Death Drive in Blue

Are you sure you weren’t rooting for the Americans all along?

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Pathways of Desire, a team of anthropologists lands on the beautiful tropical planet of Yirdo, thirty-one light years from Earth, to meet its inhabitants, the Ndif. Like their planet, the Ndif are beautiful. They have golden hair and smooth skin and tight tender bodies, barely covered by their pandsu-leaf clothes. …