Skip to main content

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.
Anonymous said…
I await it you on the Bloody rules thread.

Lepidus.
Highwaylass said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
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.
Cicero said…
Sounds like the Left hand of Darkness is my next read! Thanks everyone.

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch