Le Guin's characterisation of magic and the power of Names remains one of my favourite treatments of the themes in modern fantasy. Earthsea remains one of my pleasures.
I could never really get into LeGuin. It's been a long while since I tried reading Earthsea but it seems like a very mediocre fantasy novel with a plot that struggles to actually go anywhere. Apparently it's trying to preach some kind of political message about racism, and doing it poorly -- I didn't get that message at all when I read it, and only later learned about the racial aspect of it.
If you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes.
LeGuin has none of the above, and overall just seems kinda...mid. I'm confused why so many people seem to gush over Earthsea.
(Notwithstanding the above, it's okay with me if you happen to like LeGuin -- I'm not trying to be the taste police. I'm posting because I'm trying to figure out what all the fuss is about, and wondering if I'm missing something -- so dissenting opinions are welcome!)
> f you want to write good fantasy, it helps a lot to include: Huge exploding fireballs. Cool-looking protagonists mastering the battlefield with confidence and style. World-altering stakes.
Maybe for people that don't subscribe to this, something a bit less... Action-y makes it more interesting.
Something about how you phrased this makes me think you might appreciate Master of Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy. There are five kinds of magic, each with their own unique source, style, and pretty rigorous rule set, and the protagonist sets out to learn them all (unheard of, if not outright forbidden).
One of my favourite conversations I ever had with another human being, was with someone who was telling me about a book he was reading, which he evidently loved very much. He spoke almost no English, and I spoke absolutely no Cantonese, so the entire fifteen minute conversation was conducted with gesture, intonation and the phrases:
'one man'
'many mans'
'some kung fu'
'many _(* n)_ kungfus!'
I love the left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, all the hainish books,
but I have never loved any book as much as my conversation partner loved his book about many many Kung Fus.
Yes, because you don't understand them. That's basically the difference between Western and Eastern style religions. Here it's not a theory, it's a path. It's about you. When she writes “To light a candle is to cast a shadow”, what does that mean to you? How does that affect the way you live your life? Your relationship with others? To take it as a simple "message" is like going to the gym to stare at the weights.
If you ever move out of your moms basement, and maybe have a real relationship with another human, try reading these things again and see how you feel.
This is both painfully hilarious and hilariously painful. It might even be hilarious, but my JVM ran out of memory while trying to build the DOM model.
There could be years between looking into it and passing a legislation. There could be years between passing a legislation and actually shooting drones. It's EU, we won't do shit until the comprehensive environmental impact study is finished.
it does at a macroscopic level by making scraping expensive. If every "valid" page is scattered at random amongst a tarpit of recursive pages of nonsense, it becomes computationally and temporaly expensive to scrape a site for "good" data.
A single site doing this does nothing. But many sites doing this has a severe negative impact on the utility of AI scrapers - at least, until a countermeasure is developed.
