EARTHSEA books heading back to the screen

A fresh attempt to adapt Ursula K. Le Guin's classic Earthsea fantasy saga to the screen is underway.

A24 Studios have joined forces with producer Jennifer Fox (Michael Clayton, Nightcrawler) and Le Guin's son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, to bring the project to the screen. They are developing a television series which will faithfully adapt the books to the screen.

A previous attempt to adapt the books for television was made in 2004 by SyFy. Starring Shawn Ashmore and Kristin Kreuk, the mini-series was criticised for its huge deviations from the source material, in particular "whitewashing" the characters of Earthsea (most of whom are explicitly dark-skinned) with Caucasian actors.

In 2006 Studio Ghibli produced Tales from Earthsea, an animated film which is set in the Earthsea world but uses an original story. Le Guin was lukewarm on the results, and it is generally regarded as one of the weaker entries in the Studio Ghibli canon.

Le Guin passed away in January 2018 at the age of 88, but there has been a huge resurgence in interest in her work recently. The Books of Earthsea (2018), which collects all six Earthsea books and several novellas and short stories, has been a major success and has won its illustrator, Charles Vess, two Hugo Awards. A documentary film on Le Guin's career, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, has also won significant critical acclaim.

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

Since leaving the Tombs of Atuan more than twenty years ago, the former priestess Tenar has found a new life and a new family on the island of Gont. When her husband dies and her son goes to sea, she finds herself alone. When an injured child comes into her care and the wizard Ged returns to his home island after an arduous journey, Tenar finds her life changing once more.

Tehanu is an unusual book. It is the fourth novel in the Earthsea series but it is very different in tone and content to the original trilogy. It is a quieter, more reflective book, less concerned with adventure than it is with the musings over the value of life, love, freedom, motherhood and responsibility.

The book focuses on Tenar, the main character of The Tombs of Atuan, the second book of the series. We learn that, despite the romantic tension between her and Ged, they never realised that affection and instead went their different ways, Ged rising to become Archmage of Earthsea (as seen in The Farthest Shore) and Tenar choosing a quiet life as a farmer's wife, despite being given the opportunity to live in luxury in Havnor or learn the ways of magic from Ged's old tutor. The book sees Tenar reflecting on her decisions, mixing satisfaction with raising two children well with regrets that perhaps she could have made other choices.

In this sense the book is about the hesitancy of middle age, when one is still young enough to find a new career or relationship or path to happiness, but old enough for some weariness and cynicism to set in. Tenar and Ged are now mature adults rather than the callow youths of their first meeting and now have to ask some serious questions about how they are going to spend their latter years.

The book is reflective but not devoid of incident. A forbidding enemy has arrived on the island and Ged and Tenar have to face down and defeat him. Dragons are seen and magic is performed. But Tehanu is not an epic fantasy novel of action and sorcery and explosions, but a book that uses fantasy to explore the common, human condition. On that level it is reflective and melancholy, but powerfully and beautifully written.

Tehanu (****½) is an introspective, quietly powerful fantasy novel. It is available now in the UK and USA as part of The Books of Earthsea omnibus edition.

The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Magic is losing its power throughout Earthsea. Ged, now the Archmage of Roke, decides to investigate and embarks on a fateful voyage which will take him to distant corners of the archipelago. He is accompanied by Arren, Prince of Enlad, a young man who is also seeking his own destiny and fulfilment.

The Farthest Shore (1972) concludes the original Earthsea trilogy, which was never meant to be a trilogy; Le Guin started work soon afterwards on a fourth book, Tehanu, but for various reasons it was delayed and not completed and published until 1990. Still, as a wrapping-up of storylines and character arcs from the three books it does thematically feel like the ending of a series.

At its core, The Farthest Shore is the story of confronting one's own demons and recognising the consequences for poor choices. In this sense the book feels like an echo of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), the first novel in the series. In that novel Ged unleashes a dark shadow of himself into the world and has to find and confront it, which he eventually does at great cost. In The Farthest Shore the threat is more traditional, with Ged having acquired a nemesis in his adventures who now seeks revenge on Ged and domination over all the lands of Earthsea. In terms of the standard, trope-filled fantasy narrative, The Farthest Shore is the most traditional book in the series, with a callow young youth hero (Arren) learning wisdom from his mentor (Ged), who seeks out the enemy who would become a dark lord.

But this is a crude, reductionist reading of the story. As with the earlier Earthsea books and indeed much of Le Guin's work, the tone is melancholy rather than celebratory. Ged is a much older man than the last time we saw him and any hope that he may have found a life of happiness with Tenar (the protagonist of The Tombs of Atuan) appears to have been dashed. His life has been filled with great accomplishments and deeds, but Ged seems decidedly unhappy and bowed with the weight of responsibility. The decision to leave these behind and strike out himself in search of the answer to the mysteries afflicting the islands is clearly joyous. This novel, then, is the story of Ged resolving the lingering issues of his childhood and trying to find a way of achieving happiness in middle and older age; The Farthest Shore may therefore be the quintessential mid-life crisis novel, but with dragons.

As usual, Le Guin's inventiveness with worldbuilding and striking prose makes for an atmospheric and at times haunting story. Her characters are interesting, complex figures, although Arren occasionally risks blandness compared to Ged, his enemy and the dragons. The Tombs of Atuan was interesting in that it presented Ged solely from Tenar's point of view and gave us the external image of the character we spent all of A Wizard of Earthsea getting to know. The Farthest Shore gives us both, with Arren's view of Ged contrasting with Ged's own, less awe-inspired reflections.

This is therefore a sombre and at times dark book, but also one that is ultimately life-affirming, ending on a note that gives Ged and Earthsea hope for a much better future.

The Farthest Shore (****½) wraps up the opening Earthsea trilogy in fine, if occasionally maudlin, form. It is available now in the UK and USA as part of The Books of Earthsea omnibus edition.

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

Tenar is the high priestess of the Nameless Ones. She serves at the Tombs of Atuan, deep within the Kargish Empire, a place of rote and ritual. Despite the importance of her role she feels lonely and listless...until the day a wizard comes to her island.

The Tombs of Atuan (originally published in 1971) is the second novel in Ursula K. Le Guin's classic Earthsea sequence of novels, set in an enormous archipelago. It is not a direct sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea, the preceding novel, and in fact feels like a companion book more than a successor. The book focuses almost exclusively on the new character of Tenar, with the book's connection to A Wizard of Earthsea not becoming clearer until later on.

Tenar is an interesting character and it's a surprise to learn that she is Le Guin's first major female protagonist. Tenar is painted in Le Guin's traditional depth, as we get to know this young woman who combines curiosity, ruthlessness, loneliness and leadership skills. The book also inverts its presentation of Ged from the earlier novel. A Wizard of Earthsea was, for all of its travelling and epic journeys and mighty set-pieces, a deeply internal story of a boy finding out who he really is and making peace with himself. The Tombs of Atuan, being told entirely from Tenar's POV, instead allows us to meet and see Ged as strangers see him, wholly externally with only hints at what's going on under the surface. Thus our understanding of the main character of the series is expanded.

Le Guin's prose is powerful and evocative, and it's interesting in this novel that she flips the setting and feel of the earlier book on its head. A Wizard of Earthsea took place on land and sea under the sky, with the wind blowing in the characters' faces and freedom all around them, even as they were forced into a confrontation with a dark force they didn't understand. The Tombs of Atuan takes place almost entirely underground, our characters sometimes literally stifled and near-entombed under the earth, in claustrophobic surroundings. Le Guin nails this oppressive, stifled atmosphere and the elation the characters experience when they finally escape (not a spoiler, hopefully, since this is Book 2 of a six-book series).

There are some weaknesses to the novel. This is a short book, but even so, it does feel like an extended single episode rather than a novel-length narrative. Indeed, the book started as a short story for a magazine and had to be expanded to a longer word count for commercial reasons. It feels like maybe this should have been the opening section of a longer novel exploring more of Tenar's character (and it feels like her development is cut off just as it was starting to get interesting, and won't be revisited until the fourth book of the series) or remained as a short story. As it stands, the story feels a bit too slight and claustrophobic to sustain a full novel, despite the strengths of the writing and characterisation.



The Tombs of Atuan (****) is a slight story and perhaps a tad underwhelming compared to A Wizard of Earthsea, but it remains an ambitious and fascinating novel. Le Guin's writing power and her mastery of character is on full display. It is available now in the UK and USA as part of The Books of Earthsea omnibus edition.

Wertzone Classics: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

When Karg raiders attack the island of Gont, the inhabitants of a small village are saved by a young boy who has discovered that he has magical powers. A sorcerer directs him to the island of Roke to there learn the ways of wizardry and controlling his abilities. Ged, as he becomes known, shows great promise but his pride is his downfall: an arrogant display of magical power goes awry, and unleashes a dark evil upon the world which only Ged can defeat.

Originally published in 1968, Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea has become an acknowledged classic and required reading in the fantasy canon. Fantasy was in a far more nascent state in the 1960s than now, with the genre divided between more literary works (such as Gormenghast) and action-driven swords and sorcery adventures, such as the Conan tales by Robert E. Howard. However, the immense success of The Lord of the Rings had driven publishers to seek out or even commission more work in the genre. Le Guin agreed to write a story about a wizard, inspired by the idea of what Merlin was like when he was a child. For a setting Le Guin was struck by Earthsea, a vast archipelago of hundreds of islands she'd created for a couple of short stories in 1964, and began work on a story that expanded the detail of the setting considerably.

She also tremendously popularised the "wizarding school" idea later used to blockbuster effect by J.K. Rowling. Le Guin didn't create the trope, which was first deployed by T.H. White in The Sword in the Stone (1939) and then by Theodore Cogswell in "The Wall Around the World" (1953), Robert Sheckley in "The Accountant" (1954) and Eleanor Estes in The Witch Family (1960), but she certainly ran with it.

A Wizard of Earthsea is still, however, a work that wrong-foots the audience. Most such fantasy tales feature the hero encountering an external threat (a monster, a dragon, an enemy wizard, a dark lord) and working to overcome it with their wits, skills and the help of friends they meet upon the way. This book doesn't do that: instead, Ged's primary opponent is himself, his own hubris, arrogance and the dark shadow of his own soul. His enemy is his internal fears and weaknesses, given form. The result is a profoundly introspective book about a character having to find himself and grow up, but where the metaphor becomes literal.

It's an audacious and, I suspect, slightly bemusing idea for younger children, but it certainly adds a tremendous amount of depth to the character of Ged, helping him avoid being a traditional "chosen one" hero figure. Before he can do any heroics in the future, he has to first come to terms with himself.

Which isn't to say that Le Guin skimps on the other elements required for a classic fantasy. The worldbuilding is excellent and atmospheric, the small secondary cast of characters is well-drawn, and for such a short book there's quite a few memorable set-pieces, running from Ged defeating the Karg raiders with his wits, to his mage-duel with Jasper which goes horribly wrong to his epic confrontation with the Dragon of Pendor. The book also touches on the value of friendship and the true nature of a hero.

A Wizard of Earthsea (*****) is fifty years old this year, but with its focus on internal conflict and its sophisticated worldbuilding, feels fresher and more vibrant than ever. It works well as both a stand-alone novel and as the opening novel of the six-book Earthsea sequence. It is available now in the UK and USA as part of The Books of Earthsea omnibus edition.

RIP Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy of all time, has passed away at the age of 88. The cause of death has not been revealed, but it was known that Le Guin had been in poor health for several months.

Le Guin's contributions to the field of science fiction and fantasy were legion, but she will be best-remembered for her seminal and defining Earthsea series, one of the earliest "YA" fantasy success stories, and several key and defining works of science fiction, most notably The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974). She has won the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award multiple times. Her fans and appreciators include Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood.

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California in 1929. She was the daughter of well-known academics, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Kracaw. She was raised in a happy family and inspired by her parents and their numerous academic friends, she started writing very early. Her first fantasy story was written at age 7 and by age 11 she'd started submitting short stories to magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction. Le Guin went on to achieve a BA in Renaissance French and Italian Literature and an MA in French and Italian Literature. She met and married Charles Le Guin in 1953, with whom she had three children, and she began publishing short fiction in the early 1960s.

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

In 1964 Le Guin published "The Word of Unbinding", the first story set on her signature fantasy world of Earthsea. In 1968 she followed it up with the first novel in the setting, A Wizard of Earthsea. The novel, unusually, attracted both tremendous critical acclaim and significant sales. She followed up the book with several sequels and other works set in the same world: The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990), The Other Wind (2001) and Tales from Earthsea (2001).

A Wizard of Earthsea has been adapted for the screen twice. In 2005 SyFy produced Legend of Earthsea, which "whitewashed" the cast (in the original novel, the entire cast was dark-skinned) and lost all of the thematic subtlety and depth from the novel. The following year Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli released Tales of Earthsea, an animated film. Le Guin had enjoyed Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro and was keen to see him handle the movie, but was disappointed when he handed the project off to his son to direct, who in turn produced a more conventional action-adventure story with the resolution revolving around simply killing the villain (a choice Le Guin found boring).

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”

Le Guin also had an ambitious cycle of future history stories, known as the Hainish or Ekumen novels. These novels were relatively individual in story and theme, but united by a shared (if not explicitly stated) history, partially defined by the creation of an interstellar communication device known as "the ansible" (a name cheerfully stolen by David Langford for his long-running SFF newsletter). The two-best-known works in this sequence are The Left Hand of Darkness, which explores the definition of humanity and identification on a world of shifting genders, and The Dispossessed, a lengthy and sustained interrogation of the left/right political paradigm.

Le Guin's other notable work includes The Lathe of Heaven (1970), about someone whose dreams intrude on and shape reality, and Lavinia (2009), her final novel, which explores the titular character from Virgil's The Aeneid.

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

In later years Le Guin found herself enjoying her status as an elder stateswoman of the genre. She praised authors coming up through the ranks, particularly Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, and forged a friendship with Canadian literary author Margaret Atwood. Atwood went through a phase of hating being called a science fiction author, but through several public debates Le Guin explored with her the idea that maybe it wasn't such a bad label after all (Le Guin herself struggled with the label when trying to be taken seriously as a literary author in the 1970s, before concluding it didn't matter).

Ursula K. Le Guin's output was modest compared to many other authors, but her impact on science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction was seismic. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are among the greatest works of speculative fiction ever written, her inspirational status in the field (especially to female writers, but to everyone who sought to layer greater themes and meaning into genre work) is unrivalled and her literary legacy formidable. She will be missed.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 6

The publication of The Lord of the Rings, and in particular the explosion of its popularity after 1965, did not result in an overnight transformation in the way fantasy was perceived and written. Indeed, the dominant form of fantasy throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s remained sword and sorcery of the kind pioneered by Robert E. Howard.

Sword and sorcery and epic fantasy are distinct subgenres, although sharing some similarities (and both can be jointly referred to as secondary world fantasy). Sword and sorcery is seen as primarily action-driven, with violence and magic being dominant forces. Sword and sorcery books are generally shorter, and although often arranged in series there are perhaps less links between each book, with the focus more on stand-alone adventures. In the middle of the century sword and sorcery could also be quite weird, taking on board influences from science fiction as well as the fantastic.

Sword and sorcery had become the dominant form of fantastic fiction thanks to the likes of Howard and Leiber, and the work of other authors like L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter in popularising and expanding the genre. However, and perhaps surprisingly, it was this seemingly masculine subset of fantasy that brought in the first major female writers to the genre.

Starting in the 1930s, C.L. Moore wrote a number of short stories in both the science fiction and fantasy settings. Her works appeared in magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding. Moore is notable for introducing one of fantasy's first heroines in the Jirel of Joiry series. In the following decade Leigh Brackett began writing numerous sword and sorcery-like stories, but set these on other planets like Mars and Venus, hence having them categorised as planetary romances (the same fate also befell male authors, most notably Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars-set Barsoom series which arguably has more in common with swords and sorcery then science fiction).

In 1963 Andre Norton published Witch World, in which a man from our world is transported to a fantasy realm of warring factions. It is later revealed that people from other worlds and universes have been brought to this planet and the fantasy-like backdrop is melded with science fiction ideas. Norton wrote or co-wrote more than two dozen novels, novellas and short stories in this setting, and allowed other writers to use it as well. Witch World introduces the idea of having a fantasy world where only women can use magic, an idea later utilised by Robert Jordan in The Wheel of Time (unlike that series, men can also use magic safely and later learn to do so).

Male writers also continued to expand the remit of sword and sorcery and take it in unusual directions. In 1961, Michael Moorcock published The Dreaming City, which introduced readers to the character Elric of Melnibone. An albino riven by angst and introspection, Elric was deliberately designed as the antithesis of traditional heroes like Conan. The early Elric stories ended with the annihilation of Elric and his world; later books and novellas would fill in his backstory. Moorcock, who swiftly gained a reputation as the enfant terrible of science fiction for his introduction of the New Wave of the genre, enjoyed skewering holes in the perception of fantasy as well. In the 1970s he published controversial criticism of Tolkien (for his conservatism) and H.P. Lovecraft (for his racist viewpoints that spilled over into some of his fiction).

Rewinding a little to the same year that The Lord of the Rings was published, 1954, Poul Anderson released his seminal fantasy The Broken Sword, a gritty story of war, death and magic based on Viking mythology. Although relatively obscure today, writers from Moorcock to Richard Morgan have sung its praises as a demonstration of a darker, less comfortable form of fantasy to that written by Tolkien. Indeed, some have cited The Broken Sword as the forerunner of the so-called "grimdark" movement of fantasy that would eventually continue through Stephen Donaldson to more contemporary authors like Scott Bakker and Mark Lawrence.

In 1968 another author took a step into the ring to write a work that was neither Tolkienesque, nor sword and sorcery. Ursula K. LeGuin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea was set in a (mapped) fictional archipelago with a predominantly black cast of characters, a fact lost on the writers of the poor SyFy mini-series based on the books. The book inverted the fantasy stereotype of wizards being wise old men by asking where they came from and how they learned to do magic. This began the "magical academy" trope of fantasy fiction, which later found its ultimate form of popularity in the Harry Potter series (and echoes may also be detected in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels are probably the closest we have to a "traditional" epic fantasy series between Tolkien and 1977, the year in which the modern genre really came into being.

In the same year, Anne McCaffrey published Dragonflight, the first novel in the Dragonriders of Pern series. Dragonflight is many respects an epic fantasy, but also a "rationalised fantasy", where the fantastic elements are explained by a science fictional background. The Pern series, despite its nominal SF background, would go on to influence many future fantasy novels, particularly with its depiction of dragons as allies and mounts rather than simple monsters.

Other authors continued to write tales of the fantastic without following up on Tolkien's lead. In 1970 Roger Zelazny published Nine Princes in Amber, about a man who discovers he was really destined to rule Amber, the one true world of which all others are reflections. This was the first of The Chronicles of Amber, which eventually extended to ten novels and enormous critical acclaim. Patricia A. McKillip achieved a significant breakthrough with her third novel, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld in 1974, but then surpassed it in 1976 with The Riddle-Master of Hed, the first novel of The Riddle-Master Trilogy. Children's fantasy also became more popular around this time, with notable works of juvenile fantasy including the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper (1965-77), Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1977) and Elidor by Alan Garner (1965).

However, the biggest and most successful juvenile fantasy of this time was Watership Down by Richard Adams, published in 1972. At first glance this book about rabbits has little to do with epic fantasy, but some of the tropes of the genre can be found within its pages. There is the lengthy, dangerous quest through unknown and hostile territory. There is a complex mythology including creation myths and spirits representing death. There is even magic, in the form of seers and visions. Foreshadowing the YA novels of modern times, the book is also fairly grim for a children's story, with major characters dying. Unusually, the novel's darker and more violent aspects survived into the excellent 1978 animated film adaptation.

By the latter part of the 1970s fantasy was a thriving form of fiction, but no-one had stepped forwards to really follow up The Lord of the Rings, or do something different with that form of fantasy. There was one last piece of the puzzle to slot into place before that would start to happen, and it came from two Americans who were not authors of fiction. Instead they were nascent game designers by the name of Gary Gygax and David Arneson, and the impact their creation would have on modern fantasy would be second only to Tolkien.