Title The Found and the Lost Series --- Author Ursula K. Le Guin Cover Art Jun Yu Publisher Saga Press - 2016 First Printing Saga Press - 2016 Category Anthology Warnings None Main Characters See below Main Elements See below

• "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow"
• "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight"
• "Hernes"
• "The Matter of Seggri"
• "Another Story of a Fisherman of the Inland Sea"
• "Forgiveness Day"
• "A Man of the People"
• "A Woman's Liberation"
• "Old Music and the Slave Women"
• "The Finder"
• "On the Hight Marsh"
• "Dragonfly"
• "Paradises Lost"

For the first time in her career, the legendary Ursuala K. Le Guin has collected her iconic longer works into one volume. Ranging from 1971's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" to 2002's "Paradises Lost," these thirteen pieces are a retrospective of forty-one years of work. Of the collection, Le Guin says, "I think the way these stories wander around the universe, leaping from hither to yon, is an honest reflection of what my writing has always done, refusing to stay in any place or box or genre."

Ursula K. Le Guin passed away this year, a loss of one of science fiction and fantasy greats, one of the earlier women to earn renoun in that field. But her works will live on, and what better time to read her collected novellas.

The anthology started off great, with a return to the world (or more accurately, the univers) of The Dispossessed which I had recently read. Where space travel appears to take little time for the traveller, centuries still pass back home, so those that go on exploratory missions tend to be a little, well, crazy. Why else would you be willing to travel for a few years only to come home to find everything you remember is gone? So take 10 rather unstable characters and send them to a planet that is more than it appears and instead of have an adventure outside oneself, one is forced to look inwards.

In the second story, aside from being disappointed that the main character didn't turn out to be literally a buffalo gal, was also mind absorbing. A girl in a plane crash finds herself in a land that is, but kind of isn't part of the world she is familiar with. Coyote finds her and takes her under her, well, paw. We also meet other beings such as Horse or Chipmunk, each with their own personality traits and quirks, familiar to us as the animals they represent, but at the same time we don't quite know what they are. Are they gods? Spirits? Creations of a young girl's imagination? A tale about looking at the world in different ways, looking past what you see to what is really there.

Then came the third story...there is no fantasy aspect at all, it's an inter-generational tale told from the point of view of various women in the family. Some segments are little more than bizarre stream of conciousnesses. It was more difficult to read and keep track of (took me a few segements to figure out it was mother/daughter not sisters or unrelated friends). It was interesting on some level but ultimately I really had to struggle to finish reading it, and it wasn't the lack of fantasy that made it a bit of a chore to read.

I enjoyed the two that followed that since they were all in the same universe as the first story. It is interesting how Le Guin sets up a society bound by certain rules and then explores the consequences of it. In one of them, women are more common than men twelve-to-one. In the second, there are complex rules defining who you can marry, and people marry in groups of four with two men and two women and bisexuality is common. In all cases being exposed to the envoys from the Ekumen they are all forced to question their world once exposed to other ways of thinking. They are all in some ways thought experiments, what science fiction should really be rather than simple battles in space.

Then the next four, still within the Hain universe, all focus on a slave world. We see the same events from different perspectives and from different periods of time, as the slaves revolt, only to settle into a new norm that still left women as badly off as when they started. Very interesting but at the same time it got very depresssing. I might have enjoyed these stories more over a period of time, but after a few hundred pages of the worst of humanity and a few glimpses of hope, I began to cringe at the thought of reading the next one.

Fortunately after these four, it was three stories set in Le Guin's famous Earthsea world. I had read all three before, when I read the Earthsea books themselves, and it was wonderful to return to that magical land of wizards and dragons, where magic comes at a price and the villains tend to get what they deserve since the balance of the world cannot be denied. The first two stories are safe for anyone new to Earthsea to read, but Dragonfly depends heavily on having read the books as well as giving away major spoilers!

Finally Paradises Lost, which takes place on a generational ship, humans have done great damage to the Earth have sent off 4000 settlers to find a new world, something that will take 6 generations to complete. We are now in the 5th generation, where memories of Earth are long gone, and the people living now know nothing other than the world within the confines of the ship. New religions arise, new cultures, and of course the anticipation of what the new world will be like, which this 5th generation might just barely live to see.

As anthologies goes, aside from Hernes, it was an extremely strong and solid collection, a pleasure to read. Le Guin was indeed a sorceress with words.