migration to build a mysterious building, generation after generation, touches on the question, What is art? That is, the transcendental, nonutilitarian strivings of human beings (Influence of Borges here) | |
| The Gyran Hatred of Wings The blessing and the curse (more curse than blessing) of growing wings and flying | |
| The Gyr put up with-try to ignore-their affliction, going about their business as lawyers, accountants, etc | |
| Yet the inspiring image of flight remains | |
| The Island of the Immortals A horror story, worse than "Wake Island," and probably from Gulliver's Travels: some people, bitten by a fly, cannot die | |
| Buried alive, after centuries, they turn to diamonds, still alive | |
| Confusion in Untilde;i A virtual reality satire taken from the pages of Stanislaw Lem: the traveler becomes lost in a VR machine and passes from one ridiculous dream to another | |
| Great Joy Big business and the travel industry produce a monstrous Disneylike theme park, exploiting the natives | |
| Humorous (a village full of Santa Clauses that speak with an accent), but also acerbic, being close to home | |
| The Seasons of the Ansarac A society that alternates between city life and country life, each having its joys and miseries | |
| Commentary on the mortality of humanity: its sorrow alleviated by a sexual dance | |
| Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved. |
