“Sur” was originally published in the February 1, 1982, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in The Compass Rose: Short Stories (1982). It is currently most readily available in The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (Saga Press).

I never go anywhere without bringing something to read, and I was waiting in line at the DMV the first time I read “Sur.” The story made me so happy that I laughed out loud. People turned and stared. It was as if they had never heard a laugh in the DMV before. I laughed again, tore the story out of the magazine I'd stuck in my purse that morning, and assigned it to my graduate writing class that night.

My students didn't like the story much. I was a lazy teacher then and I am a lazy teacher now. When I love something I just want to hand it over, gift it out. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to explain it. I just want the lucky recipients to see the shine, feel the heat, enjoy the light, savor the flavor. Swallow it whole and take it home with you, that's been my teaching style. It's never worked but it's hard to abandon and so it is difficult even now to say what makes “Sur” such a brilliant, brave, and beautiful story, but it is and I will herewith try to tell why.

The idea, for starters, is delicious. Nine genteel South American ladies tell their friends and families they are going on retreat to a convent for six months, but instead they hire a steamer, sail from Chile, and trek to Antarctica, arriving at the South Pole in 1909, three years before Amundsen. They build an elegant ice cave where they study, cook, play guitar and banjo. They embrace the hard work of sledge hauling and become their own dogs. They live on dried fruits and potatoes that have been freeze dried “according to an ancient Andean Indian method.” They shake their heads at the mess previous explorers have left behind—a “graveyard of seal skins, seal bones, penguin bones and rubbish, presided over by the mad, screaming skua gulls”—and delight in the free beauty of the orca whales, the floating rainbow clouds, multiple suns, and constant white light of the Great Ice Barrier.