Earthsea – A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin (2015)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The first three books are a classic "bildungsroman"--a coming of age story--both as a whole and individually. The point of view character in each novel is a young person, passing through late adolescence and into adulthood. In this respect it is more comparable to Harry Potter or The Dark Is Rising or perhaps His Dark Materials fantasy series.
The world LeGuin builds for the story is incredibly rich and unique, like Middle Earth and the world of ASOIAF, but the structure of the stories are considerably simpler.
However, the "inner life" of the stories are richer. Like the Dune series, the novels of Earthsea spend a lot of time deep in the perspective of a few key characters. I think it is one reason these novels are so hard to film in a satisfying way.
That said, where Earthsea really distinguishes itself from almost any other fantasy series, is the fact that LeGuin came back to the series much later in her life and added two more books. These are set in the same world but regard it with different perspectives of age and gender.
The original trilogy is classic fantasy about Our Heroes who are uniquely gifted and ultimately save the day and pass into legend. The final two books are about what happens to those people when they face the complicated and unsatisfying future: their personal gifts are no longer powerful, and their beliefs and assumptions are challenged by a new generation... and ultimately found to be not only flawed, but awful. Some of the things they defended were not absolutely good after all, but the lasting artifacts of earlier selfishness, bias, and bigotry.
I resisted reading these later two novels for a long time because I enjoyed the purity of the stories in the original trilogy. But now having read them all, I find I can enjoy them in related but still somewhat separate ways.
If the later two novels don't sound like your kind of thing, you could read the first three now, and then visit the last two books a decade or two (or three) later. That would align your perspective with LeGuin's when she wrote them.
“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
EDIT And to add, I know this is an older series but I tend to read more science part of fiction and less fantasy.
> That thing is shit
Now everyone feels better!
Tolkien has perhaps the richer universe, but GRRM is all about the people. And to me, that's what truly fascinating. All the characters are interesting, and relatable in some way (even those that are evil, or very different).
Go further back to authors like H.G. Wells, and most of the characters didn't even have names (War of the Worlds and The Time Machine had very few named characters, for instance).
The Conan series, for instance, predates Tolkien by a decade.
Howard is more pulpy swords and sorcery with some horror he actually rewrote some westerns as Conan short stories. And Tolkien started work on what became LOTR etc before ww1 well before Howard.
And I personally found the first book (wizard) decent, but the sequels were pretty meh (imho). And even with the first, I found the climax pretty meh too (and saw it coming a mile away).
There is something about reading your first Tolkien fantasy book around 13-15 that just feels different. If you had read any of the Tolkien facsimiles at that age (Shannara, Wheel of Time etc) you may feel the same way. But if you reread those books now, you may feel different.
"All of the books share a single creation myth (though not all cultures are aware of it), a single cosmology, and are connected by an overarching story." [0]
Sure, one could argue that it's still not fully-formed, as it's still in the process of being written. But the same could easily be said for A Song of Ice and Fire.
The Stormlight Archive quickly won a place in my loved series category. I don't think I devoured any book from last year as quickly as when the latest entry in the series was released.
One of my favorite things about Brandon Sanderson is that he proactively engages readers (/u/mistborn on Reddit), and he gives regular status updates on his writing progress. I highly value transparency from authors.
I'd never heard of Earthsea, but the article managed to catch my interest. I'm adding it to my queue.
Reading his books, I feel like I'm in some kind of Marvel universe, complete with quippy dialogue and 'coolness' that to me gives a stink of 'commercialism' that I can't get past.
In the Stormlight Archive, Shallan is the best example of this: Her dialogue is so forcedly hip and witty that cringes abound whenever I read it. To me, it ruins the whole atmosphere and I feel like I'm in a plastic universe, rather than a living breathing one.
His worldbuilding is great, but his worlds are devoid of authenticity IMO.
Actually I thought most of the standalone short stories in the cosmere book itself were pretty great.
One of the reasons he's my favorite author is that he 1) pumps out solid books almost yearly and 2) his series are very different even though they're all fantasy.
Perhaps it was too far into the twilight-y romance through the first half to keep my attention. Great world-building, but I dislike the characters.
All his magic systems have well defined mechanics and strict rules behind them so it's kind a expected and I feel like somebody who used to play a lot of games see through it more easily. Whatever it's good or bad depend on your own preferences in fantasy.
Personally I see this as a good thing since opposite would be ever repeating contrived coincidence of just-one-another arcane trick rediscovery. Probably these limits on what magic can or cannot do is one of things that make him improve his writing.
I recently picked up the Way of Kings but found the way he described the action/fantastical elements really jarring. It was like he felt he needed to spell it out rather than let the reader discover it organically. I've been told I need to struggle through though as it's supposedly a great story.
"Like a videogame" is an apt description of Sanderson's approach, and not my thing. Even Jack Vance's magic system of memorizing spells, used in his Dying Earth stories and said to have inspired the Dungeons & Dragons RPG system, is more mysterious and mystical than Sanderson's. Which is the way it should be!
At worst it turns your exciting adventure novel into a textbook for arcane effects practitioners.
FWIW, I didn't find it over-explained, but I tend towards systems naturally.
Good "soft" magic is mysterious and often unreliable. It sometimes comes with a price. Main characters often do not understand it and cannot use it, or they misuse it to terrifying or hilarious results (e.g. Cugel in The Eyes of the Overworld).
The supernatural must be unknowable, otherwise it simply turns into the natural.
"A wizard/hacker did it" is simply bad writing.
I perfectly fine with this kind of stuff in something like Discworld because of nature of these books and how I read them, but for epic fantasy with more or less serious themes I expect events to have logic behind them. Sanderson's books still have mysteries, but they just served by the ways other than generic "magic". So there is plenty of things to make theories about during and after reading.
Ultimately, to me, literary fiction is NOT like programming, and it's not as easy to explain what works and what doesn't. Mystery and ambiguity are bad things in code but good in literature.
Which brings me full circle to why I dislike Sanderson's approach :)
I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
Still his problem with Shallan is pretty much the same as he had with Mat in first of his WoT books and basically with every other witty character in every of his earliest books. He just wasn't good enough for writing some types of characters, but still tried to include them regardless. I think everyone will agree that he actually become better at this since most of people I talked with enjoy Hoid in SA.
I don't try to justify it, but I think it's not that easy to fix character like Shallan since her character was well defined in first book released in 2010. I guess what we can see in Oathbringer it's attempt to do that although not very good one.
I very much disagree about his worlds lacking authenticity. It seems you have some strange suspension of disbelief resulting from Shallan's dialogue (which I find is true to her character and upbringing). I agree some of the writing for dialogue is "off", but I feel much of this results from Sanderson's pace of writing.
"Well, she wanted me to get married too", Shallan said. "So I wouldn't call her sexist. Merely... Jasnah-ist?" She paused. "Jasnagynistic? No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?"
Now, without devolving into debating the anachronicity of the terms used here in general - this is a good example of what I am talking about, and perhaps 'hip' was the wrong way to word it, but it goes beyond mere 'bad wordplay' for me. If you can read the above without cringing, all the more power to you. For me, passages like these completely break immersion and leave me wondering whether I'm reading some kind of bad fanfic. And unfortunately, yes, that does color the rest of the reading, because trusting the author to be competent is (at least to me) an important part of staying immersed. And, thusly let down by Sanderson, my mind moves onto the other things that can be seen as flaws.
That being said, I don't feel disinterested: He has several good qualities as a writer. But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either. In the words of Francis Bacon, his books are to be "swallowed", not "read wholly, and with diligence and attention".
Pulling apart words and putting them back together is one of the more relatable demonstrations of intelligence, imo.
Sanderson also clearly gets many orders of magnitude more out of "word shape" than I do, so he might just really like puns. I've also never translated that quote to any of the various forms of sigals Sanderson defines in the series; if you do so, it might well be breathtakingly beautiful.
> But just like the Marvel movies probably won't be regarded as the masterpieces of our times, despite their popularity, Sanderson's books are not, to me, worthy of such praise either.
Forty years later Star Wars hasn't exactly fallen out of favor. Ignore the stilted dialog...it has a "robot" which is really obviously just a trashcan. Mark Twain's books contain a lot of colloquial dialog which is very much not "soaring prose", and they remain popular a century later. Which is not to say that I think Sanderson will be a hot read in eighty years, but I doubt Jordan or Martin will either. While the average library system presumably has a copy of The Dispossessed at one of its branches, the average branch has zero copies IME.
All of which is totally tangential, I just couldn't let it go (and I tried).
Being occupied with word shapes and word plays is fine! You and several other replies to that post focused on the word-play part of it, as if that was what I was reacting to, and I understand that, since I didn't really give you a lot more to work with. What I tried to bring attention to, however, was the way in which sentences like that break immersion. To me, a sentence like this takes me away from the fantasy world that I have so far been presented, and into some kind of (sorry I keep using this example, but it's really how I feel about it) Marvel movie where our heroes are engaged in friendly banter, or to some tumblr fanfic. That could of course be a problem with what I am expecting going into his universe, but I believe it is more of a problem of Sanderson not taking the time to properly refine his ideas before committing them to paper. Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing. That doesn't excuse it for me, though.
I am not looking for soaring prose - Mark Twain is great partly because of his ability to maintain the illusion of a rustic backwater society and the people within it. Star Wars is similar: When they stay within the expectations set up by their own universe, it's great! Trashcan robots are part of this! But as we have seen, whenever the dialogue takes you out of the universe and reminds you this is an illusion, fans do react ("I don't like sand...").
I also recognize that this has evolved way beyond where it started and this interaction on HN has influenced my thoughts about this. So I won't pretend what I'm saying now is 'what I had in mind from the beginning'.
Or maybe some super-set incorporating both the flat word play and "breaking the fourth wall" all with other willful discarding of immersion? I can't think of anyone else who goes as deep and long into fantasy as he does, and then occasionally casually discards immersion simply to wink at the reader or make a (weak) joke or whatever.
I'm not a fan of this either, though it doesn't happen often so I find it tolerable. That very rarity, though, particularly in combination with the breaks in immersion always seeming gratuitous, does make it feel like an unforced error on his part. If someone's not sold on the 1000 other pages, adding less than five pages of immersion discarding humor seems unlikely to sufficiently sweeten the deal.
> Which, again, as many have pointed out, is due to the prolificness of his writing.
I assume his prolificacy hurts the quality of his prose (though that's very much a pass/fail sort of thing for me; he passes, so his prolificacy is a pure win for me), but what I'm talking about (and maybe you are as well) seems more like what I'll describe as "Get an [expletive] editor." In some ways he seems particularly egregious, as I don't know if even one percent of his content feels like it needs to be excised, and what does feels like it could go for free.
Edit: Reading your sibling comment, I'm probably off-base with the above.
> I think that Shallan, as presented, is written lazily and with a way of thinking and talking that has been forcibly transplanted from our (as in, the World, 2018) current culture and into a fantasy universe, which is jarring to me.
The dialog generally "feels" reasonable to me, but that's obviously something where tastes strongly vary. One note. Looking at:
> No, drat. It would have to be Misjasnahistic, and that doesn't work nearly as well, does it?
I, at least, don't know anyone who talks like that. Which is not to say it's good, just that describing it as "hip" does seem quite curmudgeonly :)
He has the capacity to be a good author, but, he is spreading himself way too thin. Classes at BYU, Stormlight, Mistborn, games, the rest of the Cosmere stuff. It lacks focus, and honestly that universal creation myth is a shoe-in.
Compared to Le Guin, Tolkien, Martin, Jordan, his worlds just lack focus. If you read fantasy for the big themes, like the reckoning of how religions fit into society and what value they provide, you can get them from Sanderson's books. But if you read them for the craft of language, the dialog, and have any credulity, it is hard to countenance where he's taken the series.
tldr; I enjoyed the hell out of Mistborn, but his later books have been a real disappointment, and I'm awaiting a return to form when he gets his priorities straighten out.
I find his single universe building and the "rules of the Cosmere" draw me in more and more to his work. With the first couple of novels I didn't realize this was even going on; but as individual books they still were great standalone. As I became aware of the ties between the books I've just been more drawn in. These are some of the only fiction books where I find myself wanting to go back and re-read so that I might pick up on things I missed the first time through.
I also admire his obvious and sincere efforts to include non-neurotypical characters in the series. He specifically thanks people he consulted with about this in his acknowledgements. The Stormlight Archive includes, among its main and secondary characters, people with depression, PTSD, and autism. I think it's great that he's giving people who have those, especially kids and teenagers, a chance to see themselves as heroes in an epic fantasy series. The depictions aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, and they avoid some common pitfalls. Nobody gets superpowers from their mental illness, for example.
Sanderson appeals to readers with certain sensibilities. The rules of his world always make sense, and things follow those rules, even including the magic. There are lots of readers for whom this is a great boon, because otherwise, magic feels like mere plot convenience and deus ex machina.
I've never found anything that comes close to replicating it. I would love recommendations if people have them.
The Book of the New Sun is technically sci-fi, but in fantasy trappings, set in a future world in which the sun is slowly dying out, and humankind has mostly lost their knowledge of technology. It's dense, filled with sly little narrative puzzles that are left for readers to deconstruct, and it's beautifully written in a mannered, intentionally archaic style.
The Latro series, starting with Soldier of the Mist, is a historical fantasy about a Roman soldier who suffers from retrograde amnesia, so he must continuously write down what happened the day before. (It came out decades before the movie Memento.)
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficul...
This was because a printer's error caused the pages to be bound in the wrong order. I don't usually pay attention to page numbers, so it took me a while to realize this. I thought I was losing my mind until I noticed the numbers weren't in sequence.
To this day, I can't tell you what was going on, plot-wise.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Champion#The_Eternal_C...
Also, Gloriana was great (very different from Elric).
In this vein, Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is probably my favorite; it's direct and raw, like a bare knuckle punch in the face :).
Were you aware that Moorcock wrote, performed and toured with Hawkwind in the 70's and 80's? Also Hawkwind's 1985 "Chronicles of the Black Sword"[0] album is largely inspired by the Elric tales.
I've been to see Hawkwind live around 25 times, so I have a bit of a thing for them and Moorcock. If you ever get the chance you should go see them because Dave Brock sadly isn't getting any younger.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicle_of_the_Black_Swo...
I guess I'm going to have to be 'that guy'. Malazan Book of the Fallen does the whole intricate, overlapping fantasy universe incredibly well.
That I did read to death.