Lucía’s Reviews > Tales from Earthsea > Status Update

You'll know what to say when the time comes. That's the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.

she was quiet-voiced and even-tempered, having learned the uselessness of impatience in the work that must be done.

that's why we're called the Hand, or the women of the Hand, though we're not women only. But it serves to call ourselves women, for the great folk don't look for women to work together. Or to have thoughts about such things as rule or misrule. Or to have any powers.

«We can't do anything without each other,» he said. «But it's the greedy ones, the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other. And those who won't join them stand each alone.»

Wanting praise, not history, the warlords burnt the books in which the poor and powerless might learn what power is.

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.