Like many people I read the Earthsea books of Ursula K. Le Guin when I was a teenager.
I enjoyed the mystical sweep and the moral dilemmas that were presented in the stories. Unlike the traditional sward and sorcery genre, actions in Earthsea tend to have consequences- bad as well as good- and there are no particularly easy answers.
I was talking with some fellow bloggers the other day and they also remembered the books warmly.
Recently, whilst at an airport somewhere, I found several sci-fi books by the same author.
I have always enjoyed the technical sci-fi of writers like Asimov and Arthur Clarke. However Le Guin's work was a revelation.
I read The Telling first, possibly because, being a fairly recent book, it was more prominently displayed. The latest book I have read is The Dispossessed which I enjoyed even more.
Le Guin's talent is to write from a certain point of view without sounding preachy. The subtleties of Earthsea are repeated on a wider and far more adult scale. So in the (fairly small) amount of time I have free at the moment, I intend to pick up the rest of her sci-fi books- and it is good to have this to look forward to!
I enjoyed the mystical sweep and the moral dilemmas that were presented in the stories. Unlike the traditional sward and sorcery genre, actions in Earthsea tend to have consequences- bad as well as good- and there are no particularly easy answers.
I was talking with some fellow bloggers the other day and they also remembered the books warmly.
Recently, whilst at an airport somewhere, I found several sci-fi books by the same author.
I have always enjoyed the technical sci-fi of writers like Asimov and Arthur Clarke. However Le Guin's work was a revelation.
I read The Telling first, possibly because, being a fairly recent book, it was more prominently displayed. The latest book I have read is The Dispossessed which I enjoyed even more.
Le Guin's talent is to write from a certain point of view without sounding preachy. The subtleties of Earthsea are repeated on a wider and far more adult scale. So in the (fairly small) amount of time I have free at the moment, I intend to pick up the rest of her sci-fi books- and it is good to have this to look forward to!
Comments
My own favourite is ‘Always Coming Home’. Not hardcore science fiction but an account of a more believable utopia. It is believable because the people in ‘The Valley’ still manage to make very human muddles of their lives through their own choices but sort themselves out, more or less.
Lepidus.
I'm not aware of many other authors who take their own work to pieces in the public domain.