Asimov’s Disease: Don’t Spoil the Magic

[mtvessel]

Jan 2012
The Other Wind - Ursula Le Guin - Orion, 2003
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There is a certain danger inherent in reading a sequel to a book or books that you liked a lot. If you are lucky, it deepens the world, characters and themes, allowing you to re-read the original with greater understanding. However, it may also prove to be a book of little merit, re-hashing storylines or engaging in world-building at the expense of plot. Well, Le Guin has never written a lazy book in her life and this one certainly does something new with the Earthsea setting. Unfortunately, that is its problem.

There are, however, some good points. The first is that Ged is back to his wise old self, after his uncharacteristic regression to teenagehood in Tehanu. He appears in the first chapter, where he advises a young hedge wizard called Alder who is plagued by dreams in which the dead, including his wife and his former teacher, reach out to him across the wall dividing the lands of the living from those of the dead. Ged eventually suggests (for no good reason) that he talks to Tehanu, who is with King Lebannen in his capital of Havnor City.

So off he goes (another mis-step, in my view - in the previous books, Le Guin cunningly avoided sending any of her characters to Havnor which meant that it could be a shining city of legend, with its white marble buildings and the Tower of the Sword. Now we get to see it for real and it proves to be a disappointingly generic fantasy city with nothing remotely memorable about it. It doesn't even have its own map.). We are re-introduced to Lebannen, Tenar and Tehanu, who have problems of their own. Thol, the new Kargish leader, has sent a princess called Seserakh as part of a peace treaty whom Lebannen doesn't want to marry. And the dragons are getting uppity again, with the part- woman, part-dragon Orm Irian (introduced in Tales from Earthsea, which I haven't read) appearing as their ambassador.

There is a much better balance between the male and female characters than in any of the previous books. Tenar, Tehanu, Lebannen and Alder all get equal billing. But Le Guin’s feminism shows up annoyingly in Lebannen’s completely irrational rejection of Seserakh, which is out of character for the smooth-talking diplomat that he is supposed to have become and serves only to make a point about men’s obsession with sexual and emotional freedom cutting them off from “proper” relationships (though it interestingly mirrors the divide between dragons and humans). It is also striking how the women characters can be mapped onto female archetypes - Tenar is the Mother, Tehanu the Waif, Seserakh the Princess, Orm Irian the avatar of (sexual) freedom (okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch). Not even Le Guin seems to be up to inventing new roles for women to play in stories.

But the big problem is the revisionism in the rules that govern Earthsea. For example, we are told in A Wizard of Earthsea that knowing someone’s true name gives a wizard power over them, so how come everyone refers to the king by his - Lebannen - throughout? Wouldn’t this open him up to influence by any mage who was so inclined? This kind of thing indicates the lack of concern that Le Guin now has for the elements that were so important in her earlier stories.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the climax of The Other Wind, which introduces a major change in one of the key elements of the Earthsea mythology. I have to say that the way in which this was presented is particularly disappointing. It's fair enough to try to do something different from conventional heroics, but having a bunch of characters sit around and swap mystical revelations with each other ("we broke the world to make it whole"), particularly when those revelations have not been earned, is simply not good story-telling.

Then there's the dragons. As I recall, they were introduced essentially as a convenient means of transportation in The Farthest Shore, but in later books Le Guin felt the necessity to explain them. The problem is, the more we know, the less strange and magical they become. Similarly with the incongruity of Kargish belief in reincarnation when there is a demonstrable afterlife. To me it is far more interesting to leave it as an odd quirk reflecting humanity's capacity for massive self-delusion than to try to justify its origin.

And this over-explanation reflects back on the original trilogy. For a start, its clean through line - three tales of a man in youth, middle age and mature years and his attendant growth in wisdom - is muddied. And while the new insights we are given don't invalidate Ged's heroism in The Farthest Shore, the fact that we now know that this isn't the end of the story reduces still further the affect of its climax (which is somewhat underwhelming anyway).

I call this tendency of mature SF authors to write unnecessary sequels to their most successful works “Asimov’s Disease”, after that author’s largely unsuccessful attempts to retrofit his Foundation trilogy into the same universe as his Robot books. There are numerous other examples - Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to 2001, Roger Zelazny’s pointless second Amber series, Gene Wolfe's Earth of the New Sun and Frank Herbert’s increasingly nebulous Dune follow-ups are just a few that come to mind. I can see that trying to fix the plot holes and inconsistencies that are the follies of youth, especially when egged on by publishers and fans, must be a strong temptation. But it really should be resisted. This is a relatively minor example of Asimov's Disease compared with those above - the new narrative certainly has some merit - but like them, it diminishes the power of the original without putting something better in its place.

Comments

[zerothin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't describe the afterlife depicted in The Farthest Shore as a "mess", though it is unoriginal. "The land of the dead and everybody just hanging about forever" is essentially a description of the Greek underworld as depicted in the Odyssey and elsewhere (which I personally find a very powerful image and a good metaphor for the catastrophic effects of the loss of memory on any notion of a "soul"). Why is Le Guin's use of it a mistake? It fits nicely with naming magic (people are a "shadow and a Name" and lose the latter - their vital spark - when they die) and with the motivations of the gebbeth in A Wizard of Earthsea (it wants its name back). It's certainly less of a mess than the human-dragon thing, which makes no sense at all.