Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea

Abstract What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. She sets readers adrift among worlds: peripatetic but somehow at home. Somehow, she sublimely mixes comfort with revelatory, emancipatory unsettlement. Small wonder that she has inspired later speculative writers, among them Neil Gaiman, Kim Stanley Robinson, N. K. Jemisin. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea aims to do justice to both Le Guin’s passionate simplicity and her revenant complexity. It also makes the case for the boldness and coldness of the often-overlooked later three books of Earthsea. In Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind (written decades after A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore were published between 1968 and 1972) she turned a cold eye, a dragon’s searching eye, back on the comfortable green world she herself had made decades earlier. They unfold a distinctive vision of the writer’s task: world-building as responsibility, plus openness. Call it invitational realism. She builds a world that leaves the real task of building, of creating, of imagining, and of reimagining, with her readers. Drawing on my own crooked path—from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood—Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar’s stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation.