I read the original Earthsea Trilogy as a teenager, and at that time I considered it on a par with both Narnia and Middle Earth although based on a very different philosophy; Lewis and Tolkein were both Christians while LeGuin was a Taoist.

The fourth Earthsea book was published nearly two decades later and it's clear she had moved on and had a very different agenda. Apparently she had become a radical feminist and felt guilty for making the original trilogy 'too patriarchal.' Although gender roles in Earthsea was something that might have been worth exploring if done subtly she seemed to go all out to completely deconstruct her fantasy world. The wizards who had earlier been wise guardians of Earthsea's mystical balance suddenly became foaming at the mouth misogynists for no obvious reason. The later books got even worse as LeGuin seemed to completely forget the Taoist principles that had informed the earlier books. I suppose the lesson is it's better not to go back to a series after such a long gap.

Posted by: @cobalt-jade

Yes, that fourth Earthsea book was awful. Some authors just shouldn't try to build on their earlier work.

 

True.
And, sadly, the final book by the writer who was my favourite living author until she died, was also disappointing, and reminded me slightly of Earthsea. 

She was Diana Wynne Jones (under Jones) who created and wrote some amazing worlds and fantasies, with very clever, slowly unfolding, plots and concepts. Plenty of "Aha!" moments. I have read, loved, reread, bought, and shared them for about 30 years.A few are connected, but others are stand-alone.  The few where she revisited a world for a new book were well executed.

@coracle 

I think Diana Wynne Jones wrote Howl's Moving Castle, which was adapted to an anime movie by Hayao Miyazaki.

Yes, that's right. The film is clever in its own way, but it deviates from the book in many ways. For instance, the boy apprentice was old enough to marry Sophie's sister! And the character of the Witch was altered beyond recognition.

I'm pretty sure Diana Wynne Jones came up with the "Wizard School in a modern world" trope before J. K. Rowling did.I

Then again, LeGuin did the Wizard School thing first, back in A Wizard of Earthsea, which came out in 1969. Of course, that was a Bronze Age world not the modern one.

I could have swallowed Tehanu (that was what that fourth Earthsea book was called) and thought it merely OK but misguided but towards the end of it there was some seriously messed-up cruel torture inflicted on the two main characters that had no place in an Earthsea book IMO. It was a complete change of tone. I'm not a prude by any means, and I've read way more graphic stuff, but the fact that it was there was like the author shredding apart the earlier trilogy a bit too gleefully, if you know what I mean. I could go on and on about that terrible book but this is a Narnia forum and not an Earthsea one.

@cobalt-jade Yes, she did have a book called Witch Week (someone in the class seems to be a witch, but who?) and the Chrestomanci series has magically talented young people living and training together, although not the size of a normal school.
On the other hand, The Worst Witch was written a good while before Rowling came up with Harry & friends. The first was published in 1974, when Rowling was only 9. 
[I note that Jill Murphy, the author, was only 15 and still at school herself when she began writing. Lots of the characters and events were based on her own school years! It was offered to publishers when she was 18, but was rejected as 'too scary', and it wasn't published until she was 24. She's still writing them, and there have been 8 altogether].
It's believed by many that this series was a major factor in Rowling's invention.

[While looking this up on Wikipedia, I followed a link to the first movie adaptation, and spotted Sophie Cook in the list of schoolgirls! This came out 2 years before she played Susan in the BBC Narnia serials. Ooh! I watched it to look for her, and think she's the blonde girl on the right at 20m38sec]

I don’t know what people here think of Phillip Pullman.  I tried reading The Golden Compass but stopped reading after a few chapters.  I was kind of suspicious about the girl and the “daemon” living at the college. “Daemon” is too close to demon to suit me.  And I was rather offended by Pullman’s attacking Narnia and C. S. Lewis’ Christian ideas. So should I give Pullman another chance?  Reading his books might be a waste of time if I want to be real Christian since I don’t want to be influenced by his “daemonology”. And what is there to be gained by reading an author who hated C.S. Lewis and Christianity?  

Narnia was some of the first fantasy that I was exposed to as a child except for Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It does have some advantages over other fantasy in that the talking animals are more like real ones. The animals act like real ones and don’t dress up in human clothing like in The Wind in the Willows. I think they are more believable.  They even work better than the creatures in The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. In some ways I guess Narnia is more realistic fantasy.  But these books can all be enjoyed as quality literature.

@narnian78 I've just never managed to finish a book by Pullman. There's a rather dry quality to his writing I just can't tolerate for very long. It also feels like he's always pushing an agenda, which strangely enough I never get with Lewis despite the obvious Christian inspiration for both Narnia and the Space Trilogy. I suppose the anti Christian agenda in His Dark Materials didn't help, but even with the Sally Lockhart series where that isn't really present I couldn't sustain enough interest to finish even the first book.

@hermit I'd actually say Philip Pullman has a great prose style, but I don't like his stories. (Part of that may be because he's into science and I'm not.) So my favorite thing by him is his (somewhat loose) translation of Grimms' fairy tales. Interestingly, despite his ardent atheism, he stays true to Christian milieu of the stories with their references to God, the Devil and the occasional saint. Don't ask me why he tolerates Christianity in the Grimms but not in C. S. Lewis. (And it's not like those fairy tales are considered feminist-friendly either.) Maybe it's because he and C. S. Lewis are both English academic types with interests in literature, so he feels "betrayed" that someone like that doesn't share his worldview.

I haven't read any of Philip Pullman's books, so I can't fairly judge them in and of themselves. Interestingly, my school library got a copy of Northern Lights (the original title of The Golden Compass) when it first came out (I would have been about 17 then), and I saw it and was intrigued and tried to start reading it once or twice. But for some reason it didn't really grab me and I never got past the first few pages, so I soon forgot about it. It was only later that I found out that Pullman was an extremely harsh critic of C.S. Lewis and had more or less deliberately written this series as a sort of anti-Narnia with an underlying atheist agenda to counter Narnia's underlying Christian agenda.

What I would have made of that in my late teens, I don't know; I was an agnostic at the time and had pushed aside the joy and wonder I used to find in the Narnia books (which I hadn't touched for several years by then), because I was now convinced it wasn't possible to prove anything about God for certain. That all changed a few years later!!! But I'm grateful that, in the meantime, I didn't end up reading these books that could have made me even more sceptical and cynical about religion than I already was.

Now that I'm coming from a very different position, I could definitely read the His Dark Materials trilogy without it causing any crisis of faith for me; "I know the One in whom I have put my trust", to quote 2 Tim. 1:12 out of context. But I'm just not really interested in reading it now. I respect Pullman's standpoint and his right to write things based on his own convictions, naturally — I know what it's like to not have faith and to be extremely wary of people and institutions that claim to have "the truth" about God. But I find it a lot more difficult to respect Pullman's blatant misreading of Narnia and of Lewis's intentions. In his Guardian article 20 years ago in which he panned the Narnia books, Pullman stated straight out that "One girl [i.e. Susan] was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys." Which, as anyone who has actually READ The Last Battle can tell you, is not what happens in it at all!!!

I can only assume Pullman has either not read the book himself and is just going by what he's heard about it (as J.K. Rowling admitted for herself after making similar statements about exactly the same incident) — or else he has read it, but through such a distorting lens of his own disdain and prejudice that he totally missed what the book actually says and he's just repeating what HE assumes it must be saying. Either way, if he can't have the honesty and decency to at least be factually correct about the story he's criticising... why should I take him seriously at all??  

YES about Pullman! If, as a writer, you are going to shoot your mouth off about another writer's work, READ it first!

As a writer myself, I have absolutely zero respect for this guy.

I think Studio Ghibli also did an anime movie called Tales from Earthsea. Japanese animation kind of has a unique look; it's totally different than the style of animation in the US.

@jasmine_tarkheena yes they did. I looked at some of it, but didn't warm to it. Japanese animation doesn't really appeal to me. Perhaps it's the huge eyes, which seem to be a throwback to the big-eyed paintings and cartoons of the 70s (Western). But they are very talented to create such amazing movies.

Anime is a taste thing, definitely. I like it, but can see that others wouldn't.

From what I heard and saw of the Earthsea animated movie it was unfaithful to the books -- they took a lot of liberties with the adaptation. For example, they jammed the first four together in a very awkward way. They also had horses in it -- well, a horselike animal with horns -- and there were no horses in Earthsea, just boats. If you wanted to get around on an island, you had to walk.

There also was a live-action miniseries of it, on SyFy I think. This was some years ago. Again, the writers took liberties with the text to the author's chagrin, notably making all the characters White (they weren't white in the books) and having the culture be Medievalish rather than Bronze Age. Probably they put horses in that one too!