'Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea' by John Plotz
Ursula Le Guin was remarkable, and not only for breaking into the science-fiction writers boy club in the 1960s. She produced work at a high level, largely taking the technology of imagined worlds for granted and drawing from anthropology and linguistics rather than the hard sciences. She also wrote a series of fantasy novels that deserve to be ranked with J.R.R. Tolkien. Her Middle-Earth is called Earthsea.
John Plotz was profoundly influenced by Earthsea as a bookish, alienated teenager in ‘80s Washington D.C. His extended essay becomes highly personal without losing sight of Earthsea’s universal implications. For Plotz, Le Guin offers more than simple escape from our world and is a response “to many of the woes of the world at large—ethno-nationalism, climate change, the ever-increasing American wealth gap.” But not in obvious ways. The fantasy of Earthsea is truer than literary realism for “refusing the neatness that plot demands.” Le Guin’s Taoism made her suspicious of anyone’s claims to neatly drawn solutions. Many of the turns in Earthsea’s saga result from the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions.
Plotz, a humanities professor at Brandeis, sees the original Earthsea trilogy as a response to America in the Nixon years. If so, her insights are more subliminal than political from her willingness to understand multiple perspectives. She was “not optimistic,” Plotz writes, “but inevitably and relentlessly hopeful.”
