Excerpt of the Afterword from A Wizard of Earthsea
(or: why you should read this series)
“The part of the tradition [of fantasy] that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blonde princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.
It’s in this sense that A Wizard [of Earthsea] was perfectly conventional. The hero does what a man is supposed to do: he uses his strength, wits, and courage to rise from humble beginnings to great fame and power, in a world where women are secondary, a man’s world.
In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.
His people, the Archipelagans, are various shades of copper and brown, shading into black in the South and East Reaches. The light-skinned people among them have far-northern or Kargish ancestors. The Kargish raiders in the first chapter are white. Serret, who both as a girl and woman betrays Ged, is white. Ged is copper-brown and his friend Vetch is black. I was bucking the racist tradition, "making a statement”–but I made it quietly, and it went almost unnoticed.
Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbins’s painting for the first edition–the fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skin–was, to me, the one true cover.
My story took off in its own direction, away from the tradition, also in the whole matter of what makes heroes and villains. Hero tales adn adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins. This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted–“of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.
But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory.
I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting–danger, risk, challenge, courage–to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the complexity and moral richness of our life into Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.
Or does might make right?
If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don’t play war games.
To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.“
–Ursula K. LeGuin
