Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula LeGuin reviews the Sci-Fi channel's EarthSea miniseries

On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based -- loosely, as it turns out -- on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense.

... and, surprisingly enough, doesn't like it. Didn't she have some editorial control over this? Apparantly not; she was a "consultant", which in Hollywood means they are free to ignore you.

Tehanu : The Earthsea Cycle

Almost 20 years after concluding the EarthSea trilogy, the author looked back on what she had written and discovered that it was a horrible, misogynistic world explicitly dominated by a male patriarchy that excluded women ("weak as women's magic, wicked as women's magic") and dared to present a male character as the hero and a female character in the role of damsel in distress.

In short, it wasn't politically correct. And so Tehanu was written to clarify the matter, for all those who read and loved the original trilogy, by destroying the characters and the world. No stone is left unturned; no way to grind the achievements and sacrifices of the characters into dust is ignored.

Unless you are a rabid man-hating feminist who read the original trilogy by accident and now seeks a way to atone for the mistake, you'll be happier not reading this.

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