Tales from Earthsea

Tales from Earthsea is a collection of fantasy stories and essays by American author Ursula K. Le Guin, published by Harcourt in 2001. It accompanies five novels (1968 to 2001) set in the fictional archipelago Earthsea.

Tales from Earthsea won the annual Endeavour Award, for the best book by a writer from the Pacific Northwest, and Locus Award, Best Collection, for speculative fiction collections. Two of the five collected stories were previously published, "Darkrose and Diamond" (1999) and "Dragonfly" (1998), and both had been nominated for annual awards.

Contents

"Darkrose and Diamond" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1999.
"Dragonfly" was first published in Legends, October 1998.

Themes

All of the stories reinterpret the world of Earthsea. In the original trilogy, Earthsea society in general and the practice of magic in particular are dominated by men. Women can only be witches, which is the despised lowest rank of the magical world, as expressed in the proverb "Weak as women's magic, wicked as women's magic".

Tales from Earthsea (film)

Tales from Earthsea (Japanese: ゲド戦記, Hepburn: Gedo Senki, literally Ged's War Chronicles) is a 2006 Japanese animated fantasy film directed by Gorō Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film is based on a combination of plots and characters from the first four books of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu; however, the film's title is named from the collection of short stories, Tales from Earthsea, made in 2001. The plot was "entirely different" according to the author Ursula K. Le Guin, who told director Gorō Miyazaki, "It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie", although she later expressed her disappointment with the end result.

Plot

A war galley is caught in a storm at sea. The ship's weatherworker is distressed to realize he has lost the power to control the wind and waves, but is more so when he sees two dragons fighting above the clouds, during which one is killed by the other—an unprecedented and impossible occurrence.