alt Hacker NewsLe Guin is a master of fiction, period. While she's very different from modern sci-fi/fantasy, her work is almost as foundational as Tolkien, Lewis, or Asimov.
Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.
But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.
If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.
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I beg to differ. Earthsea is a good example of "tell, don’t show". It goes on and on with explaining things that happen without the showing part. It’s outright boring.
It might have been inspirational decades ago. Now, it reads dated. Tastes are different, but I’d not call it well-crafted at all.
A side point: when you say “Lewis” I assume you mean Charles Staple Lewis, not Sinclair Lewis. I find it hard to consider the former “foundational”. It was and is popular (much to the annoyance of his buddy Tolkien), but hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth).
As for Asimov, well, one can argue about his long term influence but who can avoid calling it foundation-al?
Agree completely on Le Guin
That "loosely" hides a bit of a tragedy on the Studio Ghibli adaptation: instead of accepting the transcendent Hayao Miyazaki work that she and we all deserved, she refused what she misunderstood would be a Disney-like cartoon...
And instead of this, much later, the not-at-all ready son, Goro Miyazaki, had a go without having done the massive thought-work that you can for example glimpse Hayao doing on the emotional arc of Ponyo
If I haven't read any of her books, which book or series would you recommend as a starting point?
> Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here)
Can I make a side-rant how since Game of Thrones, it seems to have become an expectation that characters must be killed off? Apparently readers are (expected to) be so desensitized that nothing below "the main party that is the main reason you're reading this story can die at any moment" registers anymore.
In fact, even that is just the bare minimum. To really make an impact, we need some mass casualties like the Red Wedding or Thanos' "snap" in the Avenger movies.
Can we go back on all of that?