The (also awesome) writer Jo Walton wrote a great celebration of Ursula Le Guin's life. She wrote in part:
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field…
Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
I enjoyed this review and thought the point about "whiplash" with Tehanu was well observed.
I read Tehanu roughly when it came out, so I'd have been about 18, having read the others much earlier. I was annoyed and disliked it due to the tonal change.
I re-read it again a year or so ago along with the short stories and The Other Wind. I loved it. Nothing had changed - except me, of course.
same, I used to skip tehanu when I reread the series, but find it an excellent book today. it also helps that it's now the start of a second trilogy, so the shift from the first trilogy isn't really an issue. (I think younger me would have enjoyed tehanu greatly as a standalone book, it just wasn't the conclusion to the earthsea trilogy I wanted)
The best thing about this illustrated edition is Le Guin's own comments written in the past few years reflecting on these books.
Here's the last paragraph on her comments on Tombs of Atuan. (Um, spoilers, I guess.)
> Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.
I have the omnibus edition that they have in this review. It is a gorgeous book, although still likely not as lovely as Folio Society's https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/books-of-earthsea.html. The paper is very white, with the reading light behind it is almost a bit too white/reflective. But great in ambient light. Charles Vess' illustrations are amazing, although there are just too few of them. I got spoiled at his glorious and PLENTIFUL work on Sandman and Stardust. Nevertheless, excellent packaging for incredible series of stories.
As a kid, I always thought the “coding language” of magic in these books was clever. If you know the secret magical name of something, then you can speak to it in the secret magical language, and it will obey you. This had built-in scaling limits, for example, if you wanted to conjure a tidal wave, then you would need to know the names of millions of droplets of water, which naturally means a tidal wave spell is going to be very long winded and difficult to cast.
I'm apparently the only person who thought these books were terrible. I barely made it through Wizard of Earthsea. The story meandered and never seemed to go anywhere, the names were unpronounceable and unmemorable, and the ending dragged on and on.
You're not the only one. I think I may have read no more than a dozen pages before being bored silly. By way of contrast, I've just finished "Gravity's Rainbow".
I have that omnibus edition. Bought it for my then newborn daughter when it came out (and have them all in eBook format as well), but have yet to convince her to read it, or The Hobbit.
It is available as an eBook in the UK for a ridiculously cheap £5.99.
Read The Hobbit to her, a bit at each bedtime. Make-up funny voices for the characters. My oldest son is now 24 and it's one of his fav memories just the both of us.
We read hobbit and LOTR to our children while they were in kindergarden. Took 5 months. These are most LOVELY memories for both us and them. Unfortunately, not every child these days can focus on a book when they have so many screens out there beckoning them, and this way we were able to share our love of that story with them.
one of my favourite things about the first earthsea book in particular is that it is a remarkably thin book with the feel of a much larger novel. I have never seen that particular feat managed better - the book is not particularly dense in the hard-to-read sense but she makes every word count and builds up an extremely rich world in a short novel.
You're not alone. Ursula K. Le Guin hated the TV series, not least the casting of white actors for Ged, who is clearly described as dark-skinned in the books.
I haven’t finished it yet but I like it ok as a newcomer to Earthsea. I certainly don’t think it was bad enough for his Dad to walk out of the theater at the premiere.
Silicon Valley loves to mine the fantasy and science fiction genre for their company names. At least the ansible is a generally neutral device (with some crummy side effects, as discussed in Le Guin stories) whereas naming something "Palantir" is to miss the whole damn point.
Palantir is an excellent, AMAZING name for that company. It screams "we spy on people around the world: their pasts, their present, their very thoughts. We serve corrupt powers that pretend to be pure and good. We are a tool to enable the strong to dominate the weak. The data we produce will be misinterpreted to disastrous results."
I dont know if Thiel intended to convey that, but it's exactly the same name that I would've picked for that company.
not just the software, it caught on as a reasonably standard term for an instantaneous communication device, and a bunch of other SF works used it in tribute to le guin
I was really excited for the release of that omnibus, I remember actually marking it on my calendar lmao and then I physically handled it and realized it was too big to actually hold and read.
I checked it out from the library instead and spent a day leafing through it admiring the illustrations and reading some of the additional stories and afterwords that I hadn't seen before
The last Earthsea book change its world in a way which is unique (or at least rare), even in fantasy series. I won’t say it here for spoiler reasons, but it’s really quite wonderful. The whole series is absolutely worth reading.
It was the first instance of an author asking the question, "Can fantasy be written which is not a direct copying of _The Lord of the Rings_?"
and it is interesting to contrast it with texts such as _The Broken Sword_ by Poul Anderson (first published the same year as _The Fellowship of the Ring_) and _The Charwoman's Shadow_ by Lord Dunsany (published nearly 3 decades earlier).
The Broken Sword branches off in the other direction, I would say. Not in the action aspect, but in its overall worldview.
LoTR is subtly Christian in its themes of hope and redemption. The Broken Sword fits into the Nordic pagan view of the world, where heroes and villains are doomed alike.
The (also awesome) writer Jo Walton wrote a great celebration of Ursula Le Guin's life. She wrote in part:
She widened the space of science fiction with what she wrote. She got in there with a crowbar and expanded the field and made it a better field… Le Guin expanded the possibilities for all of us, and then she kept on doing that. She didn’t repeat herself. She kept doing new things. She was so good. I don’t know if I can possibly express how good she was.
https://reactormag.com/bright-the-hawks-flight-in-the-empty-...
I enjoyed this review and thought the point about "whiplash" with Tehanu was well observed.
I read Tehanu roughly when it came out, so I'd have been about 18, having read the others much earlier. I was annoyed and disliked it due to the tonal change.
I re-read it again a year or so ago along with the short stories and The Other Wind. I loved it. Nothing had changed - except me, of course.
same, I used to skip tehanu when I reread the series, but find it an excellent book today. it also helps that it's now the start of a second trilogy, so the shift from the first trilogy isn't really an issue. (I think younger me would have enjoyed tehanu greatly as a standalone book, it just wasn't the conclusion to the earthsea trilogy I wanted)
The best thing about this illustrated edition is Le Guin's own comments written in the past few years reflecting on these books.
Here's the last paragraph on her comments on Tombs of Atuan. (Um, spoilers, I guess.)
> Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.
I have the omnibus edition that they have in this review. It is a gorgeous book, although still likely not as lovely as Folio Society's https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/books-of-earthsea.html. The paper is very white, with the reading light behind it is almost a bit too white/reflective. But great in ambient light. Charles Vess' illustrations are amazing, although there are just too few of them. I got spoiled at his glorious and PLENTIFUL work on Sandman and Stardust. Nevertheless, excellent packaging for incredible series of stories.
As a kid, I always thought the “coding language” of magic in these books was clever. If you know the secret magical name of something, then you can speak to it in the secret magical language, and it will obey you. This had built-in scaling limits, for example, if you wanted to conjure a tidal wave, then you would need to know the names of millions of droplets of water, which naturally means a tidal wave spell is going to be very long winded and difficult to cast.
I'm apparently the only person who thought these books were terrible. I barely made it through Wizard of Earthsea. The story meandered and never seemed to go anywhere, the names were unpronounceable and unmemorable, and the ending dragged on and on.
> the names were unpronounceable
Each to their own, but this seems an odd criticism; do you have an example of a name that struck you as such in it?
Not him or her, but I'm guessing Kurremkarmerruk...
You're not the only one. I think I may have read no more than a dozen pages before being bored silly. By way of contrast, I've just finished "Gravity's Rainbow".
I thought they were terrible too. I don't have much memory of specifics, as I read it a very long time ago.
I ended up using the audible as asmr to help me fall sleep...
[dead]
I have that omnibus edition. Bought it for my then newborn daughter when it came out (and have them all in eBook format as well), but have yet to convince her to read it, or The Hobbit.
It is available as an eBook in the UK for a ridiculously cheap £5.99.
https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-books-of-earthsea-the-co...
https://www.gollancz.co.uk/news/2018/10/17/the-books-of-eart...
Read The Hobbit to her, a bit at each bedtime. Make-up funny voices for the characters. My oldest son is now 24 and it's one of his fav memories just the both of us.
We read hobbit and LOTR to our children while they were in kindergarden. Took 5 months. These are most LOVELY memories for both us and them. Unfortunately, not every child these days can focus on a book when they have so many screens out there beckoning them, and this way we were able to share our love of that story with them.
one of my favourite things about the first earthsea book in particular is that it is a remarkably thin book with the feel of a much larger novel. I have never seen that particular feat managed better - the book is not particularly dense in the hard-to-read sense but she makes every word count and builds up an extremely rich world in a short novel.
Loved these books.
Did not love the television mini-series.
I may just get that book.
I have the Frankenstein book, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Bernie_Wrightson_s_Fran...
You're not alone. Ursula K. Le Guin hated the TV series, not least the casting of white actors for Ged, who is clearly described as dark-skinned in the books.
Do you like the animated one by Miyazaki’s son?
That's more "inspired by" rather than "based on" the novels, though.
Never saw that one.
I haven’t finished it yet but I like it ok as a newcomer to Earthsea. I certainly don’t think it was bad enough for his Dad to walk out of the theater at the premiere.
Fun fact: she coined the word Ansible. I had no idea until reading one of her books recently and thinking "Ansible? Like the software?"
I always thought it was Card who invented it for Ender's Game. (He borrowed it)
Thanks for the fun fact!
No he cribbed that from the Hainish Cycle and kept the mechanism. Just read that last summer and was whaaaaat.
Silicon Valley loves to mine the fantasy and science fiction genre for their company names. At least the ansible is a generally neutral device (with some crummy side effects, as discussed in Le Guin stories) whereas naming something "Palantir" is to miss the whole damn point.
Palantir is an excellent, AMAZING name for that company. It screams "we spy on people around the world: their pasts, their present, their very thoughts. We serve corrupt powers that pretend to be pure and good. We are a tool to enable the strong to dominate the weak. The data we produce will be misinterpreted to disastrous results."
I dont know if Thiel intended to convey that, but it's exactly the same name that I would've picked for that company.
"Hans... are we the baddies?"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
One day soon we will lose our fucking minds and start attacking former friends and allies.
Palantir: peer into it hard enough, and the Dark Lord will look back at you.
Yeah, it fits.
"Far-seeing, but dangerously corrupted" fits either Palantir quite well.
not just the software, it caught on as a reasonably standard term for an instantaneous communication device, and a bunch of other SF works used it in tribute to le guin
I was really excited for the release of that omnibus, I remember actually marking it on my calendar lmao and then I physically handled it and realized it was too big to actually hold and read.
I checked it out from the library instead and spent a day leafing through it admiring the illustrations and reading some of the additional stories and afterwords that I hadn't seen before
I just searched my calendar for "Earthsea" and found the entry, Oct 23, 2018: "The Books of Earthsea hit stores"
My copy came with the color illustrations stuck to their facing pages.
The last Earthsea book change its world in a way which is unique (or at least rare), even in fantasy series. I won’t say it here for spoiler reasons, but it’s really quite wonderful. The whole series is absolutely worth reading.
> If you were 11 years old in 1991, and read the four books in quick succession, you’d get whiplash when you got to the fourth one
I was 11 in 1991, but I didn't get to Tehanu until I was 12. It was definitely whiplash inducing though.
I was just gifted the first book of the series. I’m looking forward to reading it after seeing some of the praise it received recently.
Reminds me of Goodreads.
> I was just gifted the first book of the series. I’m looking forward to reading it after seeing some of the praise it received recently.
> 5/5
Ha. Fair enough. I'll report back once I read it. I don't have a Goodreads account so I'm making up for it here I guess.
Author used to be an Emacs maintainer, FYI.
First 2 are great, next 4 start to drag but you’re invested in seeing how things turn out.
I liked that series. It was so subtly different from standard sword-and-sorcery genre, even though Ged is himself a formidable warrior.
It was the first instance of an author asking the question, "Can fantasy be written which is not a direct copying of _The Lord of the Rings_?"
and it is interesting to contrast it with texts such as _The Broken Sword_ by Poul Anderson (first published the same year as _The Fellowship of the Ring_) and _The Charwoman's Shadow_ by Lord Dunsany (published nearly 3 decades earlier).
The Broken Sword branches off in the other direction, I would say. Not in the action aspect, but in its overall worldview.
LoTR is subtly Christian in its themes of hope and redemption. The Broken Sword fits into the Nordic pagan view of the world, where heroes and villains are doomed alike.
Yes, but when paired w/ _The Merman's Children_, one sees a world where the White Christ ultimately prevails.