Paul H.'s Reviews > Tales from Earthsea

(3.5 stars.). A prime example of why authors sometimes shouldn't return to their earlier work; the first four stories are reasonably good, but the fifth (and the appendix) are just pure facepalm material, political nonsense. It's hard to describe just how awkward the shoehorned feminism-equality themes are in "Dragonfly"; I half-expected Le Guin to have one of the characters suddenly announce that Roke Island will now be renamed "Woke Island" and will only allow non-binary wizards or whatever.

What Le Guin has done with Tales from Earthsea is something like Tolkien publishing (in the 1960s) a new set of stories showing that, actually, there were also female Maiar, who were totally super-awesome girlboss wizards, but then Gandalf was a tool of the patriarchy who rejected women's ways of knowing, and . . . uh . . . there were also female hobbits who brought the Ring to Mordor, and they were very strong and independent, but somehow weren't addressed in the original three novels, because reasons.

Is there anything more tedious than present-day political concerns projected into art? Is anyone out there a fan of Stalinist-era Russian art? Or Neruda's "Ode to Lenin"? Or, like, everything by Shaw? It's difficult to think of something more diametrically opposed to great art than political soapboxing. Even if I agree with the author (e.g., Claudel's plays), it's just always terrible.

The most mind-boggling thing is that Le Guin had already returned to Earthsea two decades later (with the fourth novel in the series, Tehanu) and addressed many of these themes, yet in a far more subtle and interesting way.