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[felis_ultharus]

Still getting gradually caught up on friends-list reading. I'm not all the way there yet.

I woke up with that usual, post-finished-version sinking feeling of thinking it was going to be terrible and I'll never be a writer. I'm so manic-depressive just after finishing one of these things.

I did finish Tombs of Atuan, too, yesterday. Great, but not quite as brilliant as Wizard of Earthsea. Very little happens in Atuan -- it's more a psychological portrait of a priestess and a wizard -- which is okay for a change, but I don't know if I'd want to read a whole series like that.

Comments

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

it's more a psychological portrait of a priestess and a wizard

..... and that's when I put on my Trogdor t-shirt and made myself a big mug of Ovaltine. And then went to DragonCon. My Mom drove me.


I ♥ nerds

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

You laugh, but that's the thing about LeGuin :p

Bad fantasy writers can't get a consistent system of fantasy together, much less a psychologically realistic one.

Decent fantasy writers get a coherent world together, but don't create realistic characters.

Good fantasy writers know enough psychology to make a character react and think in realistic ways.

LeGuin takes it from the opposite path. She comes up with a coherent world simply as a thought experiment in psychology. As Margaret Atwood described LeGuin's writing, "Boys meets girl, but girl has gills, and what does that do to things?"

She didn't set out to write a wizard and a priestess -- she set out to try and figure out what it'd do to human psychology when one person is able to reshape creation by hacking with words, and the other serves entities that have a direct and obvious-to-everyone influence in human affairs.