The Shobies Story

by Ursula K. Le Guin

A starship crew faces the physical and psychic effects of traveling faster than light from Hain, the Prime World, the source of the oldest culture and most intelligent life among the planetary group called the Ekumen. Their entire journey, including time-travel, lasts only forty-four minutes.

The crew calls themselves the Shobies after their ship's name, Shoby. The crews' ritual is gathering around a campfire to discuss the Churten theory and to tell stories that will bond them together. Gveter, the only Cetian in the crew, is much hairier than and not as gifted in language as the others, and he holds close to his knowledge. As a space crew, they operate by consensual decision using transilience rather than by chain of command. Transilience is the experience of entering the fiction world by way of the imagination. Their equipment that facilitates transilience stops functioning and they can't agree on what they perceive. They start to lose their social cohesion and in order for the Shobies to tell their story, they must establish themselves with relation to time.