Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018)

A Wizard of Earthsea was an early venture into "YA Fantasy" publishing, and it set much of the pattern for the wizard bildungsroman that later made the fortune of the world's richest woman. More than half a century after its original publication, it holds up very well. It is certainly a better book than its more "successful" imitators. I first read it when I was less than ten years old, and I had forgotten many of the details and much of the structure--despite in the interim having sampled show more some of the attempts to adapt it to the screen.

While the publishing press and the author herself have been quick to compare this high fantasy Earthsea to Tolkien's Middle Earth, I found the style far more reminiscent of Lord Dunsany, an author praised elsewhere by Le Guin with language similar to her remarks in the 2012 afterword to Wizard. There she mentions other fantasy literature that "mostly lurked in small secondhand bookshops smelling of cats and mildew" (262). To the extent that this book is an "epic" fantasy, it is more Odyssey than Illiad, deliberately spurning the matter of great wars and killer heroes.

As an orientation to esoteric wisdom, Le Guin's work far exceeds more recent tales of "wizard school." The teachings of Lao Tzu that she imbibed at her father's knee are evident in the magic of Earthsea. She has one clinker in her diction, where she misuses "adept" to mean "neophyte" (26). That lexical slip is far outweighed by such musings as this:

"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do ..." (99, italics and ellipsis in original)

Le Guin quietly but consciously twitted racial preconceptions of US readers when writing this book, but she admittedly conformed to received gender types for fantasy literature (263). As a result, the business with Serret reflects Aleister Crowley's observation that "the neophyte is nearly always tempted by a woman."

My reread of this novel was undertaken with a view to reading the entire Earthsea cycle of six volumes. Only the first three of these had existed for my childhood reading. As a reading project, then, it shares elements of my mature returns to Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising books (a series about magic enjoyed in my childhood) and Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle (a reread in order to approach the volumes subsequently published). I'm only encouraged by this first book. show less

ok like, i know i kinda related to the presence of a caste of eunuchs in the previous book in ways that probably weren’t intentional on the author’s part and i don’t want to make this a pattern or anything but like… arren.

arren.

you know that genre of youtube videos that are just titled like “[character] being relatable for [x] minutes”? well, this babygirlified subby mess of a boy (who is destined to become king of all the isles i guess???) is variously described as “a gentle show more messenger for bad news” & “that girlish lad of yours”??? the latter comes when a bunch of patrons in a tavern ask ged if arren can sing, and after arren obliges they remark, “that’s a queer music.” and like, YEAH my dudes??? you asked a fucking subby femboy to sing??? if the music weren’t queer i would worry that something was wrong??? (yes, they’re not using “queer” in that context, but shut up, let me have this.)

anyway, this “girlish lad” meets his hero and IMMEDIATELY tries to become his sub ("as he had made his act of submission he forgot himself") and when fleeing the scene of that embarrassment turns into a boy disaster lesbian (“forgetting courtly farewells he hurried to the doorway, awkward, radiant, obedient.”) he later gets captured by slavers & chained up on a ship, there’s a curious comment about his soul not rebelling against the notion of slavery??? but anyway, ged rescues him which is pretty badass, and he later dreams about still being held captive. we’re meant to understand through context clues that these dreams are scary & unpleasant, but he never EXPLICITLY SAYS they are?

again, please don’t take this too seriously, i’m taking a character who was definitely intentionally written in some ways that appeal to me and reading WAY TOO MUCH INTO other things that were clearly NOT intended, but yeah i’m having a lot of fun with this and i love this character now, thank you for your time i will not be taking any questions.

so yeah, that was a big part of my enjoyment of the book, no lie, but like let’s just pivot i guess to the actual main action of the book and say that holy shit, this is one of the most original fantasy novels i’ve ever read??? we begin with arren bringing ged & the masters of roke the terrifying news that the power of magic has begun to fade from the outlying lands of earthsea. it turns out that they’ve been getting similar reports from other outlying lands, and arren’s report is sort of the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because whatever is happening is spreading. the archmage decides that he’s going to investigate this himself, and the only companion he’ll bring with him on this dangerous quest is arren himself.

they have some adventures while they’re investigating this that i already relayed some of, but the deeper they probe into what’s going on the scarier it gets? they find lands where not just magic, but all arts have begun to fade, as people grow obsessed with the promise of immortality promised to them by what we increasingly realize is a sorcerer who rivals archmage ged’s power. and like, it starts to sound like we’re basically dealing with a situation where ged is the most powerful servant of life & this other guy is the most powerful servant of death, and in a way that is kind of exactly what’s happening? but that makes it sound really simple & boring, which, nah! like, there’s just so much interesting characterization & worldbuilding around this, like, this is ursula k. motherfucking le guin we’re talking about, y’all! i don’t know that she really knows how to do “simple & boring.”

things escalate to the point where we find out that this evil power has even caused dragons to lose the power of speech??? arren & ged are tested in ways that are terrifyingly existential, and almost lose themselves several times, but it’s that thing where seeing these characters at their worst & most vulnerable actually helps emphasize how fucking strong they both are when they come out the other side of it still themselves?

this is exactly the same kind of “huge (in a good way), but also small (in a good way)” story le guin told in the a wizard of earthsea, and also tombs of atuan even though that one was harder for me to get into. the world faces existential threats that are mirrored in the personal threats the characters themselves grapple with, and the story is made so rich & meaningful because of this.

i’m looking forward to getting to the next book, because i know le guin is very frustrated with how male-dominated her first trilogy was, and the farthest shore is actually pretty easily the worst offender in this regard? but like, please please please don’t skip it as a result if you’re remotely interested in these books, because there’s so much good stuff in here. i’m just saying, i’m excited to get to the books where le guin feels like she rectified some of the issues she had with the original trilogy. show less

I can't think of an author whose stories generate such sharply contrasting reactions in me as Le Guin. Her stories either click solidly or leave me entirely cold. This volume collects 17 stories from her first (roughly) decade of work, originally published between 1962 and 1974, and it contains some of both.

Let's start with the high points. "Nine Lives" and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" are, as Le Guin notes in her introductions to the stories, as close as she comes to traditional SF show more adventure stories; each is the story of a small spaceship crew finding something unexpected on a distant planet. But even as she nears the traditional, Le Guin's angle of approach is distinctive; she's less interested in space battles and aliens than she is in psychology and the internal lives/conflicts of her characters.

And the story that is (of what I've read) by far my favorite of her work, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," is by some definitions barely even a story. There's no plot to speak of; you can't really summarize the piece without simply reiterating it in full. There's only one distinct character, and that character is more a symbol than a person. It's a piece about mood-setting and effect, more of a philosophical hypothetical than anything. In fact, in this volume, it carries the subtitle "Variations on a theme by William James," which I don't remember seeing when I've come across the story before. And yet, for all the "barely a story"-ness of it, it is an unforgettable piece of writing that shifts the way you see the world.

But when Le Guin doesn't click for me, which is most of the time, getting through her stories is like an uphill slog through molasses. There's a chilly intellectual detachment that puts me off, and let's face it, "chilly intellectual detachment" is pretty much my brand, so if it's too much for ME? (And yes, ChillIntDet is a large part of "Omelas;" if I could explain why it works so perfectly there and falls so flat everywhere else, they'd be paying me the big bucks to write literary criticism.)

She leans, I think, too heavily to the literary end of the spectrum to hold much interest for me. Is there a contradiction between that and my recent gushing over the literary innovations of Harlan Ellison? Perhaps, but I think the difference is that in Ellison, the style enhances and is subordinate to the stories, which are strong enough to stand up to the stylistic hyperactivity; in Le Guin, the stories are more fragile to begin with, and they disappear behind the wall of ice surrounding them.

Your mileage, of course, may vary, and Le Guin is a revered figure, one of the few SF authors to get her own volumes in the Library of America series. There are another 20-ish Le Guin stories waiting for me on my slow survey of award-nominated short SF, but I will take them one by one, as they pop up in various "year's best" volumes. Pushing my way through another volume of nothing but Le Guin stories would be more effort than I could take. show less

The Earthsea Trilogy (before it became the Earthsea Cycle) cemented its reputation and its literary standing with this fraught and eerie quest in search of a man who has returned from death and therefore destroyed all meaning in life magic is draining from the world, but not just magic; all craft and drive, ambition and openness. Archmage Ged and a young prince Arren voyage across the archipelago to find a place from which there is no returning.
If the trilogy has been about anything, it has show more been about growth to maturity, of mastering oneself and the nature of responsibility. The Farthest Shore is a return of the king narrative, ultimately, where the greatest good that can happen to Earthsea is for a king to assume the throne. I suspect we're in allegorical territory here, with Earthsea's fairy tale roots on show, where a person can only truly be said to rule oneself when one has confronted death and accepted it and found greater joy and meaning in life having done so. Or maybe LeGuin's a monarchist.
I suppose on reflection that this makes it seem worthy and dry, a heavy spiritual message for a piece of children's fantasy, rest assured this is a beautifully written, keenly observed, wise, harrowing, terrifying and ultimately quietly uplifting book. It has dragons, too. show less