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Tales From Earthsea: Short Stories by: Ursula Le Guin

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Rating: - ONE GOOD BOOK

Well 5 actually. it proberly all won't be that much sence to anyone if they havn't read the earth sea quartet 1st which are also reall good, so a must read to anyone.

the "tales of earthsea" is a collestion of 5 different stories telling you the history of earthsea, how the school of roke was established and the continues battle of the magic world.

full of excitement and suprises, mystery and magic. a must read.

Rating: - The Weaker Sex

When Ursula le Guin created the fantasy world of Earthsea, many years ago, it was the setting for three tightly knit and cohesive stories featuring the wizard Ged. But it was also, once established, with strong logical rules for magic and social interaction coupled with a history and geography comparable to Tolkein's Middle Earth, a great setting for stand alone short stories.

How do I know ? "The Rule of Names" published twenty odd years ago proved it, a blackly comic short tale of magic and dragons. Set in Earthsea, it meant le Guin did not have to explain the premise of the story, just the action.

The tales collected here, however, are not, as the author explicitly expains, such stories, enjoying and employing the world of her earlier books; they are instead attempts to move on, to try something new and challenging.

No one could dispute this is laudable, and surely this is to be celebrated...well, unfortunately le Guin has decided to exclude roughly 50% of the reading population from this new version of Earthsea. Yes, it seems, men are no longer welcome here.

Perhaps in an attempt to reverse the stance in the original three books, where "Weak as women's magic" is a common saying and all wizards are male, we are shown now, in fact, that men are very much the weaker sex. The first and longest of the stories, "The Finder" really establishes that "male" equals "wrong". The villain is a man searching for power, embodied in an alchemical material known as "Semen", the hero a man who does not mind being known as an honorary woman (Otter joins an orgaisation called "Women of the Hand".) The wizard's school of Roke is established, effectively,by women but men bring division and evil. Conflict and violence are shown to be male traits, contrasted with female understanding and caring.

The other stories continue to have this subtext, although not as blatantly as in "The Finder", for example in "The Bones of The Earth" we see that Ged's old tutor owes his power to a Wise Woman's teaching; in "Dragonfly", we see the wizard's school of Roke set in turmoil by a girl applying to join the all male college; in "Darkrose and Diamond", Diamond has to choose between wizardry and a girl.

I have to declare an interest, as I am a male, but I have to wonder, if a book showing an opposite bias, that is, one which quite explicitly dismissed femininity as being an inferior condition, would it have found a publisher?

The Battle of the Sexes is much older than Earthsea, but this book is hardly a valuable addition to that great struggle, one side is made so weedy it is little more than a Walkover.

Rating: - must-have for Earthsea fans

Anyone captivated by le Guin's magical sequence of books about a world in which magic is both commonplace (used to change the weather, avert ill-luck and improve sea-worthiness) and highly dangerous will find this new collection of stories irresistible. The first, The Finder, is a novella pre-dating the foundatuion of the wizards' school on Roke island, is the best. It tells of how Otter, a born mage (like Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea) is enslaved to Gelluk, a sorceror obsessed with finding quicksilver (there are strong echoes of alchemy here). The search for this had already poisoned other mage-slaves, but one woman joins her dying strength to Otter's and helps him defeat his enemy. He goes on to found the wizard- chool of Roke, an establishment rendered with less detail but more skill than Rowling's Hogwarts.

What is marvellous about le Guin is the way she uses fantasy to explore real moral problems and psychology. Recent Earthsea novels, particularly Tehanu have been less satisfactory because of a strand of feminism now woven in - insisting that women's magic as powerful and important as men's, etc.. This is all very well but as a woman fan I get fed up with it. It never mattered to me that Ged was a man...what did was the passion and precision of the prose, the extraordinary imagination, the characters. Ged returns briefly as Archmage in On the High Marsh, and one could do with more of him. The other stories are love-stories, and in the case of Dragonfly, a precursor to The Other Wind.

All are charming, but the real reason why (apart from The Finder) this is worth buying is that at the end le Guin gives us the back-story to the myth of Erreth Akbe and the world she has invented. It moves, even as one slightly regrets the loss of mystery, and the pleasure of piecing together the past, as in Lord of the Rings. As le Guin says in her preface, "commodified fantasy takes no risks..Imagination like all living things lives now, andf it lives with, from, on true change."

Rating: - Growth and Illumination

Many authors are tempted to return to their early works in their later years. For most authors, this is a mistake. Not so with this set of five stories placed in the world of Le Guin's marvelous Earthsea. Each story provides a new illumination into what Earthsea is, its history, and the people that lived and loved within it.

The first story, "The Finder", is the longest, actually a novella, and for my money the best of the set. Here we find ourselves far back in the history of Earthsea, when wizard fought wizard as a matter of course, when magical knowledge was jealously guarded, when the average non-magical person lived in fear of what magic would visit them next. Otter, a half-trained wizard with a powerful skill for 'finding' whatever he looks for, falls on the receiving end of the worst of this mis-use of magic, forced to try and find mercury, the King of all materials, for a half-crazed older wizard. How he escapes from this imprisonment, and his search for a place where magic is taught freely, forms the bulk of this story, ending with his founding of the School of Wizards on Roke. In this story we find the same evocation of the magical, of balance between man and nature, of ambition tempered by internal morality, that so graced the original trilogy.

The second story, "Darkness and Diamond", has appeared elsewhere previously, but it deserves a second reading, being a beautifully told love story of a boy with conflicted desires between his wizardly talent and its concomitant requirement of chastity, and his love of music and a girl who shares his passions. A fine portrait of what is important in the business of living.

The third and fourth stories, "The Bones of the Earth" and "On the High Marsh", are comparatively minor stories, that never the less do a good job of filling in some of the history of Ged, showing his first teacher in his greatest wizardly act, and a mature Ged who can forgive and help heal a former Arch-mage.

The last story, "Dragonfly", has also appeared elsewhere, but it is a must read before tackling the latest Earthsea novel, The Other Wind. This is story that I think many fans of the series object to, as it details the heretical idea that women both can and should wield magical powers, that their power, based on the Old Powers, is just as valid as the complex hierarchy of talents embodied by the School of Wizards. Is this a change from the world of the first three novels? Certainly, but I think it is a change for the better, more fitting with the overall theme of balance that pervades the entire Earthsea universe. As Le Guin herself states in the forward, it has been a long time since the first books were written, and history and people move on, grow and develop, and this story exemplifies this very well.

For fans of the originals, this is a must book. For those who have never been charmed and captivated by Earthsea, now is the time to read the series in its glorious whole.

Rating: - In the depths of time, a place named Earthsea was created.

Ursula le Guin once again comes up trumps with this fantastic series of stories that tell of the history of Earthsea. The tales are from different periods of Earthsea's history, and it's a great follow up to the other books in the Earthsea series, so any fan like me wouldn't want to miss out on this superb book. The essay on Earthsea and it's history and the inhabitants was a very informative guide and gives a greater insight into the main charachters and the people that have been met on the way throughout all the 4 previous books. Don't miss out, if you bought 'The Other Wind', then this can easily be said to be it's s-equal!

Review Pages: 1 2