Ursula Le Guin: the Earthsea Quartet
I’m a fan of fiction that deals in world-building - the creation of not just foreign lands but entire alternate worlds and universes holds so much room for the writer’s imagination. My appreciation of the likes of Pullman, Tolkein and Le Guin does not stem purely from the portrayal of fantastical environs far-removed from our own though. Such fiction often incorporates ideas and issues of our own world but in doing so presents these ideas and issues in a refreshing and different light that helps us understand them in a new and possibly more productive way. Ursula Le Guin for example has addressed topics as far-reaching as politics, organised religion, racial and gender prejudice and the balance between humanity and nature in her fictional work centred on the world of Earthsea.
The first four full-length Earthsea novels (the fourth originally intended to be the last, but more recently followed by The Other Wind) are available in paperback format as one volume, which is a convenient and appropriate way to approach the series. They are self-contained works but take place chronologically, which means reading them in such an order is, to my mind at least, strongly advised but not essential. Earthsea is clearly far-removed from planet Earth in the Twentieth Century but as with similarly themed literature, it can be read as fantasy/alternate universe or equally as an allegorical work that deals with subject matter that is universal to both the world of Earthsea and our own. For all its talk of magic, dragons and distant lands, each novel has a lot to say about human nature and how we perceive our own world, here and now.
