I get it! Without being too Harold Bloom about it (though he had a point) I get the impression writers are far too heavy handed these days about these issues and it doesn't make for good literature is all.That is the political point, and thats what is revolutionary about it, even today. That she managed to invert the racial politics of an entire genre without making a big deal of it.
Yeah I said before, his shipmates on the boat to Oskill call him "red skin"I think Ged is kinda Native American colouring, rather than Black. She mentions it somewhere in the first Earthsea book.
At what point did you realise Ged was black? I didnt at all on my first read.
I think this is what she does such a great job of in Tehanu. Revises the whole world in light of her emerging political and feminist understandings.It leaves you free to just enjoy the writing and the story. Who wants to be dragged down with real world politics when you're reading a fantasy novel with loads of cool stuff like dragons and wizards and magic?
This is where I am now, end of chapter 5. I agree I was quite taken aback too by how different it is to the first book, I was expecting Ged to come into it sooner, and the third chapter about the prisoners really messed with me when I read it last night before going to bed, incredibly claustrophobic and cruel - bad vibes. I don't think the quality of the writing has dipped from the first book though and I'm totally hooked.The Tombs of Atuan
I'm about five chapters in. This was hard to get into at first, very different from A Wizard of Earthsea, not the same sweeping setting and pacy narrative, but I slowly settled into the world of halls, tombs, walls and religious ritual/cruelty, and it began unfolding itself, semi-revealing — as with the first book — a complex, ancient world... And now (Spoiler alert) a wizard has turned up, so I can't wait to read the rest of it.
Evidently, cos nobody even really notices it unless it's pointed outthe best thing about earthsea is definitely not that she might posibly have made some main characters not be white lol wtf
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one...
...I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don’t notice, don’t care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being “colorblind.” Nobody else does.
I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from readers of color who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt included in—and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents, when they’d found nothing to read in fantasy and science fiction except the adventures of white people in white worlds. Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.