She refused to write wish fulfillment, even the wish fulfillment many of us crave. … The women warriors of current fantasy epics,” Le Guin wrote in an afterword of The Tombs of Atuan, “look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.” Instead, Le Guin wouldn’t play make-believe, and her women were sometimes vulnerable, including physically. “When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. One thing they have in common is that, unlike Quentin, they all grow up pretty fast. We live now in wealthy times of female heroes, particularly in trilogies. Such a heroine, a woman of importance, just hadn’t really existed yet in the marketplace. (So much “torn between two lovers” garbage, too! Blecho!) Their heroes stopped being women and started being devices. Both Hunger Games and Divergent in particular went badly nuts in their third acts, all the plots squeaking like squeezeboxes, all the characters dripping blood and tears endlessly. The blockbusters in YA SF and fantasy suffered horribly having to perform throughout three books. Trilogies have gotten a bad rap, and rightly so. How about: Are these people still actually behaving like themselves-or at least like people-throughout? Am I satisfied? And, hmm: Is this world complete? How should we judge a trilogy? Let’s say you get three magic questions, which is always the kind of dumb jerk thing that happens in a magical land. That’s partly the function of publishing over years as a trilogy. It’s almost as if the books had a spell on them, leaving them incapable of being recalled. They evaporate, in a not unpleasing way, leaving a sense of having had a nice steak, or a decent massage. It is queerly difficult to remember these books not so long after reading them. But does she? While the fox god rapes her, he gives her some power, but takes something more complicated-something she wasn’t sure she had but definitely wouldn’t have given up. All she wanted was a family of her own making, and here she’d found it at last! But the ceremony goes on, and, instead of this goddess, out from a candle pops a 12-foot tall man with a fox’s head. Even as they begin, Julia realizes she doesn’t actually care. They prepare, wearing white flowing gowns: a crown of mistletoe, a silver bowl of rainwater, six animals for slaughter.
As they work, Julia begins to believe that underneath all the religious blah-blah of our world there actually is something, a guiding but local hand of a goddess, an actual hand of nature and the seasons, “a distant cousin of Diana or Cybele or Isis.” The hermit gives them an invocation.
Julia eventually gets on board, and they tromp the countryside digging up strange minor deities and a hermit and some critters.
THE MAGICIANS LAND TIK SERIES
They teach her everything they know, and then they add her to their quest: What is the “magical singularity”? What is the next level, what is beyond? The central mystery being: What is the nature of magic, and how much of it do we know? Is there always more and more powerful magic to be discovered? Or do you meet up with “inverse profundity,” in which it turns out that our magic is just a series of sad little power tools that a stronger race have accidentally left behind? The answer isn’t, they’ve found, traveling nearer to the center of the Earth, or dreams, or the magnetic field, or space. At last, an advanced magician shows up and runs Julia through a test of all her spells, and then leaves her clues to get to a village in the south of France, where she finds 10 people, half of them her friends from online, who are, of course, magicians as well as geniuses and medicated depressives. There she begins learning, and, outgrowing this shabby house of magic, she begins traveling house to house, from Buffalo to Key West, finding these locations by friendliness or via “the power of the bathroom handjob.” The quest leaves her emptier and emptier.
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