Ursula Le Guin: Three fantasy and science-fiction books

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

The Birthday Of The World (Gollancz, $29.95)

Tales From Earthsea (Orion, $34.95)

The Other Wind (Orion, $18.95)

Only in silence the word,

only in dark the light,

only in dying life:

bright the hawk's flight

on the empty sky.

Ursula Le Guin wrote this poem 35 years ago. It's as good an introduction to her work as you'll find: simple, elegant, mystical and memorable.

It also happens to be the epigraph to A Wizard of Earthsea, the book which launched Le Guin's classic Earthsea fantasy series, and in the process altered people's idea of what children's fantasy could be. In much the same way, her novel The Left Hand of Darkness changed our sense of the scope and potential of science fiction. Astonishingly, the two books were published within a year.

Le Guin, 74, has been writing more or less steadily since, though the vagaries of publishing contrive to give the impression of a highly cyclic boom-and-bust output. For instance, two years ago, five Le Guin books tumbled out into the world within an extremely short period, despite having been written over most of a decade.

Three of those books, all for adults, have just become available in New Zealand: The Birthday of the World, a collection of science-fiction stories; Tales From Earthsea, a collection of loosely linked fantasy stories; and The Other Wind, a novel which picks up where the last story in the Earthsea collection leaves off, and brings the whole series to what is, for now, its conclusion.

Let's not mince words: these books are extraordinary. What's most striking, when you go back and compare them with Le Guin's early work, is that she's retained her strongly individual voice while changing and maturing into a vastly more impressive writer.

It isn't easy to put your finger on what makes her current work so good. Partly this is because, as you might expect with someone who's been writing for decades, she has a broad-spectrum technical mastery. Writing is a craft incorporating many skill-sets, and she's good with most of them.

Reading the two new Earthsea books, for instance, it slowly becomes clear that not a word is wasted, and no unnecessary details are let inside the frame. The stories are simple, told with an absolute economy of language, but they possess a subtlety and complexity of thought which makes them reminiscent of great Chinese and Japanese painting, where five brush-strokes can somehow convey an entire landscape.

Go from this to her new science-fiction collection, and the difference is astonishing. The writing hums and crackles with energy. These stories are like Petri dishes, each containing a different culture - quite literally, because for each one Le Guin invents a new planet, and a new human society, and sets about exploring how people might live in differing conditions. These are stories which contain worlds.

A society where women outnumber men by 16 to one. A society where everyone is both male and female. A society where nearly all forms of social interaction are taboo. A lesser writer, playing these anthropological games, would run the risk of subjugating the story to the thought-experiment. Le Guin balances the two imperatives perfectly, so that the narrative and the speculation are simply aspects of each other.

She also approaches each story as a new experiment in form, using multiple voices and a hugely varied range of story structures. The Matter of Segri, the story of a world where men are rare and managed as a precious resource, has more than enough material in it for a novel, but Le Guin makes a virtue of its brevity. She presents excerpts from the natives' memoirs, from their fiction, from reports written by visiting aliens, so that the shape and weight of a major work are conveyed in a handful of pages.

There's a PhD waiting to be written on Le Guin's attitudes to and use of genre conventions. As well as fantasy and science fiction, she's written realistic fiction, young children's books, screenplays, poetry and a translation of the Chinese mystical text the Tao Te Ching.

This last is possibly her most revealing and personal work, because while she alters her approach substantially from one genre to the next, a strong strand of Taoist thought runs through everything she's written.

Ged, the hero of the Earthsea series, is in his 70s now, and facing the imminent prospect of death. Le Guin's treatment of this issue is profoundly unsettling, and profoundly comforting, far more so than the youthful author of the "only in dying life" poem could have achieved. Her mature position can probably be summed up by this passage from her version of the Tao Te Ching:

To know what endures

is to be openhearted,

magnanimous,

regal,

blessed,

following the Tao,

the way that endures forever.

The body comes to its ending

but there is nothing to fear.

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.