Ursula K Le Guin, sci-fi and fantasy author, dies at 88

[AdamSmith]

Alas. Godspeed.

Ursula K Le Guin, sci-fi and fantasy author, dies at 88

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/23/ursula-k-le-guin-sci-fi-fantasy-author-dies-at-88

 

[AdamSmith]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/14/she-makes-the-ordinary-feel-as-important-as-the-epic-the-gift-of-ursula-le-guin

[AdamSmith]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/david-mitchell-wizard-of-earthsea-tolkien-george-rr-martin

[AdamSmith]

...First, there is the titular wizard himself. Ged is a superb creation, by any measure, and was the Archmage of my bookshelf even before he became the Archmage of Earthsea. He was by far the easiest wizard to relate to, and the least derivative I knew. Not to belittle TH White’s, Tolkien’s or Susan Cooper’s wizards (never belittle a wizard of any stripe), but they are variants on the archetype of Merlin, a Caucasian scholarly aristocrat amongst sorcerers, who appears fully formed and with little room for character development. Where the Merlins reveal themselves layer by layer, Ged grows. Each section of the novel is a stage in “Ged’s Progress”: from a village lout called Duny in Ten Alders, “wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper”, to an impatient apprentice at Re Albi, hungry for power for its own sake, to a brash student on Roke prone to inverted snobbery, to a chastened survivor on Low Torning and Pendor, to a guest in a trap on wintry Osskil, to a fugitive returning to Gont, and finally to a hunter going to his own death. The narrative is powered by Ged’s vices and virtues, and this intertwining of character and plot gives A Wizard of Earthsea an inherent rightness, like a progression of unexpected yet satisfying chord changes. Any reader with experience of adolescence will recognise herself, or himself, in Ged’s portrait, and because we identify with Ged’s failings, we worry for him, can hardly bear to look when disaster hits, and afterwards care deeply about his fate.

Compared to Ged, the novel’s other characters are minor ones in terms of “screen time” and only three appear in more than one episode of Ged’s life: Ogion the Silent, Ged’s master on Gont; Vetch, a friend who sometimes knows Ged better than Ged knows Ged; and Serret, an ill-intentioned sorceress. Yet even the characters that appear most fleetingly seem to be endowed by Le Guin with a fully thought-out inner life, so that when they speak, act and respond, they do so as human beings who have lived lives as full, broken, light, dark, messy and real as Ged’s and ours. Here a fisherman named Pechvarry, whose dying son Ged tried but failed to save, meets the young wizard on his victorious return from Pendor: “‘I did not know you were so mighty, my lord.’ There was fear in that because he had dared make Ged his friend, but there was reproach in it also. Ged had not saved a little child, though he had slain dragons.” How human this brief passage makes Pechvarry, how conflicted, and how visible it makes his scars. Le Guin’s thumbnail sketches contain the psychological depth of oil paintings. The notion that these people on the periphery of Ged’s story aren’t real never crosses my mind. Pechvarry et al. are still out there in their corner of Earthsea, getting on with their lives.

As for the titular wizard, so for his titular world. “The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journey-like and architectural,” Le Guin has written. “Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to. This may be particularly clear in the ‘secondary universe’ of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author.” Earthsea is an archipelago, dense with islands at its centre and sparser at its edges, and after my first reading, it joined Tolkien’s Middle-earth to form an elite fantasy-world super-league of two. (George RR Martin’s Westeros has since made it three, but CS Lewis’s Narnia feels too fey and allegorical to qualify.) Tolkien, whose influence Le Guin acknowledges, casts a long shadow over 20th-century fantasy, and yet (after donning my riot gear) I would argue that Earthsea is a superior creation to Middle-earth. No territory is as fertile as virgin territory, but Tolkien’s sylvan elves, earthy dwarves, cod-Arthurian knights, scrotum-faced orcs and Dark Lords in implausible towers have ossified into cliche.

Earthsea is a fantasy world, and proud of it, mapped by its creator in 1966–7 on a large sheet of butcher’s paper with crayons in a house full of young children. Earthsea has magic, dragons, its own myths and prehistory; but its magic is weighted with metaphysics, its dragons are psychodragons of air and mind, more akin to dangerous Chinese sages than Tolkien’s Smaug; and Earthsea is so human a world – with trade-routes, local politics, class hierarchies, infant mortality, abuse, addiction and slavery – that its fantastical elements feel almost quotidian. Even Earthsea’s islands, with names such as Atnini, Komokome, Selidor and the Isle of the Ear, have a habit of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/23/david-mitchell-wizard-of-earthsea-tolkien-george-rr-martin

[Thumper1]

So, recently I read EarthSea and I just found it boring.  Out of insecurity he made a huge mistake, the mistake plagued him for chapters and years, and then he "magic'd" his way out of the problem.  I really wanted to like it.  I've moderately enjoy her short stories.  I want to like her writing more because I really like her.

[AdamSmith]

On 3/19/2018 at 1:27 PM, Thumper1 said:

So, recently I read EarthSea and I just found it boring.  Out of insecurity he made a huge mistake, the mistake plagued him for chapters and years, and then he "magic'd" his way out of the problem.  I really wanted to like it.  I've moderately enjoy her short stories.  I want to like her writing more because I really like her.

Try The Left Hand of Darkness.

https://www.shmoop.com/left-hand-of-darkness/title.html