Ursula K. Le Guin

You can discover Ursula K. Le Guin again and again in your life. As a child reading about Earthsea, as an adult reading about Hain, and always with the feeling that you might stumble into some heretofore unsuspected realm which, despite being wholly hers, had long lodged deep in your own mind.

For those of us growing up in the faerie lands, Le Guin helped introduce us to the subtler forms of magic. Are you facing the threat of a mighty dragon? Don't fall into the classic trap of opposing fire with fire and force with force and instead consider first that your wits may be your most valuable tool.

We know her parents were anthropologists and that she grew up steeped in the variety of human experiences, and, like the children of musical families, she had the virtuosity that comes from long and early exposure. Her gift--and I say 'gift' knowing full well the work it required to flower--was to write about people in a manner that was honest, insightful and kind--a combination I still struggle to master and sometimes despair of achieving--and she did more than simply project the patterns of contemporary Americana into a fantasy setting like so many golden age masters.

I reread the Earthsea books last month after a gap of many years and it's a tricky thing, rereading your formative stories as an adult. The people of Earthsea are distinctly non-Anglo and the magic of that world is more concerned with balance and self-mastery than explosive power and control all of which certainly strikes the adult in me as an inherent indictment of the Western socio-economic system, but I'm hardly peering through the eyes of a child here.

There's one story where I still feel some kinship to the kid who first read it because it haunts me with every passing day, and, yes, it's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. I considered calling this post "Still Wallowing in Omelas" but it seemed painfully self-indulgent, kin to the troll who delights in telling others what a jerk they are. All the same, twenty years later I still don't have an answer to Omelas, but I'm trying and I'm searching and one of these days I'll figure out where they went, those ones that walked away, and maybe then I'll get a chance to tell Le Guin what her works meant to me.