![]() ![]() I’m not talking so much about the vividness of a well-rendered video game as a curiously open-ended quality that makes you feel that her world is both very far away and right here in your own bedroom. Perhaps what most sets Le Guin apart from her peers is the vivacity of her worlds, the way she makes readers accept a world simultaneously distinct from and entirely a part of life as it’s ordinarily lived. Her Earthsea has less in common with Narnia, Hogwarts, and Percy Jackson’s Camp Half-Blood than it does with medieval romances and Icelandic sagas, where dragons and death keep company with fishing yarns, goat-herding woes, and village quarrels. Le Guin’s peculiar gift, though, is to make the ordinary feel as important as the epic: mundane questions about who’s cutting firewood or doing the dishes share space with rune books and miscast spells. ![]() Like other protean, inventive writers who move between speculative and realist fiction (Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro), Le Guin drops her reader into an uncanny double of our own world, a dream where somebody changed the names and shapes of everything and forgot to let you in on the secret. If you think you have Le Guin pegged because you know young adult fantasy, think again. ![]()
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