“The Day Before the Revolution” – Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

“‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is a science fiction short story by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in the science fiction magazine Galaxy in August 1974, it was anthologized in Le Guin’s 1975 collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and in several subsequent collections. Set in Le Guin’s fictional Hainish universe, the story has strong connections to her novel The Dispossessed (also published in 1974) and is sometimes referred to as a prologue to the longer work, though it was written later. ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ follows Odo, an aging anarchist revolutionary, who lives in a commune founded on her teachings. For a day, she relives memories of her life as an activist while she learns of a revolution in a neighboring country and gets caught up in plans for a general strike the next day. The strike is implied to be the beginning of the revolution that leads to the establishment of the idealized anarchist society based on Odo’s teachings that are depicted in The Dispossessed. Death, grief, and sexuality in older age are major themes explored in ‘The Day Before the Revolution’. The story won the Nebula and Locus awards for Best Short Story in 1975, and was also nominated for a Hugo Award. It had a positive critical reception, with particular praise for its characterization of Odo: a review in Extrapolation called the story a ‘brilliant character sketch of a proud, strong woman hobbled by old age’. Multiple scholars commented that it represented a tonal and thematic shift in Le Guin’s writing and toward non-linear narrative structures and works infused with feminism. … Le Guin uses vivid imagery to convey the experience of being elderly, such as when, on waking, Odo examines her aged feet and struggles with the deterioration her body has experienced as the result of a stroke. Her activities are interspersed with recollections of her past: According to Hanson, Odo’s memory drives the narrative of the short story. Focusing on Odo’s old age, rather than her period as an active revolutionary, Le Guin examines the essential motivations people experience besides idealism, according to Slusser. Odo acknowledges to herself that she has been motivated by sex and vanity, and also the happiness she had and then lost. In scholar Jane Donawerth’s view, Le Guin uses Odo’s aging to examine her makeup as a revolutionary. Various elements of her life are undone over time, as her physical deterioration prevents her from working and her lover’s death destroys her love life. …”
W – “The Day Before the Revolution”
A Moment in a Life: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution”
[PDF] “The Day Before the Revolution”