As a teenag­er I was intrigued by the prodi­gious out­put of sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers that you could find lin­ing the shelves at WH Smiths — Isaac Asi­mov, Michael Moor­cock, Robert A Hein­lein, Frank Her­bert and so on — often with appeal­ing, oth­er-world­ly art­work on their cov­ers. Along­side sci-fi you also had the relat­ed genre of sci­ence-fan­ta­sy, or straight-up “fan­ta­sy”, which dif­fers from sci-fi in the fact that, whilst the lat­ter remains tech­ni­cal­ly in a world of sci­en­tif­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty, sci­ence fan­ta­sy allows for vio­la­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic laws of the real world, thus encom­pass­ing all the “sword and sor­cery” fic­tion from Tolkien to Robert E Howard’s Conan The Bar­bar­ian nov­els.

Thanks to Tolkien (I first read The Lord of the Rings some­where in my mid-teens), it was sci­ence fan­ta­sy to which I leaned, if I had to choose, but even then I wasn’t what you’d call a real fan of the genre. I was too eclec­tic, I sup­pose, busy col­lect­ing thrillers by the likes of Alis­tair Maclean or Jack Hig­gins, or hor­ror fic­tion by James Her­bert, or grit­ty pulp like Richard Stark’s Park­er nov­els or Don Pendleton’s The Exe­cu­tion­er series – more killing bad guys than slay­ing drag­ons, shall we say?

How­ev­er, anoth­er name I recall see­ing on those book shelves (but which nev­er read until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly) was that of Ursu­la K Le Guin (1929–2018), an Amer­i­can author known for both sci­ence fic­tion works set in her “Hain­ish” uni­verse, and sci­ence fan­ta­sy in her extra­or­di­nary Earth­sea series. It was the lat­ter I dis­cov­ered a few years ago when I pur­chased her Earth­sea Quar­tet on a whim and found myself amazed and thrilled by her sto­ry-telling. There is noth­ing throw­away about Le Guin’s nov­els, no pro­duc­tion-line fan­ta­sy, these; they are lit­er­ary works that weave an extra­or­di­nary world which has obvi­ous­ly been tak­en seri­ous­ly and com­pre­hen­sive­ly thought through.

The Earth­sea world is one of sea and islands, a vast arch­i­pel­ago metic­u­lous­ly mapped out at the begin­ning of the book, in which its inhab­i­tants under­stand that mag­ic is a real thing, an in-built tal­ent com­mon to all though high­ly-devel­oped only in some, par­tic­u­lar­ly those trained at the school at Roke (Earthsea’s school of wiz­ardry cre­at­ed long before Hog­warts). There are “weath­er work­ers” and “fix­ers”, and var­i­ous low-lev­el mag­i­cal specialities…and then there are the cream of the crop, the card-car­ry­ing wiz­ards, like the pro­tag­o­nist Ged (also known as Spar­rowhawk), who go by the title of “Mage”.

In the first book, A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea, the young Ged, on the island of Gont, over­hears his mater­nal aunt, the vil­lage witch, using “words of pow­er” to attract goats. He tries it him­self, to sur­pris­ing effect, and his aunt recog­nis­es Ged’s excep­tion­al­ism. By the age of twelve he has learned every­thing his aunt can teach him, and so the jour­ney begins. I love the nuanced mag­ic: instead of those dra­mat­ic elec­tric-bolt bat­tles between Gan­dalf and Saru­man, or Har­ry Pot­ter and Volde­mort, we see Ged using a “mage wind” to pow­er a boat for­ward when the wind fails. It’s alto­geth­er a more sub­tle kind of mag­ic. A more believ­able kind, in fact, even if it is just “fan­ta­sy”.