I was thinking about the Space Channel special on teen girls, reading and the popularity of the fantasy genre and I noted that almost all of my favourite YA books are also fantasy books. Perhaps this is because of the same reasons addressed in the Space Channel special – that in fantasy anything is possible.
It is for these same reasons that I loved Raymond E. Feist’s The Riftwar Saga books and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels – books that I read at separate times, but books that have become intricately linked in my memories as similar reading experiences.
They both shared a Tolkien-esque quality ot their stories, but as a YA reader I found them more accessible and more relevant to the experience of being a young adult than Tolkien.
On the surface, the Earthsea novels are about a young man, Ged, who comes from a humble and provincial background to become the most powerful wizard in the realm of Earthsea (the fantastical water-world of Le Guin’s novels). But below the surface the novels also contain a very powerful message about opportunity and stretching the boundaries of what is possible.
Le Guin is the daughter of noted anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, and she has cited this upbringing as an important influence on her writing. In the Earthsea universe, unlike a lot of heroic fantasy written in North America, the majority of the characters do not come from European-inspired cultures. Instead, most of Earthsea comes from Native North American or African-like societies.
This cultural landscape of Earthsea was very important to Le Guin. As she noted in an article from 2004, “My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be… named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense.”
I have never understood the ‘violet eyes’ thing either. And that is why I loved these books as a YA reader – Le Guin (and Feist in his Riftwar books) created worlds where anything seemed possible.
