Year's Best Fantasy 2

The Finder
Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin [www.ursulakleguin.com] is one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers. She also writes poetry, mainstream fiction, children's books, literary essays, and has recently published Steering the Craft, a good book on how to write narrative fiction and nonfiction, and coedited The Norton Book of Science Fiction, an influential anthology. She has published seventeen novels and eight short story collections to date. She is one of the leading feminists in SF, and in recent years a supporter of the James Tiptree, Jr. Awards, named in honor of Le Guin's peer and friend Alice Bradley Sheldon's SF pseudonym. Le Guin's work is widely read outside the SF field and she is taken seriously as a contemporary writer. In recent years she has published a number of distinguished short stories, and in 2000 not only did she continue to do that, but published her first SF novel in more than ten years, The Telling. Recent publications include two books of Earthsea-- Tales from Earthsea and a novel, The Other Wind (both 2001)--and a collection of science fiction, The Birthday of the World (2002).

"The Finder," which appeared in Le Guin's collection, Tales from Earthsea, is, as Michael Swanwick put it in a review of the book, "a novella that could easily have been stretched out to novel length had the author not had bigger fish to fry." It goes back to a time in Earthsea before the beginning of her earlier novels.