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”.