Lucía’s Reviews > Tales from Earthsea > Status Update

No commonwealth was left and no justice, only the will of the wealthy.

(...)
Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth- telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. (...)

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened.Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it—can we even remember it—until we can tell it as a story? For events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us.Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination.