I reread A Wizard of Earthsea
May. 6th, 2018 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8I was sorting through my calibre library the other day* and kinda fell into A Wizard of Earthsea. It's one of those childhood books that made a huge impact on me (my computer is still called sparrowhawk) but I never re-read, and so I actually remembered very little of the plot. Still don't really remember what happens in Tombs of Atuan and subsequent books - except of course Ged expending all his magic to maintain the equilibrium, that made too big an impact to forget. Falling into Le Guin's writing is the most natural thing, but her books really take me away into another world, in a way that a lot of books, books which I love, do not. And it is not a long book. There aren't any tricks to it. Maybe it's the prose, which makes the book almost feel like a written-down version of an oral work. It's a rare feeling and I love it, that wholesale transportation into another world.
At the end of the copy I have, Le Guin writes about the story she wanted to tell, and how she wanted to write something that was unlike the usual triumphant hero, who uses his - it's always a man, when she wrote it and even now - fists and strength to win. She writes about how while she still stuck to writing about a man's story, she quietly made him not a white man - this was subtle enough I missed it as a child, though I see it so clearly now, and it's so cheering - and more than that, she pushed back against the endless militarism and the stories that create conflict and excitement by throwing the protagonist against enemies. Faceless and featureless ones too, so there's no moral difficulty about showing off the protagonist's strength when he slaughters them. I read all this and then a day later I went to see Avengers: Infinity War.
Don't get me wrong, I like superhero movies. I've certainly seen a lot of them - all of the Marvel ones, except Spider-Man, more from other stories. But maybe my patience is wearing thin. I like the characters very much, some of the films are interesting visually, but I find them to be so samey in philosophy and theme sometimes. I don't like it when I can see the bones of the story poking through, because it's been repeated so many times, just in different upholstery. And some of the visuals are so repetitive - there's a certain style of science-fiction backgrounds that seems to pervade the whole genre (which is really sad), there's so much explosions and running away from same, etc. There's only so many ways you can play these kinds of fights. Instead of punching with a human fist, let's upgrade and punch with a bigger metal fist! But it has to be fist-shaped, otherwise how will our audience have any emotional connection? The science fiction feels so empty and imagination-less. Forget innovative biology, we can't even get different social constructs in totally alien planets.
I have such mixed feelings about Infinity War that I couldn't tell you if I enjoyed it at all, or give it a rating. It was compelling in theatres, though quite long. Mostly, I'm sitting here waiting and wondering if art's gonna win, or money's going to win - are they going to reverse the deaths? If they do, this entire exercise will have been wasted emotional manipulation, and I despise the death-for-shock-value and then retcon thing. DESPISE. But if they don't - well, that's harder to swallow, but I'll respect that. I know they will resurrect. There's too much information floating out there - Marvel has a whole slate of movies planned for the dead characters, we know contracts, Marvel is owned by Disney. I'm trying not to sound like a crazy fan, but I seriously don't think they'll do it. There's too much money to be made.
* It's a tragic tale. I was on vacation and had packed an ereader that day into my backpack, intending first to do touristy things, and then to find a green spot and lie out in the sun and read. It was absolutely beautiful weather, and I sat down in a garden, and I took out my trusty kobo, and it simply died and factory-reset on me. Just straight up reset. I was 5,000km away from my computer and its hard drive with my 400 ebooks. AAAAARGHHH. https://xkcd.com/466/ kicks in, except replace wifi with books in this instance, and I discovered that my absurd data plan (30gb for someone who plays hard on her at-home plan of 3gb was just...mind exploding) would tether, so I tethered my kobo to my phone's wifi, got into my kobo after guessing my password a few times (I think it's been literally 4-5 years since I logged in), and...started reading The Phantom of the Opera, which was not what I wanted to read. I was in the middle of A Civil Contract! I think at one point I'd logged about 1k hours on my kobo, so it's not like I could blame it for prematurely dying, but my god, the timing. I had so many side-loaded books and I could not access any of them!
At the end of the copy I have, Le Guin writes about the story she wanted to tell, and how she wanted to write something that was unlike the usual triumphant hero, who uses his - it's always a man, when she wrote it and even now - fists and strength to win. She writes about how while she still stuck to writing about a man's story, she quietly made him not a white man - this was subtle enough I missed it as a child, though I see it so clearly now, and it's so cheering - and more than that, she pushed back against the endless militarism and the stories that create conflict and excitement by throwing the protagonist against enemies. Faceless and featureless ones too, so there's no moral difficulty about showing off the protagonist's strength when he slaughters them. I read all this and then a day later I went to see Avengers: Infinity War.
Don't get me wrong, I like superhero movies. I've certainly seen a lot of them - all of the Marvel ones, except Spider-Man, more from other stories. But maybe my patience is wearing thin. I like the characters very much, some of the films are interesting visually, but I find them to be so samey in philosophy and theme sometimes. I don't like it when I can see the bones of the story poking through, because it's been repeated so many times, just in different upholstery. And some of the visuals are so repetitive - there's a certain style of science-fiction backgrounds that seems to pervade the whole genre (which is really sad), there's so much explosions and running away from same, etc. There's only so many ways you can play these kinds of fights. Instead of punching with a human fist, let's upgrade and punch with a bigger metal fist! But it has to be fist-shaped, otherwise how will our audience have any emotional connection? The science fiction feels so empty and imagination-less. Forget innovative biology, we can't even get different social constructs in totally alien planets.
I have such mixed feelings about Infinity War that I couldn't tell you if I enjoyed it at all, or give it a rating. It was compelling in theatres, though quite long. Mostly, I'm sitting here waiting and wondering if art's gonna win, or money's going to win - are they going to reverse the deaths? If they do, this entire exercise will have been wasted emotional manipulation, and I despise the death-for-shock-value and then retcon thing. DESPISE. But if they don't - well, that's harder to swallow, but I'll respect that. I know they will resurrect. There's too much information floating out there - Marvel has a whole slate of movies planned for the dead characters, we know contracts, Marvel is owned by Disney. I'm trying not to sound like a crazy fan, but I seriously don't think they'll do it. There's too much money to be made.
* It's a tragic tale. I was on vacation and had packed an ereader that day into my backpack, intending first to do touristy things, and then to find a green spot and lie out in the sun and read. It was absolutely beautiful weather, and I sat down in a garden, and I took out my trusty kobo, and it simply died and factory-reset on me. Just straight up reset. I was 5,000km away from my computer and its hard drive with my 400 ebooks. AAAAARGHHH. https://xkcd.com/466/ kicks in, except replace wifi with books in this instance, and I discovered that my absurd data plan (30gb for someone who plays hard on her at-home plan of 3gb was just...mind exploding) would tether, so I tethered my kobo to my phone's wifi, got into my kobo after guessing my password a few times (I think it's been literally 4-5 years since I logged in), and...started reading The Phantom of the Opera, which was not what I wanted to read. I was in the middle of A Civil Contract! I think at one point I'd logged about 1k hours on my kobo, so it's not like I could blame it for prematurely dying, but my god, the timing. I had so many side-loaded books and I could not access any of them!
