tags: Earthsea
2001
September
- 2001 Sep 2
- Wizard's School
Ursula K Le Guin. The Wizard of Earthsea. We are living in a postmodern world where everything has already been created, so everything is de facto derivative….
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2006
May
- 2006 May 15
- in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end was the word
Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.
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2007
July
- 2007 Jul 25
- returning to earthsea/of wizards and warlocks
I’m still ruminating about the end of the Harry Potter saga. The mainstream media’s reaction has always interested me. They continue to be bemused by the idea of a novel taking the world by storm, and infiltrating popular culture. Never mind the fact that people were writing “Frodo Lives!” on subway walls 40 years ago, or the fact that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was extraordinarily successful, and, as far as wizards go, Gandalf the Grey is as well-known as Merlin, and is arguably the favorite and most-beloved of wizards amongst nerds and geeks world-wide.
· Read more… - 2007 Jul 26
- "el regalo" by peter s beagle/why I dig earthsea
Actually, one of my favorite “there are wizards among us” stories is entitled “El Regalo” (The Gift) by Peter S Beagle (of The Last Unicorn fame.) Part of his anthology The Line Between, Beagle chronicles the misadventures of a 15 year old Korean American girl named Angie and her 8½ year old brother named Marvyn, both of whom come to discover that they have magical powers. In this tantalizing tidbit that is just calling to be expanded to a full length novel, they find themselves pitted against an ancient, malevolent sorceror only known as El Viejo, The Old Man.
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2012
July
- 2012 Jul 14
- systems of magic
Ever since I heard of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law—any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic—I've often found myself thinking of how magic would end up being studied in a post-scientific revolution civilization. I know a lot of fantasy authors don't like making their systems of magic explicit, because it inevitably makes it magic less magical (and not making it explicit is also incidentally in line with Tolkien's thoughts on how magic should work: internally logically consistent the way logic in fairy tales and dreams are internally consistent, no matter how weird.)
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2013
April
- 2013 Apr 17
- Middle-Earth vs. Earthsea
Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin call their respective fantasy universes Eä/Éa. Coincidence?
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