Lessons From Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 'A Wizard of Earthsea' is a classic, no question. But does anyone still care? Writers and creators of fantasy, neglect this book at your peril
‘Earthsea: The First Four Books’, Puffin, 2016, cover art by Matt Jones
How did we forget A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)? Everyone agrees Ursula K. Le Guin’s rites-of-passage fantasy is a classic: profound, lyrical, exquisitely written, a masterclass in the evocation of magic and revered by uber-hip authors from Margaret Atwood to that guy who wrote Sandman. Yet as seminal masterworks go, there never seems to be much buzz about it these days, certainly not next to gargantuan fantasy franchises like Game of Thrones and whatever The Lord of the Rings is these days.
Though initially conceived as a one-off, Wizard of Earthsea became the first in a six-book series that gradually expanded over the course of five decades to include The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990), Tales From Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001). The Earthsea Cycle, as it’s known, has sold over one million copies, scored copious awards and beguiled generations of readers.
Parnassus Press, 1968. Cover art by Ruth Robbins. One of the few covers not to whitewash Le Guin’s non-white hero!
Written on commission for children’s picture-book publishers Parnassus Press, Wizard of Earthsea was aimed at what would now be described as a YA readership. Yet Le Guin’s distant, dreamy prose and meditative storytelling might be a hard sell for today’s demographic, more accustomed to the Netflix-ready immediacy of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass (which sold 25 million copies alone) or Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books. Classic though it is, the Earthsea Cycle doesn’t have a fraction of those modern fanbases.
When A Wizard of Earthsea came out in 1968, Tolkien and Robert E. Howard were driving the boom in fantasy fiction. The hippies were scrawling ‘Frodo Lives’ on their campus textbooks; the barbarians were brooding on the covers of their dime-store paperbacks. The following year, editor Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series would begin excavating forgotten legends like Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell and Hope Mirrlees, building a canon of western fantasy literature worthy of serious, ‘Adult’ consideration.
But A Wizard of Earthsea was just a ‘kid’s book’.
Never mind that Le Guin won both a Hugo and a Nebula for Best Novel in 1970 for her gender-anarchist sci-fi The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which would go on to rank second only to Dune in a 1987 Locus poll of All-Time Best Novels…
