The Found and the Lost

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

someone