[HN Gopher] The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
___________________________________________________________________
The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Author : Tomte
Score : 100 points
Date : 2025-04-28 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lars.ingebrigtsen.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (lars.ingebrigtsen.no)
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| 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
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I just searched my calendar for "Earthsea" and found the entry,
| Oct 23, 2018: "The Books of Earthsea hit stores"
| user982 wrote:
| My copy came with the color illustrations stuck to their facing
| pages.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I liked that series. It was so subtly different from standard
| sword-and-sorcery genre, even though Ged is himself a formidable
| warrior.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| me_smith wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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
| me_smith wrote:
| 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.
| dcminter wrote:
| 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.
| zem wrote:
| 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)
| dark_star wrote:
| 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-...
| mcphage wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| Fun fact: she coined the word Ansible. I had no idea until
| reading one of her books recently and thinking "Ansible? Like the
| software?"
| rrauenza wrote:
| I always thought it was Card who invented it for Ender's Game.
| (He borrowed it)
|
| Thanks for the fun fact!
| hinkley wrote:
| No he cribbed that from the Hainish Cycle and kept the
| mechanism. Just read that last summer and was whaaaaat.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| o11c wrote:
| "Far-seeing, but dangerously corrupted" fits either Palantir
| quite well.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| One day soon we will lose our fucking minds and start
| attacking former friends and allies.
| lantry wrote:
| "Hans... are we the baddies?"
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Palantir: peer into it hard enough, and the Dark Lord will
| look back at you.
|
| Yeah, it fits.
| zem wrote:
| 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
| danielodievich wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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...
| fmajid wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Do you like the animated one by Miyazaki's son?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Never saw that one.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| zelos wrote:
| That's more "inspired by" rather than "based on" the novels,
| though.
| clircle wrote:
| Author used to be an Emacs maintainer, FYI.
| fmajid wrote:
| 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
| PS5.99.
|
| 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...
| mzs wrote:
| 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.
| danielodievich wrote:
| 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.
| brador wrote:
| First 2 are great, next 4 start to drag but you're invested in
| seeing how things turn out.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| 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.
| thordenmark wrote:
| 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.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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".
| csense wrote:
| I thought they were terrible too. I don't have much memory of
| specifics, as I read it a very long time ago.
| dcminter wrote:
| > 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?
| fmajid wrote:
| Not him or her, but I'm guessing Kurremkarmerruk...
| taude wrote:
| I ended up using the audible as asmr to help me fall sleep...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > 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.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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.
| zem wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-28 23:02 UTC)