The Found and the Lost

Without being in my excellent Great Books book club, I don't think I would have necessity picked this rather large collection of novellas up. Luckily, outside of the three Earthsea titles I chose not to read (based on the authors suggestion of the order to read the Earthsea cycle), I really enjoyed the stories and artistry of Ursula K Le Guin.

More to come including discussion questions I wrote for our meeting.

4 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
A collection of Ursula Le Guin's novellas.

Review
Subtitled The Collected Novellas, I had read several of these before in other settings. They can be grouped into three fairly clear categories:

• Hainish – light SF stories dealing with Le Guin's Hainish universe, and here particularly with Hain itself and two applicants to the Ekumen – Werel and Yeowe, both slave-based societies proceeding at different paces. Le Guin looks at the situation from pretty much every angle, trying to see it reasonably fairly from a number of perspectives. I don't recall other stories set on Hain itself, so that was interesting. The concept and series of stories works well, but feels relatively dry.


• Earthsea – a handful of stories exploring or filling in gaps in the Earthsea canon, such as how Roke was founded and what happened to it after the Earthsea books.


• General – these are, broadly, two initial stories – one SF and one fantasy, “Buffalo Girls Won't You Come Out Tonight”. I found the inclusion of that latter odd, since it's so much better known than the rest. The other story in this category is the final one, an SF story about an arkship (with a nice tip of the hat to Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky). This story felt a little more like a fully sketch of a novel than as an intended novella, if only because there are initially so very many section breaks.

The Left Hand of Darkness

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I savored this collection and each story in it. I re-read many of them and will pick them up again when I need to be reconnected to beauty, mystery, magic, or love. This collection reignited a childhood love of fantasy and sci-fi.

Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea, The Finder, A Man of the People, Vaster than Empires but More Slow, and Buffalo Gals, Wont You Come Out Tonight, took me to new worlds and at times took my breath away. These ones all made me cry.

The Matter of Seggri, Forgiveness Day, A Woman's Liberation, and Paradises Lost transported me and the troubling questions those worlds raised remained in my thoughts for days after reading.

Dragonfly, and it's illustration of authentic magic and power, stirred something deep within me.

I love almost everything LeGuin every wrote, and this book is full of things I fully love. Especially “Paradises Lost,” which I had never read before. Four thousand people on a ship, making a six generation journey to a possibly habitable planet. One group, the “Angels,” get all religiousy and doesn't belief in the mission or the world outside the ship. All of existence is just being on the ship, doing what they are doing, seeking “bliss.” The rest of the folk are more sane than that. But what struck me as interesting is how the “religious” group more accurately mirror real world materialists who do not believe in anything outside the closed system of the material world, while the group that might be called the nonreligious are aware that their existence on the ship has its meaning from a larger unseen context that includes before the mission, after the mission, and outside the ship on a planet no one has ever seen.

I doubt that this is what LeGuin intended, but who cares? The text now exists apart from her, and that is how I read it. She frequently upends our expectations, so this flip is perfectly normal for her.