"David G. Hartwell. - Years Best Fantasy 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

made our final selection. So we repeat, for readers new to this series, the usual disclaimer: This selection
of stories represents the best that was published during the year 2001.

We try to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and
responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges. This is a book about what’s going on now in
fantasy. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in
the year 2001.

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer
Pleasantville, NY

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.




I. In the Dark Time
This is the first page of the Book of the Dark, written some six hundred years ago in Berila, on Enlad:
After Elfarran and Morred perished and the Isle of Soléa sank beneath the sea, the Council of the
Wise governed for the child Serriadh until he took the throne. His reign was bright but brief. The
kings who followed him in Enlad were seven, and their realm increased in peace and wealth. Then
the dragons came to raid among the western lands, and wizards went out in vain against them.
King Akambar moved the court from Berila in Enlad to the City of Havnor, whence he sent out
his fleet against invaders from the Kargad Lands and drove them back into the East. But still they
sent raiding ships even as far as the Inmost Sea. Of the fourteen Kings of Havnor the last was Maharion,
who made peace both with the dragons and the Kargs, but at great cost. And after the Ring of the Runes
was broken, and Erreth-Akbe died with the great dragon, and Maharion the Brave was killed by
treachery, it seemed that no good thing happened in the Archipelago.
Many claimed Maharion’s throne, but none could keep it, and the quarrels of the claimants