4 ms·

Srsly. Earthsea is the most potent of all her work.

tediousdemise 6y ago
Agreed. The Earthsea Cycle is one of the greatest and most influential fantasy sagas of all time, right up there next to LotR. It pioneered the wizarding school trope, later popularized by Harry Potter, as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon. A Wizard of Earthsea is my all time favorite book.
- onei 6y ago
  I read a Wizard of Earthsea as a kid, and looking back 2 things stood out to me. First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people, although I recall some TV/film adaptions were not particularly faithful to that much to Le Guin's disappointment. The other is a phrase that I still use to this day: "tired is stupid". Particularly when I've been debugging something for many hours, late into the evening, I find that some rest and coming back to it later is almost always the solution to my problem. Turns out PEBKAC does not just apply to lusers.
  - vmilner 6y ago
    The notable white people are the Kargish bad guys.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      True, but their race is barely even noticeable in the book, and they only even appear in maybe the first 20 pages. The book is really not about race, and racial issues are pretty much non-existent in the book.
      - vmilner 6y ago
        Le Guin herself said she didn't make a big thing of it, but that the traditional genre skin-colour stereotypes are deliberately flipped. I certainly didn't notice until it was pointed out to me.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Le Guin really used it as a moment to drive home her views on diversity in "A Whitewashed Earthsea - How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books" here [1] (I've seen the Earthsea adaptation, and while I'm not as critical about it as she is, it really is a very different story, and best watched as a story inspired by Earthsea). She's always been very vocal about this aspect, and how the diversity in her work was very deliberate and "snuck past" publishers and readers defences (at the time first published) by first mentioning it a bit in, and how publishers and cover artists at various point tried making the characters white: > My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future? [1] https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv-earthsea.html https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv...
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people" I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11, and didn't even notice the race of the characters. I don't think much of it is made in the book. It's just a passing description. Much, much later, as an adult I heard someone mention it, and I went back and checked and sure enough they were right. But the characters' race had absolutely nothing to do with why I loved the book. The characters could have been blue, or purple, or glowing orange for all I cared. The book was not about that.
    - swayvil 6y ago
      Same here. Race seems such a small subject, relatively speaking.
- SeanLuke 6y ago
  > as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon. Er... also was a pretty important influence on one of the most important cyberpunk works of all time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "right up there next to LotR" I absolutely hated LotR and everything else from Tolkien that I've read. To me The Wizard of Earthsea is infinitely better, and Tolkien is not even in the same league as Le Guin.
  - forgotpwd16 6y ago
    Why is that? Basically why you dislike Tolkien, as LotR and TWoE have different flavor so liking one over the other isn't strange.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      It just always seemed super boring, generic, and unimaginative. The hobbits were also annoying for their one-dimensional, unimaginative, middle-class goodness. Yes, I know that one of the reason Tolkien's work seems so cliche today is that so much has been influenced by it. Maybe if I'd read it in the 40's or 50's I would have been more impressed, but as I read it in the 80's, by then it already seemed way too generic. By the way, I am a fan of much older literature than Tolkien, and consider the works that Tolkien himself was probably inspired by to be much more lively, authentic, imaginative, and well written than anything Tolkien himself ever wrote. Things like, say, Apulius' The Golden Ass, a Roman fantasy written in 1 AD. Or virtually any of ETA Hoffmann's work -- written in the 1700's. Or Poe (1800's), or Blackwood (early 1900's), or the French Decadents (1890's), etc.. Or the Mahabarate (400 BC or even earlier). Or The Count of Monte Cristo (1800's). Etc, etc, etc.. These works were all far more complex, three-dimensional, interesting, and insightful than the "good guys team up to defeat the big baddie" that LoTR brought.. not that that in itself had to doom Tolkien's work, if he had any profound insight in to the world or the human condition, or maybe had some interesting characters, but he had none. To me Tolkien has always just seemed as nothing more than a mediocre writer who'd have been long forgotten if there was any justice in world of literature, but instead he's gotten massively overrated.
      - tomgp 6y ago
        You should check out Le Guin’s appreciation of LOTR in ‘a wave in the mind’. Both Le Guin (esp Earthsea) and Tolkien really work well being read aloud and reading her breakdown of the rhythms of the opening sections of LOTR was a revelation to me.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
weyj4 6y ago
Well said, but your word choice ("potent") reminded me of this great essay of hers: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the... tl;dr she's making a feminist argument that a lot of our stories (Joseph Campbell, monomyth, etc) involve this phallic potency of going out into the world with our pointy sticks and poking wooly mammoths or whatever. she thinks maybe instead of pointy sticks we could think about this carrier bag model. but I can't figure out what she really means in practice, because surely she wants her politically-oriented work to be...potent? if her stories aren't effectively pointy sticks then what should they be? anyway I haven't even read Earthsea so I should probably shut up and go do that, but if anybody figures this paradox out lmk.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Great link, thank you. She really is an interesting thinker, and her stories have a lot to tell us. Earthsea is worth reading. Re potency, I think she’s saying it is more common, if less glamorous, to receive and collect than to fight and conquer. Perhaps she chooses to collect and share stories and questions rather than tell you what to do. That is why her tales can seem slow to some - there is a lot under the surface, a lot of meaning nameless or unsaid. I think of her stories more as questions than answers.
- fractallyte 6y ago
  Thank you for that link! Now I'm wondering what is the story of the Heroine with a Thousand Faces? Where is the other half of human (pre)history?

Agreed. The Earthsea Cycle is one of the greatest and most influential fantasy sagas of all time, right up there next to LotR. It pioneered the wizarding school trope, later popularized by Harry Potter, as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon. A Wizard of Earthsea is my all time favorite book.

onei 6y ago
I read a Wizard of Earthsea as a kid, and looking back 2 things stood out to me. First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people, although I recall some TV/film adaptions were not particularly faithful to that much to Le Guin's disappointment. The other is a phrase that I still use to this day: "tired is stupid". Particularly when I've been debugging something for many hours, late into the evening, I find that some rest and coming back to it later is almost always the solution to my problem. Turns out PEBKAC does not just apply to lusers.
- vmilner 6y ago
  The notable white people are the Kargish bad guys.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    True, but their race is barely even noticeable in the book, and they only even appear in maybe the first 20 pages. The book is really not about race, and racial issues are pretty much non-existent in the book.
    - vmilner 6y ago
      Le Guin herself said she didn't make a big thing of it, but that the traditional genre skin-colour stereotypes are deliberately flipped. I certainly didn't notice until it was pointed out to me.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Le Guin really used it as a moment to drive home her views on diversity in "A Whitewashed Earthsea - How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books" here [1] (I've seen the Earthsea adaptation, and while I'm not as critical about it as she is, it really is a very different story, and best watched as a story inspired by Earthsea). She's always been very vocal about this aspect, and how the diversity in her work was very deliberate and "snuck past" publishers and readers defences (at the time first published) by first mentioning it a bit in, and how publishers and cover artists at various point tried making the characters white: > My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future? [1] https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv-earthsea.html https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv...
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people" I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11, and didn't even notice the race of the characters. I don't think much of it is made in the book. It's just a passing description. Much, much later, as an adult I heard someone mention it, and I went back and checked and sure enough they were right. But the characters' race had absolutely nothing to do with why I loved the book. The characters could have been blue, or purple, or glowing orange for all I cared. The book was not about that.
  - swayvil 6y ago
    Same here. Race seems such a small subject, relatively speaking.
SeanLuke 6y ago
> as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon. Er... also was a pretty important influence on one of the most important cyberpunk works of all time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
pmoriarty 6y ago
"right up there next to LotR" I absolutely hated LotR and everything else from Tolkien that I've read. To me The Wizard of Earthsea is infinitely better, and Tolkien is not even in the same league as Le Guin.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  Why is that? Basically why you dislike Tolkien, as LotR and TWoE have different flavor so liking one over the other isn't strange.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    It just always seemed super boring, generic, and unimaginative. The hobbits were also annoying for their one-dimensional, unimaginative, middle-class goodness. Yes, I know that one of the reason Tolkien's work seems so cliche today is that so much has been influenced by it. Maybe if I'd read it in the 40's or 50's I would have been more impressed, but as I read it in the 80's, by then it already seemed way too generic. By the way, I am a fan of much older literature than Tolkien, and consider the works that Tolkien himself was probably inspired by to be much more lively, authentic, imaginative, and well written than anything Tolkien himself ever wrote. Things like, say, Apulius' The Golden Ass, a Roman fantasy written in 1 AD. Or virtually any of ETA Hoffmann's work -- written in the 1700's. Or Poe (1800's), or Blackwood (early 1900's), or the French Decadents (1890's), etc.. Or the Mahabarate (400 BC or even earlier). Or The Count of Monte Cristo (1800's). Etc, etc, etc.. These works were all far more complex, three-dimensional, interesting, and insightful than the "good guys team up to defeat the big baddie" that LoTR brought.. not that that in itself had to doom Tolkien's work, if he had any profound insight in to the world or the human condition, or maybe had some interesting characters, but he had none. To me Tolkien has always just seemed as nothing more than a mediocre writer who'd have been long forgotten if there was any justice in world of literature, but instead he's gotten massively overrated.
    - tomgp 6y ago
      You should check out Le Guin’s appreciation of LOTR in ‘a wave in the mind’. Both Le Guin (esp Earthsea) and Tolkien really work well being read aloud and reading her breakdown of the rhythms of the opening sections of LOTR was a revelation to me.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

weyj4 6y ago

Well said, but your word choice ("potent") reminded me of this great essay of hers: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the... tl;dr she's making a feminist argument that a lot of our stories (Joseph Campbell, monomyth, etc) involve this phallic potency of going out into the world with our pointy sticks and poking wooly mammoths or whatever. she thinks maybe instead of pointy sticks we could think about this carrier bag model. but I can't figure out what she really means in practice, because surely she wants her politically-oriented work to be...potent? if her stories aren't effectively pointy sticks then what should they be? anyway I haven't even read Earthsea so I should probably shut up and go do that, but if anybody figures this paradox out lmk.

grey-area 6y ago
Great link, thank you. She really is an interesting thinker, and her stories have a lot to tell us. Earthsea is worth reading. Re potency, I think she’s saying it is more common, if less glamorous, to receive and collect than to fight and conquer. Perhaps she chooses to collect and share stories and questions rather than tell you what to do. That is why her tales can seem slow to some - there is a lot under the surface, a lot of meaning nameless or unsaid. I think of her stories more as questions than answers.
fractallyte 6y ago
Thank you for that link! Now I'm wondering what is the story of the Heroine with a Thousand Faces? Where is the other half of human (pre)history?