https://newrepublic.com/article/146948/education-earthsea
"The most beguiling promise of fantasy fiction is that of self-knowledge. At
some point the protagonist discovers, with the force of a calling from God,
that he is no mere mortal, but a wizard, a dragonslayer, a king. It is an
irresistible idea for adolescents particularly, who are in the midst of
discovering themselves and trying on different identities. How much easier
everything would be if the choice were essentially made for you! And how
amazing it would be to find that you were, as you might have secretly hoped,
special, that you could speak to animals or move objects with your mind. It
puts the “fantasy” in fantasy, and is one reason this genre is often associated
with young adult fiction.
The Earthsea cycle by Ursula Le Guin, who died in January at the age of 88,
excels at these tropes. A boy discovers that he possesses great magical power.
A girl in a forgotten corner of the world learns that she has a critical part
to play in that world’s fate. Another boy, after an arduous trial, realizes
that all his effort has been a prelude to him meeting a historic destiny. These
are familiar fantasy plotlines, clichés even. Although rooted in our oldest
legends, they hold less appeal to adults in the twenty-first century than Le
Guin’s more critically celebrated works—her visionary novels exploring the
mutability of gender and the glittering nightmare of market capitalism. (These,
unlike the Earthsea books, were marketed to mature readers.) As Le Guin has
written, “Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.”
In our age, movies and television have taken over the enchantment business.
From
Star Wars to
Game of Thrones, the themes are familiar from our news
feeds—terrorism, class war, the anthropocene—and the audience’s sense of wonder
is evoked with computer-generated giants and battle scenes. The
Harry Potter
series is a model of the new type. It not only reflects the Hollywood
mainstreaming of fantasy fiction, but also combines the basic fantasy set-up
(normal boy is spirited away to a parallel world of magic and adventure) with
the leaden, self-serious spectacle of the modern fantasy epic (army of good
guys fights evil racist despot and his minions).
To return to Earthsea today is to encounter a different kind of fantasy work,
where knowing oneself is a painstaking, ceaseless endeavor. It is an end in
itself, not a means for characters to engage in bigger, supposedly more
consequential issues. It is what the story is
about, and the wonders Earthsea
offers are scaled accordingly, to the sublime horizons of a life."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-global-malaria-lgbtq-warriors-river-albania/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
