The EarthSea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin: The Masterpiece of the Century

 

It is rare that an author is given the privilege of creating a work that defines a whole age. It happened to Dante with his "Comedy," but I think that Ursula Le Guin had the same privilege when she wrote his "EarthSea" cycle, starting in 1968. It is a cycle that encompasses and defines the whole 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. 

It is especially impressive how in the last volume of the first series, "The Farthest Shore," Le Guin managed to describe exactly the current situation, where humans are so desperate to avoid death that they can renounce to everything that makes them human for a false hope of immortality

Versione in Italiano.

More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin

The End of Music - The End of Magic

How we lost the silence: what's the Web doing to us?

The Magic is Back: Reading Novels Again

Earthsea: the Soul and the Machine

Geology of Planet Earthsea. 

Ursula K. Le Guin: 1929-2018. The Magic and the Beauty.

The Word for World is Forest

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead

 

 Earthsea: image source

 Ursula K. Le Guin: "The Trilogy of Earthsea"

They came then into the streets of one of the cities that are there, and Arren saw the houses with windows that are never lit, and in certain doorways standing, with quiet faces and empty hands, the dead.

The marketplaces were all empty. There was no buying and selling there, no gaining and spending. Nothing was used; nothing was made. Ged and Arren went through the narrow streets alone, though a few times they saw a figure at the turning of another way, distant and hardly to be seen in the gloom.

All those whom they saw -not many, for the dead are many, but that land is large- stood still, or moved slowly and with no purpose. None of them bore wounds. They were whole and healed. They were healed of pain and of life. Quiet were their faces, freed from anger and desire, and there was in their shadowed eyes no hope. 

Instead of fear, then, great pity rose up in Arren, and if fear underlay it, it was not for himself, but for all people. For he saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those who had died for love passed each other in the streets. 

In the end, all literature, all science, all knowledge, are travel reports. Sometimes reports from remote lands where one has actually been, sometimes from lands of pure fantasy, sometimes from realms that science can create although nobody could ever go there: the inside of stars, remote galaxy, the great black holes. 

And here is a story of a travel of these strange days of Christmas of 2020. This travel meant walking in a this foggy city, nearly empty of people, with the few Christmas lights looking lonely and useless. And the people: all masked, all looking at each other suspiciously, all walking on as if they had nowhere to go. It was a place that looked very much like the description of the Land of the Dead that Ursula Le Guin gave us in her "Wizard of Earthsea."

That real fog and that real silence that enveloped the city were just the background of a virtual travel to another foggy land: the land of truth that doesn't seem to exist anymore. I started this trip by looking at the scientific literature about the coronavirus pandemic. Reviewed scientific papers are supposed to be the very source of truth. What I found were plenty of contradictions, of contrasting results, of evident bending of the interpretations, of attempt to be politically correct to appease the all powerful watchers who take the form of editors and reviewers. 

There is a kind of fog that pervades everything in the scientific literature. You are always under the suspicion that it would take so little to corrupt scientists. And I know it happens. I have seen it happening. Scientists turn out to be so cheap to corrupt, all what it takes is the promise of a research grant, but let me not tell you a few sad stories I know. In any case, this is what science is today, and that is supposed to be "Science" starting with a capital letter and on which you must believe. And if you don't, you are, what? A conspiracy theorist? A science denier? An enemy of the people?

It is a fog that surrounds everything in science. And even if you can trust the authors, when the data look good, the conclusions sound, you see that what we call science has no impact on the debate on the pandemic. Have you tried to argue in a public debate on the basis of data and rational arguments? You know what happens: you find yourself pelted with links by people who use them as if they were stones launched by medieval catapults. It is not just fog: you find yourself in a house of mirrors, you see multiple reflections of everything staring at you from all directions. And every reflection claims aloud "I am the truth! I am the truth!"

Surfing the web, I stumbled into another case of mirrors reflecting into each other. Do you remember the Rwandan massacre of 1994? You probably remember it as the story of how the evil Hutu (the majority) massacred the poor Tutsi (a minority), as told in the emotional film "Hotel Rwanda." But I found myself facing a report titled "Hotel Propaganda" that proposed the exactly opposite interpretation. The ones massacred were the Hutu when Rwanda was invaded from Uganda by an army led by the Tutsi and supported by the Western powers in order to gain control of the mineral resources of central Africa. 

Did Cain really kill Abel, or was it the opposite? How can we know? What do we know about Rwanda? Could you pinpoint Rwanda on a world map? Have you ever met a Rwandan? Have you ever seen anything of Rwanda that didn't appear in one of the Western propaganda channels? What is truth, as Pilate said?  Mirrors everywhere, the truth is everywhere and nowhere, and the fog pervades everything.

Still roaming a strange and foggy land, I stumbled into something even stranger and foggier -- an article by Thorsten Pattberg on the Saker blog -- (Yes, I know that it is one of the most subversive sites of the internet) It is strange how I arrived there: I was writing something about Caligula, the Roman Emperor. You know, the pervert, the madman, the one who made a horse a consul and who forced people to worship him as a God. Yes, we all know that, but is it true? And as I was asking myself that question, I stumbled into Pattberg's post that mentioned exactly the same subject: was Caligula a monster or a maligned hero?

The fog of history is truly thick if we try to pierce it across the nearly 2 thousand years that separate us from Caligula. And yet, we think we know something about Roman Emperors, don't we? But what do we know about Roman Emperors? How do we know that such people even existed? How do we know that there existed such a thing as the Roman Empire? Sure, you can find great walls and half-crumbled buildings, but what are they for? Who built them? The Romans? The Atlanteans? Aliens from Betelgeuse? Or who?

Pattberg's piece is a nice trip into the land of nihilism. Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we going? It contains such gems as

 "Since something can exist without being existent (interest rates, gross domestic product, French cuisine, the billion-year commitment and unicorns), soon our planners will introduce the realm of non-existence – and harvest it accordingly. It is a bit like discovering the concept of negative numbers. The notion of humans who are actual burdensome “minus-people” will capture imaginations. We will compute trillions of them."

And so it goes. In these foggy days, in a city populated by masked ghosts walking while suspiciously watching each other, the impression is that nothing is real, except for the fact that maybe we do live in Le Guin's Land of the Dead as she describes it in her Earthsea cycle. And maybe Earthsea really exists somewhere, except that we, the dwellers of the Land of the Dead, cannot see it. 

It is more than just a similarity, because the way Le Guin describes her fictional world, she seems to have been prescient of what would have happened to the world we deem to be real: the refusal of death leads to nothing but the loss of life. In the story, Ged the Archmage says to the sorcerer Cob: 

You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw the world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness.

And that's how a promise of immortality had become worthless in the fictional (or maybe real) world of Earthsea. And so it is for us, in our ghostly world of today that we think is real. We sold everything we had, including our freedom and our dignity, for a false promise of immortality. 

But, as the Japanese poets would say, the world is made out of dew, just condensed fog. And as long as we can walk, we walk with our feet and we walk with our minds. Someday, maybe we'll get somewhere. Or maybe not. But we keep walking. 

More posts of mine about Ursula Le Guin

The End of Music - The End of Magic

How we lost the silence: what's the Web doing to us?

The Magic is Back: Reading Novels Again

Earthsea: the Soul and the Machine

Geology of Planet Earthsea. 

Ursula K. Le Guin: 1929-2018. The Magic and the Beauty.

The Word for World is Forest

A Travel Report from the Land of the Dead

Geology of Planet Earthsea.

Earthsea is a fictional universe created by Ursula Le Guin and described in a six-volume corpus. I wrote about Earthsea here.

The "Earthsea" cycle created by Ursula Le Guin is one of those works of art that you can keep admiring forever, finding new elements of fascination everytime you return to it. Few works of fiction gave us such unforgettable characters as Ged and Vecth, shown here in a splendid interpretation by Hchom. And, of course, the more you delve into Earthsea, the more you wonder about what kind of world it is. What makes Earthsea tick?

Nothing would prevent writers from imagining words were the laws of physics are not the same as in our universe but, in practice, that almost never happens. In the case of Earthsea, we have a world that's very much like Earth, but also different in many ways. So, let's see what we know about Planet Earthsea.

First of all, it seems that the gravity field of Earthsea is similar to that of Earth. It means that the archipelago described in the novels is just a tiny fraction of a much larger planet. Then, it is clear that the flora and the fauna of Earthsea are very much the same as they are on the Earth we know. This implies an atmosphere that contains oxygen for animals to breathe and a small fraction of carbon dioxide (CO2) for plants to do photosynthesis. The presence of these two gases tells us a lot about Earthsea beyond the archipelago. Oxygen and CO2 are unstable gases which can exist in a planetary atmosphere only because they are continuously re-created by complex biological and geochemical cycles. These cycles involve at least two characteristics: one is the presence of large continents, otherwise the concentration of CO2 couldn't be kept under control by the process of silicate erosion. Then, it needs also an active plate tectonics, required for cycling CO2 from the atmosphere to the mantle and back. The continents must also be at least a few hundred million years old so that atmospheric oxygen could be generated by sedimentation and burial of organic matter. The presence of oxygen tells us that, somewhere on Earthsea, there exist coal deposits, just as well as oil and gas, even though the inhabitants of the Archipelago have no access to them or, anyway, don't use them as fuels.

The active plate tectonics that must exist on Earthsea also explains a characteristic described in the novel: the fact that people know and use metals. The father of Ged, the protagonist of the first three novels, is said to be a "bronze smith". The stories make it clear that the people of Earthsea know copper, tin, silver, gold, and iron. In one of the stories, we are told of a mercury mine being exploited. There have to exist mines yielding these metals, somewhere in the Archipelago. In turn, if ores of these metals exist, they must have been created by processes of enrichment created by plate tectonics. Another indication that Earthsea is a geologically "live" planet and, indeed, in the novels we are told of active volcanoes and earthquakes.

The size of the Earthsea archipelago is not exactly reported but it may be assumed to be that of a small continent, about the area of Western Europe. The largest Island of Earthsea, Havnor, may have approximately the size of Britain. The local lore says that a divine or semidivine entity (or maybe a mage) called "Segoy" raised the islands out of the sea. It may indicate a volcanic origin of the islands.

But saying "volcanic origin" may mean several thing and some are unable to explain the characteristics of the Archipelago of Earthsea. For instance, let's examine a group of islands that we know are of volcanic origin on Earth, Hawaii.

This chain of islands is the product of a hot magma "plume" that emerges from the Earth's mantle. The islands were generated, one after the other, as the ocean floor slides over the plume. The oldest islands (North-West) are inactive volcanoes, slowly being eroded and tending to disappear. The most recent island is the "Big Island"; South-East, where the hot spot is today. In time, the sliding ocean floor will create a new island, off the coast of Big Island.

Clearly, the Earthsea Archipelago is not a small chain of islands: there is no evidence of a temporal sequence as there is for Hawaii. More importantly, in this kind of orogenesis (mountain creation) there is no possibility to generate metal ores. The Hawaii islands are mineral-poor; their inhabitants never had metals until they were able to import them from the continental mainland, in modern times.

Maybe we could think that the archipelago of Earthsea is similar to the Aegean islands or the Cyclades.

These islands are volcanic and they have been created by the energy released by the collision of the plates existing in the region:

The Aegean islands are known to have been rich in metal ores, at least until humans started exploiting them. That would be consistent with at least one of the characteristics of the Earthsea archipelago. But there is also a problem, here: these islands exist only as minor features at the edge of large continental regions. On the contrary, we have no evidence that a large continent exists close to the Earthsea archipelago.

So, we must look for something else and we can find an interesting analogy with the submerged continent that some call "Zealandia", East of Australia.

Zealandia is a "micro-continent" in the sense that it is much smaller than the other landmasses of Earth, but it has all the characteristics of a continent. It is a solid plate, floating above the viscous asthenosphere, below. Today it is mostly submerged, the only part of it surfacing are the two islands of New Zealand but, in the past, it seems to have been in large part emerged.

Zealandia gives us a good model for the archipelago of Earthsea; it has the right size and New Zealand is about as large as Havnor. Its past history of being above the water provides the setting necessary for the formation of ores. Indeed, New Zealand is rich in metals, including gold, copper, nickel and more.

Of course, the Earthsea archipelago is not so nearly completely submerged as Zealandia is on Earth. It is possible that the phenomenon described as Segoy raising up the islands was, rather, a eustatic fluctuation of the sea level. Planet Earthsea may have seen an ice age that lowered the sea level, giving the impression of the islands rising out of the sea, but it was the opposite: it was the sea that was retreating. In the process, the mountaintops of the ancient continent emerged out of the waters, creating the Archipelago described in the Earthsea novels.

We see how Earthsea makes a lot of sense in geological terms. It is a planet with large continents, icecaps, and many features that make it similar to Earth. It could be something like the image below, although, for some reason, the people who draw fantasy planets always seem to forget icecaps - this one, at least, has a hint of them.

We may also consider a more detailed explanation for the eustatic oceanic movement that created the Archipelago. Let's imagine that the continents of Planet Earthsea were once populated by humans. We said that these continents must contain fossil carbon and it may well be that this carbon was exploited in the form of fossil fuels, coal, oil, and gas, by the humans of an earlier time with respect to the stories of the Earthsea cycle. In this case, humans would have developed an industrial civilization and the emissions of greenhouse gases resulting from the burning of fossil fuels would have generated a rapid global warming; just like what's happening today on our planet.

Let's also suppose that this warming took place a climate situation where there existed icecaps on the polar continental regions of Earthsea. The melting of the icecaps raised the ocean levels and submerged the Zealandia-like region which had been a regular continent up to then. That region would have remained submerged for several tens of thousands of years until the slow re-capture of the greenhouse gases would have brought back temperatures to the earlier values, re-formed the icecaps, and caused the Archipelago to resurface.

So, what happened to the humans who lived on the continents of Planet Earthsea? Their civilization was destroyed by a series of factors: climate change, pollution, resource depletion, soil erosion, and others. The humans of Planet Earthsea didn't go extinct but surely, they must have been enormously reduced in numbers.

A fascinating hypothesis is that the humans of Planet Earthsea tried to remedy to the disaster of climate change and fossil fuel depletion by moving to nuclear fission as a source energy, building several thousands of nuclear reactors. That didn't stop global warming, by then well past the "tipping point", but gave them the possibility to survive as an industrial civilization for a while. But, at some moment, they lost control of their nuclear plants; maybe because they ran out of fissile uranium. Without the necessary maintenance, the nuclear reactors went into meltdown and released prodigious amounts of radioactivity in the atmosphere that returned to the ground in the form of fallout. That killed off most of the surviving humans and animals.

The humans of Earthsea could perhaps have survived in small numbers by moving to the sea to avoid the nuclear contamination that made the land nearly uninhabitable. They may have developed the civilization described in the Earthsea cycle as The "Children of the Sea" or the "Raft People." They would visit land only occasionally to get, for instance, wood for their rafts, but these short visits would have had to be very short to avoid dangerous exposure to radioactivity.

When Earthsea resurfaced, some 50 thousand years after the catastrophe, it was not contaminated by the radioactive isotopes released at that time. So, the Raft People found it a good place to colonize, even though some of them maintained the old ways and are described in the cycle as still existing in the Southern and Western ranges of the Archipelago.

There remains one feature of Earthsea that makes it very different from Earth: dragons. We don't know very much about them, except that they tend to "fly west," where they probably live in one of those large continents where humans don't live, at least not anymore. Are dragons somehow correlated to the nuclear disaster that turned the continents into radioactive waste? Mutant creatures generated by the last remnants of a civilization engaged in genetic engineering? It is impossible to say but, obviously, Ursula Le Guin knows best:


things change
     authors and wizards are not always to be trusted
           nobody can explain a dragon

Ursula K. Le Guin - "Tales From Earthsea" (2001)




Other posts by Ugo Bardi on Earthsea 

The Magic is Back 
Earthsea: the Soul and the Machine
How we Lost the Silence
The End of Music, The End of Magic.