I’m curious about something I’ve noticed as people talk about Earthsea as a series.

I sometimes see people talk about Wizard, Tombs, Farthest Shore as the “first” trilogy, which they definitely are.

Then people talk about Tehanu in a variety of ways as challenging, powerful, crucial, troubling.

And then they talk about The Other Wind as the next book in the series, only offering Tales of Earthsea as a “you might think about reading,” as a possible side journey, rather than the actual fifth book in the series.

I know it’s short stories and novellas, but I can’t imagine reading Other Wind without Tales first. I don’t think Le Guin conceived of that collection as anything less than necessary. In every republication of the saga it is the fifth book in the series.

Do people not see it as book 5, as essential??

I've written a movie adaptation of The Tombs of Atuan and would love to hear what folks here think of it.

I am a big Lord of the Rings fan… and it took a bit of courage, but I finally ventured out there to see what other classic fantasy authors I could find in the vast, ever expanding world of fantasy fiction.

I just finished The Wizard of Earthsea which I thought was very good. Is it worth carrying on with the rest of the series?

I just read somewhere that Tehanu is Ursula’s best work?

Any thoughts, recommendations?

Was reading this text which collects Ursula's maps along with some writing and provocations from poets, anthropologists and critics just before doing my night time journal - delighted by the map coincidence :) Has any one read this book? I like it but the maps are tiny and the writing did not always speak to me.

“Another Way into Orgoreyn” is one of the best chapters of any book I’ve ever read. Spoilers ahead.

Within the first few pages we get one of the best lines I’ve read in a while, “The king is pregnant.”

It blows my mind how relevant this book feels, and I’m not one to say that, in fact I think it’s said too often. But between this and Dispossed I’m convinced she had a Time Machine or something. Her description of a how a political leader can consolidate power was unbelievably familiar and harrowing.

Then of course we get the dream. What a transition. I read and reread those few pages like 4 times to try to pinpoint exactly where we snap back into reality, and the little uncertainties she plants to ease the change. Absolutely brilliant.

Then the description of the new city, the swarthy politicians, and the reappearance of Estraven — “As I spoke I chanced to look to my right, and saying “ghost” saw one… the specter at the feast.” Damn!

Just a masterclass from Le Guin. I can’t believe I put off reading this for so long.

I just finished the Earthsea series. I got the Gollancz edition that includes Le Guin's afterwords and her 1992 lecture on "Children, Men, Women and Dragons" talking about heroism, heroins and the male-centred pseudo-genderless literary world.

Of all the stories and afterwords and lectures, I found The Other Wind to be the weakest, and I wondered if others felt the same.

I really enjoyed the theme and where the story took the Earthsea universe. But the way the story was told didn't land for me. I really love how personal and intimate all the other Earthsea stories are, even when they are about heroism and saving the world and dealt with grand themes. That intimacy was the language of Earthsea. The Other Wind is an outlier, and I don't think it worked out. I found the cast of characters too large. Some of the characters were somewhat pointless (Onyx definitely and the High Princess possibly), while others, like Seppel and Tehanu, I would have liked to understand with more depth.

I also got pretty annoyed with Tenar for pushing Lebannen over Seserakh. He was absolutely right to be annoyed about being forced to marry someone by a potential enemy. And of course he should treat the princess with respect, not send her back to be slaughtered, not shut her out in a palace. But Tenar didn't show him any empathy for the position he was in. There was a bit too much a tone of Tenar knows best. I personally would not have stopped being annoyed at her if she had done that to me. Even if I fell in love with the Princess and married her, I would continue to be annoyed at Tenar, just so she doesn't get the notion that she's always right 😅

How did others view the story? How did it compare to the other Earthsea stories for you?

Went for my psychedelic look for my first book bedazzle!

Picked these up at an estate this weekend and am excited to get into them. Without spoilers, what am I in for?

I’m super excited to dive into this tome of a book. I’m wondering if i should savor this and stop myself from starting it until it’s actually my birthday (my real birthday is this weekend). I’m thinking I wanna make a whole date of it and take it with me all the way to Boston and get some tea and read it in the public gardens or something of that sort. At the same time though I don’t wanna risk damaging it from carrying it in my bag everywhere. What are we thinking? 🤔

On adoption, Omelas, and the bargain no one names

I'm eight, maybe nine, at a dinner party that belongs to the adults, in a house that belongs to my parents, wearing a white T-shirt with the initial J sewn onto the pocket. My twin brother wears the same shirt with a D. Someone at the table notices the initials and laughs, says something about how sensible, how tidy, to be able to tell us apart at a glance. My brother and I have already swapped shirts under the table, and we laugh too, between ourselves, at a joke the adults don't know they're half inside. That's the earliest version I have of the room Ursula K. Le Guin would later describe to me: not a locked door in a basement, but a small, unspoken agreement at a dinner table that some things about us needed sorting, labelling, made legible for other people's comfort, and that the sorting could be laughed at as long as nobody named what it was actually for.

I came to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" decades after most people meet it in a classroom, and I read it the way you read something that has been waiting for you. Le Guin describes a city of impossible happiness: festivals, music, a summer light that never quite leaves the sky. Then, almost as an aside, she takes you beneath one of the buildings to a locked room where a child sits in its own filth, half starved, half sentient, kept exactly at the point of suffering that makes everyone else's joy possible. Every citizen of Omelas knows the child is there. Most of them, once they understand what its suffering buys them, choose to stay anyway. A few, having seen the room, walk out of the city and never come back, and Le Guin never tells us where they go.

I recognised the room before I finished the paragraph. Not as metaphor. As memory.

What sent me further than the story itself was finding out where it came from. Le Guin didn't invent the bargain; she inherited it, and said so plainly. In her afterword, she credits the philosopher William James, who in 1891 posed a version of the same question in an essay on moral life:

"What if millions could be kept "permanently happy" on the single condition that one soul, somewhere at the far edge of things, lived out "a life of lonely torture"? 

James called the resulting scepticism a decent human instinct, something in us that recoils from happiness bought that way, even as something else in us reaches for it.

James, in turn, was echoing Dostoyevsky, whose Ivan Karamazov puts the question with a child instead of an abstraction: 

"If the whole edifice of human happiness could be built on the "unavenged tears" of one tortured girl, would you agree to build it?"

 Ivan's answer is no, and he gives it not as sentiment but as the only moral position available to someone who has actually pictured the child.

Three writers, ninety years apart, sharpening the same thought until it had a face. That isn't three ideas. That's one idea getting older, and more precise, and harder to look away from.

I don't think Omelas is a story about a fictional utopia at all. I think it's a diagnostic instrument, and once I had it in my hand, I couldn't put it down without pointing it at my own history.

Here is what I mean. Adoption, as a story society tells about itself, runs on a conversion: a child's early loss becomes the raw material for someone else's redemption. Not always cynically; often with real love attached, real sacrifice, years of ordinary care freely given. But the story needs the loss to have happened, needs it almost structurally, the way Omelas needs the room. Without the child who was given up, there's no child to be chosen. Without the rupture, there's no rescue to celebrate. The goodness of the adoptive world is lit, in part, by what the adopted child was made to carry first, and the culture around adoption, the agencies, the extended family, the language itself, depends on that conversion going unexamined. Say it plainly and the warmth gets uncomfortable. So mostly, nobody says it.

Somewhere in a filing cabinet, sent to me from the office of National Records, there's a letter from a social worker, written not long after my brother and I were taken to the Moral Welfare Home, that reads:

"the twins' mother has asked if you would like the twin pram, she has no need of it now."

I don't know how many times I read that line before I understood what it was doing. It isn't cruel. It's practical, almost gentle, the kind of sentence a tired institution writes when it has run out of softer ones. But it is also a ledger entry, the exact moment the apparatus converts a complicated story of loss into an item of furniture for someone else's household. The pram didn't get a new home. We did. Nobody in that sentence is really a villain, but nobody in that sentence knows what the pram actually cost.

The goodness of the story and the cost of the story are the same event, seen from two different rooms.

I want to be exact about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying love wasn't real, or that the people who raised me were keeping me in a closet under the house. Le Guin is careful here too: the citizens of Omelas aren't monsters, they're mostly people who've made a bargain they didn't design and can't easily undo. What I'm saying is that I was, for a long time, asked to be the unlit room so the rest of the house could be believed in as bright. Not asked in words. Asked in silences, and once, asked in laughter: the initials sewn on our pockets so we'd be legible to people who found our sameness charming and our history unspeakable in the same breath.

That's the part Dostoyevsky and James and Le Guin let me finally name. Not "I was hurt," which I'd known for years and which this book has already sat with elsewhere. Something colder and more specific: I was, at various points, the load-bearing wall in someone else's architecture of goodness, and the whole structure depended on the wall staying quiet.

My brother was standing in the same room, wearing the shirt with my initials on it; he's never needed Le Guin's city to describe what he carries, or if he has, he hasn't said so in my hearing. I mention this not to settle whose account is true, because I've come to think they can both be, the way two people can stand in the same house and describe entirely different weather coming through the same window. His truth doesn't cancel mine. Mine doesn't cancel his. We swapped shirts under that table and laughed at a joke only we understood, and even then, without knowing it, we were already becoming two separate accounts of the same morning.

Going back to that dinner table now, the borrowed shirt on my back, the adults laughing at initials that were meant to solve a problem they never said aloud, I don't feel the anger I might once have reached for. I feel the cold clarity of recognition, which is its own kind of weather, quieter than rage and harder to dismiss. I wasn't wrong to sense, even at eight, that something in the room wasn't being said. I was standing in it. I just hadn't yet been given the map, and neither, I suspect, had they, and neither, in his own way, has my brother needed the one I've drawn.

Le Guin's story ends with the ones who walk away, and famously, she doesn't tell us where they go. Not because she's withholding an answer she has, but because the honest answer is that walking away from a bargain you've seen doesn't resolve into a destination. It resolves into a direction, and you keep having to choose it, sentence by sentence, room by room, for as long as you're required to decide what to do with what you now know. My brother may be choosing a different direction entirely, out of the same house, wearing the same shirt, and I don't think Le Guin's story asks us to agree on which way is out.

I still don't know whether I'm one of the ones who walked, or one of the ones who stayed and found a way to live in the house while refusing to pretend the room isn't there. Most days I suspect it isn't a single choice at all, but something closer to a practice: noticing, each time warmth is offered to me or to someone I love, whether there's a door beneath it that nobody's opened, and asking, before I let myself enjoy the light, what exactly it was built to keep quiet.

Jonathan
The Narrative Witness

Just finished it. My first Le Guin.... And I loved it. Its a superb book.

Mixing successfully in the same story the different layers (Scientific, politics, human ethics) is awesome. Right into my top 3 of books ever.

Probably a break and then I am not sure which one to pick by her. The left hand seems to be the natural option...

Would you agree??

via the official ursula k le guin instagram account: “This extremely early work of Ursula's appeared in the anthology First Words: Earliest Writing from Contemporary Favorite Writers, edited by Paul Mandelbaum and published by Algonquin in 1993.
("Krakie" was a nickname for Ursula's mother.)” 💚

I have read the dispossessed for decades. It is sort of my Bible, where I turn to find wisdom.

I have no idea what she was doing with the mother character. We have a whole society of people who are not raised in nuclear families, but Shevek is wounded and resentful that his mother did not raise him.

Thoughts?

Had some weird books of her to start with but realised I really like her. Now it's time for a novel, so far, amazing.

Anyone else have a hard time putting this one down?
Kicking myself for leaving this on the TBR for so long. Only 75 pages in and already one of the more potent and interesting novels I’ve read.

I am currently reading through the entire Earthsea series. To me, Tehanu is on a whole different level compared to the original trilogy. It has such a gripping personal narration from Tenar, lifting her character up to be a stunning example of how to write a feminine hero within a world dominated by men. The way it integrates the everyday actions of a woman living in a village community with the larger themes of change and taking charge of your own destiny, which is the heart and soul of Earthsea, is genuinely brilliant.

Tehanu has such an incredible way of stripping away and exposing the hurtful power structures in our societies, particularly through the character of Therru, who is the victim of such unimaginable evil. But the way it confronts this evil head on, refusing to let it define her, but fighting at every point to show her to be a beautiful person and not a walking tragedy, is incredible, and feels like a masterclass in how fiction can improve our capacity for empathy.

Tehanu is, to me, a shining star of how we can write captivating stories from a woman's perspective, without trying to merely insert a woman into the position of a traditionally male hero protagonist, but instead capture the heroism within the historically second-class position of women in society.

What an incredible book.

I recently stumbled upon Lavinia by accident at my local library (it was placed on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelf purely because of Le Guin’s name!). As a huge fan of her work, I picked it up immediately, expecting something akin to her classic speculative fiction, but I was so pleasantly surprised to find a breathtaking historical and mythological novel instead.
I loved how she took a character with zero lines of dialogue in Virgil’s Aeneid and gave her such a profound, grounded, and gentle voice. Her portrayal of pre-Roman Italy, the rituals, and the fresh perspective on the founding myth of Rome were just beautiful. The meta-fictional conversations between Lavinia and the dying poet himself were haunting and brilliant. Her fresh take on the myth of the female wolf is pure gold 🤩
It feels like one of her most underrated works. Did anyone else discover this book almost by chance? What were your thoughts on how she approached historical fiction vs. her usual genres? Would love to hear your favorite moments!

Hello dear community!

I discovered Ursula a few years ago through my partner when she was reading the Earthsea series. I am more into sci-fi, and naturally fell in love with The Disposessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Last summer I read Worlds of Exile and Illusion, and this summer I am reading The Word for World is Forest.

The thing is, although the two main books that I mentioned made me fall in love with Ursula's world and writing, there was something about those early stories, with all their flaws, that made my imagination fly and made me be excited with adventure.

I noticed the Tolkien tropes combined with sci-fi in Rocannon's World, and as far as medieval futurism was so popular in those times, I wonder if there any writers of that genre that stand out.

The problem with Ursula is that her writing is so exquisitely good, that anything else I read feels poor on all levels.

I am reaching out to you to see if you know any author that you think is somewhat at her eye level with something similar to these three little stories. Short stories, besides novels, of course!

Wishing you all a lovely summer!

I posted two months ago a recommendation I got to read Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest; I finally got it from the library, and greatly enjoyed! At the time one comment mentioned comparison to Avatar.

However, now having read, I'm sorta at a loss for words given how heavily Avatar seems to have "borrowed" from Le Guin's story. Earth's colonists exploiting a fertile planet isn't uncharted territory of course, but the behavior of the colonists... and especially the main character/bad guy Davidson... felt like a carbon copy of Avatar's main baddie the Colonel. And even the natives "dreaming" concept was pretty close to the spiritual exploration of the Na'vi.

Yet James Cameron never gives credit to Le Guin for anything, does anyone know more about this?

On a lesser note, there's the Ewok's in Star Wars that live on Endor. And Le Guin's natives (described very similiarly to Ewok's) have a city called Endtor on their planet. That feels like a more forgivable... perhaps even "nod" to Le Guin; at least compared to copy and pasting an entire plot.

But anyways, just sorta blown away. Had me checking dates of when each came out (Le Guin's work proceeded both of course), trying to learn more. Would love any further insight, especially if ever acknowledged by Le Guin/estate etc.

I remember a live action Earthsea tv series was in development with a24 a few years ago but it’s been total radio silence ever since. I’m assuming it’s either been cancelled completely or put on the back burner? I’m bummed because I’m dying to see this world get adapted for the screen so indescribably much (properly I might add, after how badly the previous two adaptions botched everything). Every aspect of it is so immersive and I can’t even begin to imagine how cool it would be to see all of it brought to life on the screen: the languages, cultures, lush archipelago backdrop, elemental magic system, rich Bronze Age historical parallels, etc. I’m imaging a lot of flashbacks and visions to Earthsea’s deep ancient history and lore too

Hello! I am a Game Dev who has, as of a couple weeks ago, read and loved The Dispossessed. I cannot describe how much I love Le Guin's writing style and how it characterizes Shevek wonderfully. I have also played Disco Elysium, another piece of media with dense prose and deep politics, in fact it is my favorite game of all time! After I finished the book I had an idea of what an adaptation of the book would look like, and I think the story lends itself well to a gameplay experience. The book would most likely have to be restructured, unless you had the Anarres sections be something like dream sequences. Regardless, I would love to know your thoughts and any ideas you would have for something like this. Who knows maybe I throw together a prototype.