In a “summary report” intended not for publication but posterity, the narrator in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Sur” writes of “longing to see with [her] own eyes that strange continent . . . which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scrapes of coastline, dubious capes, supposititious islands, [and] headlands that may or may not be there.” Winner of the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 1983, “Sur” (translated as “south”) describes a fictional expedition made by nine women between 1909 and 1910. Although the journey is fictitious, their destination—that “strange continent” shrouded in mystery—is not. The women seek the South Pole in Antarctica, a place so remote, so desolate, and so unfamiliar that Le Guin could treat it as a world in its own right.
Le Guin’s short story is one of many narratives woven into Elizabeth Rush’s...
