It pioneered the wizarding school trope, later popularized by Harry Potter, as well as a magic system incorporating “true names” of things, a concept used in many other fantasies such as Eragon.
A Wizard of Earthsea is my all time favorite book.
First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people, although I recall some TV/film adaptions were not particularly faithful to that much to Le Guin's disappointment.
The other is a phrase that I still use to this day: "tired is stupid". Particularly when I've been debugging something for many hours, late into the evening, I find that some rest and coming back to it later is almost always the solution to my problem. Turns out PEBKAC does not just apply to lusers.
The book is really not about race, and racial issues are pretty much non-existent in the book.
She's always been very vocal about this aspect, and how the diversity in her work was very deliberate and "snuck past" publishers and readers defences (at the time first published) by first mentioning it a bit in, and how publishers and cover artists at various point tried making the characters white:
> My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
[1] https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv...
I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11, and didn't even notice the race of the characters. I don't think much of it is made in the book. It's just a passing description.
Much, much later, as an adult I heard someone mention it, and I went back and checked and sure enough they were right. But the characters' race had absolutely nothing to do with why I loved the book.
The characters could have been blue, or purple, or glowing orange for all I cared. The book was not about that.
Er... also was a pretty important influence on one of the most important cyberpunk works of all time...
I absolutely hated LotR and everything else from Tolkien that I've read.
To me The Wizard of Earthsea is infinitely better, and Tolkien is not even in the same league as Le Guin.
The hobbits were also annoying for their one-dimensional, unimaginative, middle-class goodness.
Yes, I know that one of the reason Tolkien's work seems so cliche today is that so much has been influenced by it. Maybe if I'd read it in the 40's or 50's I would have been more impressed, but as I read it in the 80's, by then it already seemed way too generic.
By the way, I am a fan of much older literature than Tolkien, and consider the works that Tolkien himself was probably inspired by to be much more lively, authentic, imaginative, and well written than anything Tolkien himself ever wrote.
Things like, say, Apulius' The Golden Ass, a Roman fantasy written in 1 AD.
Or virtually any of ETA Hoffmann's work -- written in the 1700's.
Or Poe (1800's), or Blackwood (early 1900's), or the French Decadents (1890's), etc..
Or the Mahabarate (400 BC or even earlier).
Or The Count of Monte Cristo (1800's).
Etc, etc, etc..
These works were all far more complex, three-dimensional, interesting, and insightful than the "good guys team up to defeat the big baddie" that LoTR brought.. not that that in itself had to doom Tolkien's work, if he had any profound insight in to the world or the human condition, or maybe had some interesting characters, but he had none.
To me Tolkien has always just seemed as nothing more than a mediocre writer who'd have been long forgotten if there was any justice in world of literature, but instead he's gotten massively overrated.