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The dispossesed of Earthsea

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!

Comments

Edis said…
Luck man! You still have ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ (in which a King gets pregnant) to discover.

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.
10:58 am
Anonymous said…
I await it you on the Bloody rules thread.

Lepidus.
10:41 am
Highwaylass said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
4:55 pm
Highwaylass said…
I deleted my comment as I realised too late it gave the game away on the Left Hand of Darkness...in briefer version, I recommend her essay "Left Hand of Darkness: Redux" in which she revisits the work with a more advanced feminist consciousness to question the portrayal of gender and sexual roles which she adopted at the time of writing.

I'm not aware of many other authors who take their own work to pieces in the public domain.
4:58 pm
Cicero said…
Sounds like the Left hand of Darkness is my next read! Thanks everyone.
6:15 pm
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