Somehow it knows Sparrowhawk's true name. The hero of the series, Sparrowhawk, is a proud, difficult boy from a mountainous island famous only for its pirates, goat-herds and wizards in a clandestine contest at the wizards' school between himself and the arrogant snob (yes, there's one in Potter, too), he reaches into the world of death and unleashes a nameless dark force, a clot of pure evil and malice, that pursues him to the ends of the earth. The purpose of the wizards' school in Earthsea is to teach one how to use magic without upsetting the balance of the world. There are competing magical forces: not so much between light and darkness, as between the wise and sensible use of magic - and darkness. There are dragons, for whom the ancient tongue is native, but they are not to be trusted: while incapable of lying, they have different conceptions of truth.
To know someone's true name is to have power over him or her it is vouchsafed only to those whom one trusts utterly. She builds a world that leaves the real task of building, of creating of imagining and ofĭrawing on his own crooked path-from a DC childhood to teaching in Prague to San Francisco journalism to graduate school and then parenthood-Plotz maps the ways that readers young and old find in Earthsea a kind of scholar's stone, a delightfully mutable surface that rewards recurrent contemplation.Earthsea is an imaginary archipelago, the traditional pre-industrial world of children's fantasy literature, but governed by a supremely compelling and simple idea: there is an ancient language of creation, and anyone who has the gift of sorcery and who can speak that language, in which things are given their true, as opposed to arbitrarily phonemic names, can master their physical presence. They unfold a distinctive vision of the writer's worldbuilding as responsibility plus openness. In Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, she turned a cold eye, a dragon's searching eye, back on the comfortable green world she herself had made decades earlier. The boldness and coldness of the later three books of Earthsea is a revelation. Small wonder the inspiration she has been for later speculative writers like Neil Gaiman, Kim Stanley Robinson, and N. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea aims to do justice to both Le Guin's passionate simplicity and her revenant complexity. She sublimely mixes comfort and revelatory, emancipatory unsettlement. Le Guin sets readers adrift among peripatetic but somehow at home. The reasons to love her Earthsea are many. Four decades and who knows how many re-readings later, her Earthsea owns him still. She owned John Plotz at age eight, on the overlit and understaffed second floor of the DC library.
What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. A book on the experience of reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea novels.
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