The Earthsea Cycle: On par with any fantasy series

Regulars on this blog will know that I hold Ursula K. Le Guin in the highest literary regard. She wrote numerous unforgettable books, but all of my favorites in her portfolio are part of her fantasy opus The Earthsea Cycle. Which I happen to believe is as every bit as good as any fantasy series out there.

In this article I’ll explore six main reasons fantasy readers should try The Earthsea Cycle for themselves:

• Each volume takes readers to a new place
• The macro story is cohesive and complete
• Any book in the series could be a reader’s favorite
• The series delivers rich lore without a bloated page count
• Earthsea’s worldbuilding is incredibly influential
• There’s a true sense of magic and wonder in every book

Mile-High Background on The Earthsea Cycle

Before diving into the details, let me share a little background and summary.

The macro story is about making peace between people from different lands and intelligent species who’ve made diverging choices in their pasts. It’s a lot less overtly epic than most multi-volume high fantasy. It’s a lot smarter and more unique as well.

Here’s what I mean.

Each volume delivers a whole story and takes readers to a new place

When Le Guin began publishing The Earthsea Cycle, there were no cliffhanger-ending doorstop fantasy series to be found. Before the series hit its halfway mark, however, Tad Williams, Anne McCaffrey, R. A. Salvatore, and others had made such series the norm for high fantasy. Le Guin stayed the course, giving a full story in each book.

One of the greatest virtues to this approach is that it allowed Le Guin to take readers to new places (thematically and in terms of worldbuilding) with each story. Several overarching themes recur, but each book is incredibly distinct. The pacing, style, cast, setpieces, and ultimate resolutions are their own—not just continuations of something from before.

The distinctive wholeness of each volume was even more unique by the time Le Guin finished the series in 2002. Imagine, in contrast, if every novel of The Wheel of Time, The Sword of Truth, Deverry, Shannara, or Dragonlance brought a fresh thematic cycle (and simultaneously managed to deliver a beginning, middle, and end within less than 300 pages). Of course, Le Guin was writing a different kind of book than her peers. But that’s the real point to begin with.

The macro Earthsea story is cohesive and complete

On a similar note, Le Guin still instilled a single through story into The Earthsea Cycle. Continuous character arcs, expanding scopes, and connection points both subtle and overt in nature give the series both a red thread and momentum to the end.

The interesting thing is that Le Guin actually intended to end it multiple times. She published the first three volumes close together, but she planned for A Wizard of Earthsea (the first book) to be a true standalone novel. Only after writing The Tombs of Atuan (which she first called a sequel) did she move onto the idea of The Earthsea Trilogy. A whopping 17 years later, she realized she had more to write in this world, eventually expanding it to six books.

If you read them back to back, you might never realize so much time had passed in the telling. The consistency of style and the harmonious paradigm in each book makes it feel as if Le Guin never paused to work on anything else.

Oh, and when she added a final short story 17 years after the last book hit shelves, she really did make it clear that the series was done. Le Guin passed away that same year, marking a full 50 year gap between the beginning and end of the series.

But she finished it. If only more fantasy authors could claim the same.

Any book in the series could be a reader’s favorite

Another witness to Le Guin’s skill is the variety of responses fans share when asked to name a favorite Earthsea novel. The first three are almost equally popular. Book four in the series has a smaller base of diehard fans but tends to elicit an extra strong (and positive) response for those who buy into it. And if you scan all the Le Guin subreddits, you’ll find plenty of people naming book six as their all-time favorite as well. It’s only the very different fifth volume (a short story collection) that I haven’t heard fans vote for.

Still. To have five out of six in the running (83%) for fan favorite is all but unheard of. Harry Potter is the only similar example I could find—contrasting with numerous high fantasy series where the fans’ pick is clear and overwhelming.

The long and short is that Le Guin didn’t write many novels. But she only wrote good ones.

Earthsea offers rich lore without a bloated page count

Speaking of the long and short. The entire Earthsea Cycle spans just 320,000 words or so. That’s about one volume of long epic fantasy (Wheel of Time or Malazan, for instance). Even MG and YA novels routinely net longer word counts than her books have.

Le Guin began writing in a time when shorter novels were more of the norm, even for SFF, but there’s still something amazing happening here. Her worldbuilding outshines dozens of longer works. There’s a strong sense of place in each book. History springs up everywhere. There’s cultural variety. And the magic at work in Earthsea is much more developed than many other works with hard magic systems.

I’m continually mind-boggled at how much story and lore Le Guin managed to pack into just six short books. And I’m in awe at how conclusively she tells so many stories with so few words. The recent graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea even managed to cut a chapter or two (close to 20%) of plot events without losing a clear storyline.

Earthsea’s worldbuilding has been incredibly influential

Short and sweet can be just as sticky as anything from a longer series. Look at the magic system in Earthsea as an example.

Within this system, mages derive much of their power from their ability to find and speak the true names of a given thing or being. While Le Guin isn’t the first person to come up with the idea of names having power, her systemized use of it made for one of the most robust and comprehensible magic systems in fantasy for decades to come. And this alone has been adapted (or copied wholesale) by numerous SFF authors.

A few examples:

• “True Names” by Vernor Vinge
• The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
• Numerous works by Tanya Huff
• The Books of Pellinor by Alison Croggon
• The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
• The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Even more importantly, Le Guin did a great deal to normalize the departure from purely European-inspired fantasy settings and white casts of characters. One of Le Guin’s most vocal criticisms about her own series (there are many) is about how her publishers consistently avoided depicting a person of color in cover art and illustrations. She wrote a non-white hero and wanted him to appear on the cover. I’m hard-pressed to find many fantasy authors doing that before the turn of the century, let alone having the courage to criticize publishers for hiding it.

There’s a true sense of magic and wonder in every book

At the end of the day, Earthsea inspires wonder. It’s a unashamed example of high magic—higher than almost any peer works I can name—with Le Guin proving she was worth her Gandalf Grand Master Award at every turn. From my first few minutes with the first book, I found storytelling wizardry at every turn, and the following five books maintained the magic effortlessly.

If you want to magic on the page, you can’t do much better than picking up The Earthsea Cycle.

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About the Author

Stephen Taylor is the author of The Witherclaw Trilogy as well as short fiction appearing in The Future Fire, MYTHIC Magazine, The Centropic Oracle, and other publications. His short story “Only an Ocean” won a Silver Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. When he’s not writing, he’s often playing his violin or wandering in the woods.