Exploring Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Fantasy Masterpiece

Thank you, Max.

So I want to start by asking each of our panelists, what is it that you love about RC? So maybe Brian, we'll start with you, and then we'll go to Karen and Nivo.

Yeah, I've been reading Earthsea books since the first ones came out.

I think I was in high school.

And I was a big fantasy fan already.

But these were something that just bowled me over because they were not European.

They were not Christian in worldview.

They weren't even East Coast U.S.

It was a place that I felt I could enter into.

Thank you, Brian.

Karen? I came to these a little later.

I had already read several of Ursula's science fiction books by the time I read Earthsea, so I was a bit older.

And I have often wondered how much I would have liked them if I had read them as a teenager the way Brian did.

They're very sober books.

So that is something that really works well for me as an older reader.

And I was probably in my late 20s when I read them.

I don't know that it would have worked so well for me if I had been younger, although many of my friends who did read the books younger assure me that it would have, that I would have absolutely loved them.

I think... a lot of my attachment to fantasy and to science fiction is very much rooted in setting, that this is the one genre where a story can take place absolutely anywhere.

And for that reason, I feel in these literatures, you're more firmly in the mind of the writer.

So the story is going on and you're following that, but you're also very much seeing the imagination of the writer at work.

And I think that I loved that about him.

I loved just the place of Earthsea.

And then I loved Ged, you know, the young man who makes one terrible mistake and spends the rest of the book paying for it.

Yeah, thank you.

And Nhi, how about you?