Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books were some of my absolute favorites while I was growing up, but I found when I came back to them a few years ago that they left me relatively cold; the language was more formal than I like in my books these days. Enter these short stories about life on a number of planets in the same universe. This is scifi anthropology at its finest: really interesting speculative concepts explored and taken to their logical extremes, without sacrificing strong characterization or detail. Someone else's review calls them ethnographies, which is very apt.

Each story was better than the last; I loved the planet where women outnumbered men 16 to 1, and the world reminiscent of the Civil War South, and all the others. Best of all was Paradises Lost, about life on a multigeneration spaceship: it's possibly the best piece of spacefaring fiction I've read, which is saying a lot. She also manages to do Weird Alien Sexuality without being either boring or gross, which is impressively rare.

So good. Can't wait to read more of her scifi.