Halfway trough the monster Earthsea tome, but...well, you'll see...
The Books Of Earthsea (2018)
These are the first three. I'm chopping it up into two trilogies.
And that my dumb ass lost along the way.
Well, it's fixed now. I've read 'em!
A Wizard Of Earthsea (1968)
Okay, so our hero through this trilogy is Duny/Ged/Sparrowhawk.
Mostly Ged.
UKL had some subconscious internalized patriarchy going on, but she admits it in the collection intro, and says she fixes it in book 4 onward.
Duny's/Ged's aunt turns out to be a witch, and becomes his first teacher.
There's blatant shade thrown on witch magic over wizard magic.
And only boys can be wizards.
Still, Duny's/Ged's first teacher was a woman.
Word gets round of how powerful Duny/Ged already is, so the wizard Ogion shows up, and takes the lad under his wing.
Ogion ends up being a pretty big character.
It's under Ogion that Duny becomes Ged.
After awhile, Ged goes to the island of Roke to be trained at their wizard school.
No, it's not like Hogwarts.
But I'll get into that later.
Trying to impress a rival, Ged tries to summon a dead spirit.
He does, but something else bad comes with it.
He spends the rest of the book hunting and being hunted by that something.
The homunculi in "Full Metal Alchemist" are a ripoff of this whole thing.
Come to think of it, Fullmetal is just Earthsea with a steampunk skin.
Earthsea's better.
I'm thinking, I just might love this even more than "Last Unicorn".
Yep, I do. Dunno how I rank it against "Princess Bride". Maybe tied. I gotta think about it.
Very modern. Hard to believe when it came out Classic Trek and "Lost In Space" were on.
It SLAUGHTERS fucking Harry Potter.
Harry Potter can go eat shit pot pies.
Time to bump that quote again....
I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the "incredible originality" of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a "school novel", good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
-Ursula K. LeGuin.
Yeah, it's a cultural crime that (cinematically) we got 8 fucking Harry Potters instead of 6 Earthseas.
You know what Harry Potter has that got it past all the suits and all the limousine-liberal critics?
Capitalism.
Hogwarts has a fucking strip mall.
Le Guin neglected to put a fucking strip mall in her wizard campus.
If she'd just shown off her capitalist bona-fides by having strip malls, and stupid merchandisable bullshit, like puke flavored jellybeans, she could have been queen of the universe.
"All these things I will give to thee...😈".
😉😏
More on this in "The Farthest Shore".
Things learned in the afterward-
Not only are Earthsea's characters red, brown, and black, but mostly that, with minority white.
That gave racist marketing people headaches.
Ged's quest is for self discovery, because UKL hates war, and was sick of war being the source of the story. She says how limiting, and damaging, and puerile it is.
Oh!! Right! "Deathly Hallows" has a fucking war.
I think she just zinged Harry Potter again.
Nice! 😁👍
The Tombs Of Atuan (1971)
Okay, so there's this religious cult that functions like an H.P. Lovecraft version of Buddhism, in that they find a kid they pretend is the re-incarnation of the last Llama, or whatever.
Tenar is such a child.
They snatch her from her parents, and train her to replace the dead priestess she's supposed to be the rebirth of. Flash forward, and she doesn't remember her parents anymore.
Her priestess name is Arha.
Her minder/servant is Manan.
Her and her friends are brainwashed to hate wizards as dangerous unbelievers.
The titular Tombs of Atuan are a circle of black stones (pointy like clawed fingers) that allegedly contain the first God-Kings that were around since Earthsea was created.
I picture them as onyx ghost-popsicles. 😏
Under the tombs there's a labyrinth.
And at the center of the labyrinth is a treasure that got stolen from the wizards that Ged learns about in "Wizard".
You can see where this is going.
We get a lot of the grinding of Tenar's daily life in this crummy cult.
But, unlike "Moby Dick", important details are sprinkled in the grinding, so pay attention.
Then, Ged finally shows up halfway through.
This is really Tenar's book.
If you're the kind of little-dick who cries about male characters getting upstaged, go watch fucking tractor pulls; Le Guin is not for you. 🙄
Will Tenar turn to the good side?
Will Ged get the treasure?
Will Manon pull a heel turn or a face turn?
How much trouble will the priestess Kossil present to our heroes?
Do the ghost-popsicles melt?
The last half of the book covers all these questions, and more.
It almost has to be that "Tehanu" "Dragonfly" and "The Other Wind" had to exist to pay off Tenar.
With just the original trilogy, she pops in, pops out, and goodbye forever.
Yeah, Le Guin wasn't done.
It was an unfinished symphony.
It was best I waited, teenage stupidity or no.
Too late, and just in time, like Amar El-Mohtar said.
I dug it, but it's the gloomier of the (first) three.
More on that below.
Things learned in the afterward-
This truly was UKL's first book with a female protagonist.
It's so relentlessly dark, because it was a deliberate reversal of typical hero fiction.
And, in 1969, she was damned sure the patriarchy was unshakable.
Society made some good gains since '69, but MAGA seems hellbent on winding the clock back to a mashup of America's infamy/grossness decades.
When you're wistfully nostalgic for grossness, you're a fucking villain.
You're a future onyx ghost-popsicle.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
A boy, Arren, a prince, arrives at Roke.
Elder-Ged is there. We find out "Tombs" was 17-18 years ago, and Ged is 40-50.
Arren brings news that magic has stopped working in other islands.
Wizards are forgetting their spells, or else the spells don't work.
Magic is being erased. So, "an Avengers level threat" has come to Earthsea.
Ged is going to call a big meeting about this.
Ged asks the council to let him find out what's up by going on a quest.
Ged asks Arren to go on the quest with him.
Arren wants it most in the world, but is chock full of imposter syndrome.
Oh, welcome to my Hell, kid!
Ged was the audience-identification teenager in "Wizard" then Tenar in "Tombs" now Arren in "Shore".
Along the way on this quest, we see drug use and slavery for the first time in Earthsea.
More on that in the afterward observations.
Ged says a great line; "no darkness is forever, and even then, there are stars".
I needed that. 🥰👍
Very much the prototype for "Full Metal Alchemist" with how the netherworld, and resurrection, and the balance of the universe works. That part stands out most.
But we got seeds of that in "Wizard".
Here it's even more pronounced, and the similarities to FMA stand out all the more, and are undeniable.
Again, Earthsea is better.
"The Word Of Unbinding" from TWTQ ties into this!
Not directly in plot/timeline, but certain ideas are planted there.
TWOU is in this collection too, but way at the end. Glad I read it first in TWTQ for comparison.
I'll review it more thoroughly when I get to it in this collection.
Things learned in the afterward-
UKL says she definitely intended the baddie's greed for immortality to parallel the greed of consumerism in America.
Says how the ideals of the 60's have just quietly faded away as a naïve delusion, and American culture openly embraces "more is better".
Fuck America then. That shit bred Trump and Musk.
Like radiation to Godzilla.
We see the aforementioned drug use and slavery which are inevitable consequences of greed.
Fitting that this dropped same year as TWFWIF.
I ranted in the "Wizard" review about the disgusting consumerism on display in Harry Potter.
Here's Le Guin openly refuting it before Harry was a twinkle in JK's evil TERF eye.
*Googles and calculates* JK was born in 1966.
Would would have been 6 when "Shore" dropped. Guess she didn't read it. Or if she did, she agreed with the villain.
Hell, the "good guys" of Harry Potter embrace war, greed, and slavery (the house elves are slaves, goddammit).
What makes Voldemort bad is he's cruel about the slavery, he dishes it out on humans, and he kills.
Once he's bumped off, it's right back to gluttony and pollution.
No systemic change is coming.
Another Voldemort will show up in another 50-70 years.
Rowling is a fucking idiot. And that's before you add on that she's the Borg Queen of TERFs.
Yeah, I knew going in Earthsea would be more morally nutritious than Harry Potter. Just on the reputation of Hainish-verse.
I dearly wanted it to run directly counter to the garbage values of Harry Potter, and not only was I not disappointed, Le Guin delivered way past expectations. It was a pre-emptive "fuck you" to Harry Potter while JK was a fetus. Glorious.
Le Guin really did warn us about JK.
And it speaks volumes corporations and corporate media got on the Rowling gravy train.
Yeah, for weary ex-Potterites that want a new fantasy to love, I'd gladly recommend Earthsea as the antidote.
No fucking contest.
Ranking them so far....
1. A Wizard Of Earthsea.
2. The Farthest Shore.
3. The Tombs Of Atuan.
There!
Next up: second Earthsea trilogy!
Stay tuned!
2 comments:
I thought the big smarmy deal about the Harry Potter phenomenon (I never read any of the books or watched any of the movies) had to do with the idea that it was some sort of miracle that "got kids to read again." So what are they reading now? Was that just some sort of short lived phenomenon, like the idea that grunge was "real music" that kicked bad pop music out the window, only for bad pop music to come back five years later?
Is there some thing kids are all reading now? I can't tell, I thought Hunger Games and such was over with.
Hard telling what the Potter generation is reading now. They seemed to go to Twilight, and Hunger Games...and like you said, there was no next thing. My intuition is they got to college age, and scattered to a zillion littler things that weren't a big central phenomenon. Or else, they got married with kids, and got caught up in their little lives, and didn't read anymore. Or...TikTok rotted their brains. If I can get one random accidental person who floats in here, and reads Earthsea instead of, or as antidote to Harry Potter, I can sleep better.
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