Milestones and Visions

Masters of Darkness #1: Ursula Le Guin and A Wizard of Earthsea

Hey everyone! I just started a new series on my youtube channel centered around the biggest names in Dark Fantasy and Sci-Fi. The support I got on my first video ('Confronting our Shadows: Le Guin and A Wizard of Earthsea') was amazing, and I've decided to post my edited video scripts here for all you Wattpad folks to enjoy should you wish. You're welcome to watch the full video essay (with some lovely shade thrown at J.K. Rowling for good measure) at the link below. Enjoy!

Have you ever had a moment where you're reading a story and think 'there's something here that's more than fiction. There's something in this book that transcends the matrix of the world the book is set in. Something in the words that rings true – that you know, somehow, even though there are no fire breathing dragons or immortal sorcerers playing with life and death in your life – somehow, this fictional world contains the essence of a kind of psychological or social truth. And that thought is just as terrifying as it is liberating.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, I'm Traversing the Dark and I'll be your guide through the forest of Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction. Welcome to my Masters of Darkness series where I'll be looking at some of the key writers, books, films, and video games that take a walk on the darker side of these often-underappreciated genres. I'll be focusing on some of the underlying elements that make these tales work – and what gives them an enduring appeal to modern audiences.

I'm starting with a personal favorite and make no apologies for my bias when I present to you Ursula K Le Guin – a writer of both fantasy and science fiction that was a pioneer of the genre in many ways. Writing amidst towering contemporaries in her chosen genres like Margaret Atwood, Philip K Dick, Terry Pratchett, and Harlan Ellison, Le Guin its fair to say helped transform science fiction and fantasy into genres with serious literary resonance since she began writing seriously in 1966.

She was a woman writing against a current of male dominated writers in a predominantly white dominated genre – one where the tendency to reduce the problem of evil in the world onto people and cultures was all too common (see Tolkein's 'orcs' and 'Mordor' races and places that are simply defined as objectively 'evil' as examples, or take RA Salvadore's 'Dark Elf's' with their racially determined penchant for sexual discrimination and matriarchy – except for Drizzt but he's dumb, and everyone hates him).

In this climate, Le Guin's work breathed new life into a genre that was becoming metaphorically stunted. She knew the limitations of her own genres had been born out of readers' expectations of fantasy:

'1. The characters are white. 2. Fantasy land is the Middle Ages. 3. Fantasy by definition concerns a Battle between Good and Evil' (Le Guin, 'Some Assumptions about Fantasy', 2004)

Le Guin's work can be taken as a response to such trends – her corpus challenges these seemingly fundamental tenants of the fantasy genre, and in so doing, heightens the nature of the narratives that fantasy can provide, paving the way for authors like Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie.

Further, Le guin elaborates that the battle between good and evil in fantasy is always combative, always martial, and usually played out in large scale conflicts like war between two sides – which she argued was a completely reductive approach to this metaphysical battle:

'War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading...All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might." (Afterword to A Wizard of Earthsea, 2012 edition)