According to Ursula Le Guin’s website:

“October 12 and 13, 2007, in New York, American Opera Projects will be doing a staged version with piano of the Prologue and Act I Scene 3 of Stephen Andrew Taylor’s opera Paradises Lost. The entire opera will be performed at the University of Illinois in Spring 2009.

The libretto is by Stephen Andrew Taylor and Kate Gale, with input from me. It is based on my generation-ship novella “Paradises Lost,” in The Birthday of the World Excerpts were performed at the New York City Opera’s festival VOX this spring.”

I read Birthday of the World not that long ago, and remember Paradises Lost as a good short science fiction story, with unlikely and unassuming characters and Le Guin’s usual capacity to make the standard assumptions seem odd by presenting some more honest ones as normal. An opera? Weird.