[HN Gopher] The Earthsea Trilogy (2003)
___________________________________________________________________
The Earthsea Trilogy (2003)
Author : Tomte
Score : 74 points
Date : 2023-08-05 18:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dannyreviews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dannyreviews.com)
| dark_star wrote:
| From _A Wizard of Earthsea_, the first book, near the end:
|
| And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won
| but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made
| himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be
| used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life
| therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of
| ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea,
| which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in
| silence the word, only in dark the light, only in
| dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky."
| fmajid wrote:
| I'd say _The Farthest Shore_ is not a "children's book" either,
| nor arguably _The Tombs of Atuan_.
| vidarh wrote:
| Of course what started as a trilogy now contains 5 novels and a
| short story collection (the additional ones being Tehanu (1990),
| Tales from Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind(2001)). In addition
| the there's the novella The Daughter of Odren (2014) and the
| short story Firelight (2018).
|
| The new novels are both familar and sufficiently different that
| it's hard to judge whether someone who liked the original series
| will still enjoy the new ones. Part of it reflects Le Guin's
| reassessing her own writing, and give the female characters more
| space; part of it is a change of pace, and more focus on the
| characters and less on classic fantasy tropes.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I used to think that between Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and
| Narnia, all of fantasy was tapped out. Harry Potter did nothing
| to dispel this idea. Only Grossman's The Magicians has proved my
| thinking wrong.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Did you ever read Crowley's _Little, Big_? If those series you
| name form different columns in the periodic table of fantasy, I
| would say this one novel is in its own column.
| kadoban wrote:
| > I used to think that between Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and
| Narnia, all of fantasy was tapped out.
|
| Depends what you mean by tapped out I suppose. There's great
| fantasy still being written. Some of my favorites vaguely
| recently are the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Mistborn, and the
| Stormlight Archive serieses.
| WJW wrote:
| Man here I was thinking The Magicians drew way too much on
| Harry Potter.
|
| Spoilers: I did really enjoy the way the original novel
| "peaked" several times, each time leaving me thinking "well
| they beat the big bad, now what" but then there is much much
| more each time and the main character reaches an entirely new
| level of mastery they hadn't even imagined before. It's an
| interesting metaphor for life.
| creer wrote:
| I thought it was Harry Potter done right. Very right. The
| characters are youths with much more suitably fucked up
| emotions, drives, hormones, carelessness, not to mention lack
| of project etc. The magic is steeped in mystery and research
| and dangers - it's a young, nowhere near fully understood
| field. The school (mostly) fits all that. By contrast Harry
| Potter is entirely too focused on making the books
| alternately fun and gloomy, with a simpler and wider-audience
| magic. Entertaining but empty.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The three classic works of fantasy you mention don't have the
| twist (as in Vance's _Tales of the Dying Earth_ ) where the
| seemingly fantastical world turns out to be a far-future
| version of our own world. Or, in Delaney's _Neveryon_ series, a
| distant-past version. So, there was room for new developments
| in fantasy outside those big three you list.
|
| But I definitely understand your sentiment. I remember reading
| the first book of Stephen R. Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant"
| series and quickly abandoned it because it followed Tolkien too
| closely.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Ah, Covenant is really distinct from Tolkien. Not so much in
| the world building (giants, etc) but in the appalling pain
| and self obsession of Thomas Covenant. It took me 3 attempts
| to finish the first book, but after that I was hooked for the
| first two series.
| astrange wrote:
| There's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. There's isn't much
| else though, just that.
|
| (And Fate/Grand Order, but you don't want to get into that.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There's lots of excellent fantasy out there beyond the big
| names. Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_ is a good example of a
| very creative series, though it can be much harder to read.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Read it and enjoyed it. I have it filed under "science
| fiction", however.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| My favorite quote from the first book:
|
| "You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along.
| "You've drawn too much water from that well. Wait. Manhood is
| patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by
| the path?"
|
| "Strawflower."
|
| "And that?"
|
| "I don't know."
|
| "Fourfoil, they call it." Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot
| of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the
| plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked,
| since Ogion said nothing more, "What is its use, Master?"
|
| "None I know of."
|
| Ged kept the seedpod a while as they went on, then tossed it
| away.
|
| "When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and
| flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true
| name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after
| all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or
| the Open Sea?" Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last,
| "To hear, one must be silent."
| dontmobile wrote:
| "Existence is the silence unbroken," thought Ged as they
| continued moving.
|
| Unbeknownst to Ogion, his wisdom and knowledge, profound as it
| was, only skimmed the surface of understanding, gliding over
| the true depths of knowledge that lay unseen beneath.
|
| Generations would pass, with disciples traversing the path
| Ogion had once set upon, before one among them would finally
| decipher the cryptic fabric of existence. This disciple
| uncovered a universal truth - that all true names were but
| labels for different aspects of an overarching singularity.
|
| This principle was encompassed by a sole designation. A single
| true name for all things.
|
| To know this name was to echo unspeakable horror.
|
| But that is a tale for another time.
| Nition wrote:
| You have done well at mimicking Le Guin's style here, but
| this isn't actually from Earthsea, is it? Did you write this
| yourself? Or this being Hacker News, did you ask an LLM to
| continue the except above?
|
| I don't think Le Guin would have said that reality as a
| complete concept is something like an unspeakable horror, and
| I'm not sure I like the idea of presenting a creative
| fictional except as if it's legitimate.
| dontmobile wrote:
| A Passage from "Earthsea: The true name of the world",
| Chapter 4:
|
| The young disciple carefully turned the pages of the
| forgotten tome, unearthing truths that danced before his
| gaze.
|
| "Is reality no more than scripted narrative? Earthsea,
| merely a fanciful saga spun for children's delight?" His
| voice, laden with the profound implications of his words,
| rippled through the stagnant air. Comprehension eluded him.
| What was the meaning of all this? The tome had not gifted
| him the enlightenment he sought. Instead, he stood at the
| same crossroads, his understanding no more advanced than
| when his quest had begun.
|
| Weak with this startling realization, the young mage sank
| to his knees. The guardian of the tome, an ancient figure
| etched with wisdom, gestured to the inky sky above.
|
| "GEE PEE TEE FOR," the guardian uttered.
|
| "What is GEE PEE TEE FOR!?" the mage demanded, his voice
| hoarse with anxiety and anticipation. "CHAAAT GEEE PEEE
| TEEE," the guardian echoed back, its cryptic words swirling
| in the still air.
|
| And then, as if undone by an unseen incantation, the book,
| the temple, and the guardian dissolved into nothingness.
| Their existence erased as quickly as the summoning that had
| conjured them into being.
|
| Left alone in the forest, the exact spot of his summoning
| ritual, the young mage looked down at his hand. Etched into
| his skin by the guardian were the cryptic runes:
| "https://chat.openai.com/". His heart pounded as he
| contemplated the bizarre events that had just transpired.
|
| Casting his gaze upon his hand, he folded his fingers
| inward, enveloping the luminescent runes within the solemn
| promise of his closed fist. A resolute pledge echoed in the
| silence of the forest - he would neither rest nor waver
| until he unearthed the secret of GEE PEE TEE FOR.
| sorokod wrote:
| "The young disciple carefully turned the pages of the
| forgotten tome"
|
| What is the name of this literally crime?
| chromakode wrote:
| This is a concept I often draw upon in programming. To
| understand or create something you must learn its true name. If
| you don't know what to call the thing you're creating, it's a
| sign to step back and take a broader view. A good name can give
| you the power to work with huge ideas.
| cfiggers wrote:
| I like this. In a way, a program is a paragraph-length name
| for something.
| kedean wrote:
| My interpretation is that the name is the name. If you
| can't properly name, say, a class, then you don't truly
| understand it and don't have real power over it. And that's
| dangerous.
|
| Once you have full understanding of the code, the proper
| name should reveal itself. You didn't chose the name, it
| was simply not clear to you yet.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Last week I committed a change of a type name from
| "TimeThing" (always just a tentative placeholder) to
| "TimeDomainSwapper" precisely because I finally (?)
| understood what is was.
| chromakode wrote:
| As an Ardour subscriber and user for almost 2 decades,
| imagine my delight at seeing your reply! Thanks for all
| that you do.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| It's not too surprising that the reviewer describes the setting
| as "Taoist". Ursula Le Guin has even published a translation of
| the Tao Te Ching.
|
| (I agree with everything in this review, and will probably grab
| my old and battered copy of the Quartet from my parents this
| weekend.)
| dudinax wrote:
| Ironically Earthsea is almost exactly anti-Taoist. One of the
| key ideas in Taoism, that incidentally sets it way beyond
| Platonism, is the name that can be spoken is not the true name.
|
| LeGuin asks, "what if we could speak it?"
| mostlylurks wrote:
| There's a section in the Parmenides which addresses this
| particular idea, though as a part of a larger argument on the
| nature of the one. Later platonist / neoplatonist thinkers
| also occasionally had similar notions. It would be incorrect
| to say that this idea is absent from platonism.
| jacknobody wrote:
| Then we would have transcended earthbound, mortal illusion,
| and would also have transcended the need for speech... ??
| macrael wrote:
| Nit, it's not a translation since she did not speak Chinese.
| That said I adore her Tao and have read it a few times.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Please don't be petty and don't me give me the gray treatment
| because we don't share tastes (I really am looking for some
| explanations of what might I have missed) but... I have to be
| dead-serious and honest here: I had huge trouble going through
| the 5 books at all. It was torturous 95% of the time. Only the
| first book was kinda sorta nice fantasy book, it dragged a bit
| but was full of promise and the world-building was nice. Sadly
| the ending I saw a mile away but was still semi-enjoyable until
| we got there.
|
| From then on though, it was just downhill, with each book getting
| harder and harder to read. Especially book 4 could basically be
| summarized as "the dark thoughts of an old woman, mixed once
| every 50 pages with the name 'Ged', the word 'garden' and the
| description of a disfigured girl". :(
|
| Like, don't crucify me please, but I could probably compress that
| book in 20 pages, easily, without skipping a single plot element.
|
| Book 5 was a slight improvement, all the underworld / dead people
| descriptions were pretty eerie and I managed to get some
| immersion. Was okay, though still very watered down and prolonged
| and sadly again, the ending was easy to guess.
|
| Books 2 and 3? I don't even remember them now. I only remember
| how extremely excruciatingly slow they were.
|
| In any case, I know there is always the universal will-never-go-
| anywhere cop-out of "it's just not for you, man" but I would
| still be interested if anybody can elaborate what made the book
| click for them.
|
| TL;DR I found the books extremely watered down, full of dark
| thoughts and rather meaningless stoicism, and Ged was basically a
| burned out veteran before he hits 30 years old which is a bit
| disappointing, isn't it? Not to mention, again, too much focus on
| the mental struggles of old people. And there isn't even any
| revelation or motivation anywhere, it's basically "life sucks
| man, what can you do".
|
| Before you ask or claim: I really like reading fantasy and I
| picked these books several years ago due to their reputation. And
| I was -- and I still am -- legitimately confused what's so great
| about them.
| eszed wrote:
| They're just not for you, man. :-)
|
| No, but seriously, if I'm accurately reading between the lines
| of what you wrote, you're looking for an engaging _plot_ , and
| expecting _world-building_ and _character_ to work in service
| of that. I 'd argue that LeGuin (at least here: a few of her
| other stories are different) prioritizes _philosophical / moral
| inquiry_, and _world-building_ (in that order), with
| _character_ and (especially) _plot_ acting in service of those.
|
| All of which is fine, of course: not judging or crucifying you
| at all. (I'm reading and enjoying an entirely _plot_ -driven
| book right now.)
|
| My love for the _Earthsea_ books (especially the first three)
| is wrapped up in the thoughts it makes me think, and the vistas
| it makes me see - for me, each of those have indelible feelings
| attached - none of which can be condensed into a bare
| recounting of "here's what happened".
|
| To be honest with you, I can't even recall how any of the books
| end (though I also probably foresaw the endings as I last read
| them), but the dryness of Tenar's life, her fascination with
| the hidden emissary from beyond, and her moral delimma about
| helping him or not, stick with me as vividly as I'd lived them
| myself.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you, those comments are helpful!
|
| And yes you are very likely correct that the entire sub-genre
| of this fantasy is not for me (as in, I really would like
| plot and world-building and some character development, not
| 99% philosophy).
|
| We are all tuned to different frequencies, and sometimes we
| change frequencies during our lives (or during a single year
| even) so I get it but for some reason I can't tune to
| LeGuin's frequency at all.
|
| Oh well.
| norir wrote:
| It is interesting to me that you read all of the books even
| though the first one didn't speak to you. Maybe the more
| important question to ask is why you felt compelled to continue
| reading in spite of your dislike of the works? Perhaps there is
| something that you don't want to admit was compelling and worth
| slogging through or maybe you are a masochist? No matter the
| reason, it seems that the books have something to teach you
| even if you still dislike them upon further reflection.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I will endeavor to answer honestly. Part of the answer, not
| all, but part, lies your complaint: "I could probably compress
| that book in 20 pages, easily" ... "excruciatingly slow."
|
| It has been many, many years since I touched the first three,
| but sometimes it is the space between the notes which provides
| contrast to the notes themselves. Think of music and compare
| the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" versus something sparser.
| "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light ..."
|
| Earthsea is not about action or events or predictable plot
| beats. It's about the space between such things. Rather than
| the mastery of magic being D&D's verbal, somatic, and material
| components, instead lean toward how Vance's Dying Earth series
| required a wizard to hold an abstract concept in their mind.
| Here, magic is about the deep understanding created by
| observation and contemplation, rather than reaction and
| dissection, and that this is created over long periods.
|
| Imagine a cup. What is ... cupness? Go over the cups you have
| seen in your mind. Some have handles, some do not, so a handle
| is not the essence of cupness, but ... an ability to be _in
| hand_ is. A cup the size of a mountain is not a cup to you, you
| may not take it in hand. A cup the size of a dust mite is not a
| cup to you, you may not take it in hand. And so the cup relates
| to you, and your ability to handle it.
|
| Consider it further. Topologically, with a handle, it might as
| well be a donut (torus). Topologically, without a handle, it
| might as well be a ball (sphere). And so mere topology is not
| the essence of cupness. But _shape_ somehow is. You recognize
| cupness whether the color or the texture, but by shape. You
| must explore this further. Cups are fashioned, although one
| might see them inadvertently created by nature. This goes with
| their ability to be taken in hand. To fashion something may be
| art or it may be of utility, so that is insufficient. Consider
| that your cup has an orientation, such that there is a bottom
| and there is a top. You have seen inverted cups and from your
| memory you know when one is upside down. Cupness has an
| orientation to it. A cup is almost a sleeve, almost a hole, but
| for that bottom. Which again you discern, is not the place for
| a hole; if a thing is to be a cup to be taken in hand, that
| hold belongs on the side to make a handle.
|
| Consider that utility of a cup, fashioned again and again, all
| over the world. From the thinness of the sides springing up
| from the "bottom," one is conserving matter, but also
| maximizing another thing, which is the space that the cup
| _almost_ contains. It almost contains, but does not contain. It
| may partially hold. As it almost contains, it means that
| something may go into and out of the cup. With the orientation
| you have discovered upon contemplation, you now might see that
| gravity plays into the almost-containment. A cup is a handle-
| able thing which almost contains, which _holds_ due to gravity.
| We now ask _what_.
|
| The cup is not handcuffs or manacles, to hold a person. The cup
| is not a cage, to hold an animal or a marble. It has flatness
| across the top, most often, and one might reason that the thing
| held is always flat on top, held by gravity. What is held by
| gravity in an indention, with always a level top? It cannot be
| a solid object. It cannot be a gas. It could almost be grains
| of sand, but those form a pile. Ah, then a liquid.
|
| This cup is to be handled, to have a liquid go in and go out,
| at hand and at rest with its flat bottom, such that it does not
| tip. It is the size of an adult hand or two child's hands,
| fashioned. By examination, I reach forth with my hand and may
| refill it or drink from it.
|
| In Earthsea, wizardry is, _in part_ , to allow yourself enough
| emptiness to observe a thing in wholeness, to derive all that
| might be known about it in your own mind, and thereby give
| yourself a power over it, but not for something so simple as
| the cup, but as a flower or a shadow or a person. And so in the
| novels, emptiness provides space for the reader to contemplate
| and hold what they have read in their mind.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you for engaging.
|
| I have no problem with slower or more introspective stories,
| mind you. But even if I accept the notion that Earthsea is
| about wizardry being more about observing and a holistic
| approach (which I can accept easily) I still got disappointed
| because there was barely any magic, and it did not move the
| plot. There was no conflict, factions, clashes of interests
| etc.
|
| Part of the answer lies within myself as you pointed out:
| though I more mean in the sense that my life has not been
| easy, and dark thoughts and introspection have taken plenty
| of time from it, so I absolutely cannot get fascinated by
| these things in books.
|
| If you don't mind the sex analogy, this is very similar to
| assertive and dominant people usually needing to be
| submissive in sex to get off. It's like this: you got plenty
| of X in other areas of life and you don't want X in your free
| time as well. You need Y and Z.
|
| So I can mostly hypothesize that's why I don't like the
| books. I get part of the philosophy but... I wanted some
| magic, man. :)
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Might I suggest, then, most of _The Black Company_ series?
|
| Magic. Magic used in ways you might not imagine. I count
| myself a veteran of the Battle of the Stair at Tear,
| because goddamn, I felt like I was there.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Ohhh, Glen Cook! This guy is in my "to check" shelf for
| way too long. Gotta get around to him.
|
| Thanks for reminding me.
| aeontech wrote:
| Hah, I wouldn't have thought of the recommendation, but
| I'll be damned if that's not the most apt total inverse
| opposite to Le Guin's style in Earthsea I could hope to
| think of. Perfect!
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." --Louis
| Armstrong.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I hate to contradict such an authority as Louis Armstrong,
| but as a general matter, he was wrong.
|
| There are plenty of people who consider themselves to play
| jazz, but are told by others that they do not.
|
| There are even a few people who don't consider themselves to
| play jazz, but are told by others that they do.
|
| The nature of "what jazz is" is (and likely always will be)
| an ongoing debate, just like its corrollary "what is jazz".
|
| If Louis had lived until the 2000s, I suspect he might have
| rephrased this: "If you care about what jazz is, you'll
| probably never know; you're not much likelier to know even if
| you don't care".
| screye wrote:
| But that isn't the point he was making.
|
| Some concepts are grounded in language and others are
| grounded in higher order ephemeral ideas.
|
| It's like trying to plot an exponential curve with a
| polynomial equation. It's futile.
|
| Jazz is one of those ideas. Jazz is felt. Jazz is
| expressed. Jazz is in the air. When Jazz happens, you know
| it. And that's enough. The second you put words to Jazz,
| you suffocate it, you put in a box.
|
| It's like trying to explain the beauty of the Sagrada
| Familia by counting the number of minarets and sculptures
| on it. No, you take it in whole, with all your senses, and
| you 'get' it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to this, but I ultimately think that it's
| wrong.
|
| The Sagrada Familia _is a thing_ , and everybody knows
| (who knows it) what that thing is. It has clear physical
| boundaries, and to paraphrase Soul Coughing, you can put
| your hands on it and then back on yourself and then back
| on it and say "Is Sagrada, is not Sagrada, is Sagrada
| ..."
|
| The problem with things like jazz is that jazz _isn 't a
| thing_. It doesn't have boundaries. You can't point to
| it, only to (nominal examples of) it. And people don't
| always agree that a given thing _is_ an example of jazz.
| Some people want there to be something that unites all
| jazz at some level, so that "when jazz happens, you know
| it", but I really don't think that's true of the full
| spectrum of musical expression that is sometimes labelled
| "jazz".
|
| What Sun Ra was doing is far from what the late 70s jazz-
| fusion guys were doing is so far from what Tord Gustavson
| is doing is so far from the Armstrong big band was doing
| is ...
|
| To me, trying to say that there's some unitary idea that
| somehow connects all these things (and more) and that you
| know it or you don't ... well, maybe I don't know it.
|
| My real point is that what ought to matter is whether you
| like the music. Whether it's jazz or not is really just a
| distraction.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| That's a lot less quippy, though, and I think the essence
| of it is still contained in the original.
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's also pretty elitist. Reads like "you are not part of
| the club so you don't get it".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not sure if mean you my version or Armstrong's original.
|
| Mine was specifically intended to be anti-elitist, by
| making it clear that the problem comes from even feeling
| a need to define jazz.
|
| Armstrong's does strike me as potentially elitist, though
| I don't know his actual intent (obviously).
| dmbche wrote:
| "some folks they know, the others you can't tell em"
| Throw6away wrote:
| Jazz is a Duende - an act that can only be understood in its
| own terms.
| Exoristos wrote:
| LeGuin's writing, fiction or otherwise, was perpetually
| juvenilia. But this was not unusual in her generation.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I respect your opinion on this. I have the same reaction to a
| great deal of the other fantasy and science fiction I've read.
| Which fantasy books do you like?
| pdimitar wrote:
| "The magic goes away" series so far is one of the best I
| actually encountered (for me). I like the more realistic and
| honest nature of the characters, and the sense of impending
| doom and how does it modify the characters' behaviour. I find
| it pretty engaging so far.
|
| I did enjoy the beginning of one of Alistair Reynolds' books
| but haven't gotten around to read it in full yet.
|
| "Stormlight Archive" so far I find a bit prolonged as well
| but Sanderson is very good at literally everything else so
| I'll keep going (2 out of the 4 books down so far).
|
| Read a few short stories in the Witcher universe and loved
| them but haven't read the books themselves yet. But I have a
| feeling that I'll love them too.
|
| Gart Nix's "Old kingdom" (the original 3 books) were okay, I
| loved their world-building but didn't like truly love them.
| 7/10 though, solid books. Haven't tried to read anything from
| the expanded universe yet.
|
| And of course LOTR, though I have to admit I never managed to
| read it more than twice for my entire life.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| > I did enjoy the beginning of one of Alistair Reynolds'
| books
|
| Which one?
| pdimitar wrote:
| You made me look. :)
|
| "House of Suns", 2008
|
| I really liked the intro. I should get back to it and
| read it in full.
| creer wrote:
| I loved these books precisely because they were a refreshing
| look at fantasy. But yes that makes them completely different
| reading and there's no problem with not liking them. They are
| not about plot, they are about the emotions of the characters
| and the mood of the landscape. And I find these extremely
| emotional to read because of how much they engage us into the
| emotions and surroundings of the characters. Also really, the
| mage has found a direction where not doing anything or much is
| the way. That doesn't help on plot :-) I loved that the books
| powerfully evoke the emotions of stages of life:
|
| A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard
|
| The Tombs of Atuan, the adventure (not about the adventure but
| about the wizard)
|
| The Farthest Shore, mage at the end of failing magic
|
| Tehanu, retirement, ex-wizard, reconciliation
|
| Tales from Earthsea, short stories of wizards in the field
|
| The Other Wind, more retirement, old wizards, settling accounts
|
| And considering how long apart they are written, I marvel at
| how well they keep to this effort on emotion and mood.
| justonrteplh wrote:
| Created a one time account just to reply to this.
|
| You don't like the books, that's all. They don't speak to you.
|
| Nothing unusual here, there's plenty of books I don't like
| either that are apparently brilliant (The Vorrh comes to mind).
|
| Being confused doesn't make sense. You didn't like them, other
| people do.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Being confused does make _some_ sense IMO. Good readers are
| able to articulate the elements from a book that spoke to
| them, and roughly how. I don 't know if I am a good reader
| (likely not) but I can do it. Interested in feedback from
| other such people. I don't intend to argue with them however,
| just wanna hear what is it that drew them in and kept them
| in.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > You didn't like them, other people do.
|
| I think some people like to dig a little deeper than this.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Loved that series. Brilliant!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Just _do not_ , under any circumstances, see any TV
| shows/movies based on it.
|
| I saw an animated one that ... was not perfect. I think there
| may be some live-action version out there, as well.
| philips wrote:
| This video essay about the Ghibli version is interesting and
| sad in a way. https://youtu.be/2FcxccVUN94
| jacknobody wrote:
| I think the world is fast-tracking to hell, right now. Le Guin's
| protagonists know spiritual effort and reward, and her novels
| encourage me to believe that there's more, and better, to be
| gained in life than material gain at the expense of my fellows.
| vintermann wrote:
| I think Le Guin radically reinterpreted her own work in the two
| followups to the trilogy.
|
| Spoilers, obviously.
|
| The original trilogy has interesting gender roles. One one hand
| it's very rigid in its ideas of gender, as you'd expect from
| someone into Taoism. On the other, those roles were far from one-
| dimensional. I'd say that it presents an unconventional, but
| surprisingly positive view of the masculine gender role in the
| wizards of Roke, and a grim but original and compelling view of
| death. Both men and women can be cruel, but even at their worst
| you don't necessarily lose sympathy for them.
|
| In Tehanu, that's all rolled back. There the men are evil, and
| the women are victims, period. And Ged kills a guy (which he
| didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right
| after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what
| the hell, author?" moment. And the grim afterlife is apparently
| the fault of those patriarchal wizards. It seems Le Guin was
| embarrassed at her earlier work that it wasn't feminist enough,
| or that it wasn't feminist in the right way. And maybe it wasn't
| Taoist enough either (I for one could never understand how she
| could combine those two).
|
| She's still a great storyteller, of course, so it's certainly
| possible to appreciate those books, just know that they're
| written 20 years later when the author had a completely different
| view of many things.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| In the author's own words (excerpted from the Introduction to
| _The Books of Earthsea, Complete Illustrated Edition_ , 2018):
|
| ...
|
| I have written so often of how and why it took me so long to
| write the six books of Earthsea that the story has become like
| the book you have to read to your four-year-old every night for
| weeks--You _really_ want to hear it _again_? Oh well, okay,
| here goes!
|
| I wrote the first three books in five years: '68, '70, '72. I
| was on a roll. None of them was closely plotted or planned
| before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as
| I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led. I started
| confidently on the fourth book. The central character was Tenar
| again, of course, to balance it out. I knew she hadn't stayed
| and studied wizardry with Ogion, but had married a farmer and
| had children, and that the story was going to bring her and Ged
| back together. But by the middle of the first chapter, I
| realized that I didn't know who she was--now. I didn't know why
| she'd done what she'd done or what she had to do. I didn't know
| her story, or Ged's. I couldn't plot or plan it. I couldn't
| write it. It took me eighteen years to learn how.
|
| I was forty-two in 1972; in 1990, I was sixty. During those
| years, the way of understanding society that we're obliged to
| call feminism (despite the glaring absence of its opposite term
| masculism) had grown and flourished. At the same time an
| increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which
| I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling
| ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s
| and '80s, I don't know if I ever could have identified this
| absence as the absence of women at the center.
|
| Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did?
|
| Why because I was a reader who read, loved, and learned from
| the books my culture provided me; and they were almost entirely
| about what men did. The women in them were seen in relation to
| men, essentially having no existence unrelated to male
| existence. I knew what men did, in books, and how one wrote
| about them. But when it came to what women did, or how to write
| about it, all I had to call on was my own experiences--
| uncertified, unapproved by the great Consensus of Criticism,
| lacking the imprimatur of the Canon of Literature, piping up
| solo against the universally dominant and almost unison chorus
| of the voices of men talking about men.
|
| Oh, well, now, was that true? Hadn't I read Jane Austen? Emily
| Bronte? Charlotte Bronte? Elizabeth Gaskell? George Eliott?
| Virginia Woolf? Other, long-silenced voices of women writing
| about both women and men were being brought back into print,
| into life. And my contemporary women writers were showing me
| the way. It was high time I learned to write of and from my own
| body, my own gender, in my own voice.
|
| The central character of _The Tombs of Atuan_ is female, the
| point of view is hers. But Tenar is just coming out of
| adolescence, not yet fully a woman. I had had no problem in
| 1970 writing out of my own experience of what it is to be a
| girl-child, an adolescent girl.
|
| What I couldn't do then, and hadn't yet done in 1990, was write
| a fully mature woman at the center of a novel.
|
| Strangely enough, it took a child to show me the way into the
| fourth book of Earthsea. A girl-child, born in poverty, abused,
| maimed, abandoned, Therru led me back to Tenar, so that I could
| see the woman she had become. And through Tenar I could see
| Earthsea, unchanged, the same Earthsea as eighteen years
| earlier--but seeming almost a different world, for the
| viewpoint was no longer from a position of power or among men
| of power. Tenar was seeing it all from below, through the eyes
| of the marginal, the voiceless, the powerless.
|
| The essay "Earthsea Revisioned," reprinted in this edition,
| discusses that change in viewpoint. When _Tehanu_ came out, a
| good many critics and readers saw it as mere gender politics
| and resented it as a betrayal of the romantic tradition of
| heroism. As I tried to say in the essay, not to change
| viewpoint would, for me, have been the betrayal. By including
| women fully in my story, I gained a larger understanding of
| what heroism is and found a true and longed-for way back into
| my Earthsea--now a very much greater, stranger, more mysterious
| place than it had ever appeared before.
|
| Though _Tehanu_ is named for the child character, neither it
| nor the two books after it are books "for children" or
| definable as "young adult." I had abandoned any attempt to suit
| my vision of Earthsea to a publisher's category or a critic's
| prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature
| rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and
| the imagination. So, as my protagonists grew older, I trusted
| my younger readers to follow them or not, as and when they
| chose. In the PR-driven world of publishing, that constituted a
| real risk, and I am very grateful to the editors who took that
| risk with me.
|
| ...
| dmbche wrote:
| Big thank you for getting this quote here in full - you've
| got me to read the whole of Earthsea. Very poignant and
| interesting approach to authorship.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't recognise your description of Tehanu at all. But that
| she recognised that the first three books were written at a
| time when she herself was still stuck in a mindset of fantasy
| being written a certain way is not controversial - she herself
| spoke about that. They challenged fantasy tropes in many ways,
| and were radical in her insistence of not focusing on white
| people, but they did not challenge gender roles.
|
| The later books did that. But I do see them as presenting the
| men as evil, and the women as victims, "period", not unless you
| identify the idea of privilege and power as inherently marking
| all of those affected by it irrespective of how they engage
| with it.
| nostromo95 wrote:
| Tehanu is my favorite in the series; I'm sorry you feel that
| way!
|
| > And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three
| books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a
| reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment.
|
| Two people with a long-standing attraction having sex after a
| life-or-death experience seems completely natural to me. Your
| framing of them having sex BECAUSE Ged killed a man is a
| misrepresentation of what happens in the book.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I never knew Taoism had rigid ideas on gender. Is that true?
| I've never heard that or had an inkling of that.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| I certainly don't see any sign of it in the Tao Te Ching or
| Chuang-Tzu. But there's a lot of history to the religion, and
| a lot of blending with Confucian and Buddhist teachings, too.
| dudinax wrote:
| The second trilogy is great. The last book is a masterpiece of an
| author reexamining her own work from within her work.
| aleph401 wrote:
| Wow, I'm just impressed that this site has been active for over
| 30 years! (First review is dated 1992)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-05 23:02 UTC)