The Writings of Ursula Le Guin (original) (raw)

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Friday, December 17, 2004

1:26AM

Viewpoint on the scifi channel's Earthsea from someone who hasn't read the books:

I recently watched the first half of Earthsea on the scifi channel. After it ended, I remarked to my brother that it was complete crap, and he agreed. I said that I got the feeling that Earthsea was probably a book series that was adapted extremely poorly... it just had that feeling of a script stripped from a great book series and thrown together for a movie with little consideration. I came online to see if my theory panned out, and low-and-behold, Earthsea is, indeed, a book series. And so for those of you who feel that the author was given the shaft on this production, you are absolutely correct. But don't worry - anyone who watched the scifi version and has half a brain can tell that it was a complete bastardization of what is probably a great series. I didn't even bother watching the second half of the miniseries. Instead, I'm ordering the book series from Amazon.

And with all of that said, can I ask any of you for other scifi book recommendations? I don't read scifi much, but recently I blew through the "His Dark Materials" series and the Harry Potter books... and I know this is a weak, mainstream start, so hopefully you guys can point me toward some other good books. ;)

8:33AM - commodified fantasy

From the forward to Tales from Earthsea, 2001, Harcourt hardcover edition, p. xiv:

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turing their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life--of a sort, for a while.

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts empires.