Post by Kevin Bird / Redsky

I’ve enjoyed reading Le Guin write about writing or Sci Fi just as much as her actual literature. So refreshing and unique in her confident unpretentiousness

aug 31, 2025, 7:40 am • 13 3

Replies

She's amazing and somehow we ended up with JK Rowling instead of her :/

aug 31, 2025, 7:41 am • 2 0 • view

True, but we at least got this masterclass in shade throwing

So, then, what's the difference between being influenced by a body of work and admitting it, and being influenced by a body of work and not admitting it? This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. I didn't originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H. White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn't develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn't plagiarize. She didn't copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards' school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.

aug 31, 2025, 7:45 am • 3 0 • view

Gorgeous, is this in the new Yorker? Don't think I've read

aug 31, 2025, 7:48 am • 1 0 • view

As a kid a family friend wrote for the Times book review and she asked me whether I'd read Harry Potter. I told her I didn't make it through the first book and that if she liked fantasy she should try Philip Pullman So she published a piece on the Golden Compass called "Harry Potter for Grown-ups"

aug 31, 2025, 7:49 am • 1 0 • view

www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/b...

aug 31, 2025, 7:54 am • 1 0 • view

🙏

aug 31, 2025, 7:56 am • 0 0 • view

Yeah that one really is the standout of that era of YA fantasy imo

aug 31, 2025, 7:55 am • 1 0 • view

I adored those books as a teenager I should reread

aug 31, 2025, 7:56 am • 0 0 • view

Same, I think I read them a bit too young and lost the plot a bit around book 3

aug 31, 2025, 8:05 am • 2 0 • view

I found it here, originally from a publishing coop she was involved in from 2010 I guess

aug 31, 2025, 7:53 am • 1 0 • view

This is great thx!!

aug 31, 2025, 7:59 am • 0 0 • view

Except that’s not really true. In Earthsea (at least the first book), it’s less of a school than a monastery, or perhaps a medieval university. Also it’s for much older students than Hogwarts, and so very different in tone. Not totally dissimilar, but pretty different in spirit.

aug 31, 2025, 7:56 am • 0 0 • view

“Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn't plagiarize. She didn't copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything.”

aug 31, 2025, 8:04 am • 1 0 • view

I don’t really see where you and she disagree…

aug 31, 2025, 8:05 am • 1 0 • view

I don’t think Hogwarts takes any inspiration from Le Guin. Le Guin seems to think so. AFAIK (and she knows in this grab), Rowling has never said it did.

aug 31, 2025, 9:07 am • 0 0 • view

Actually this one is even better, though I can’t find the original publication

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written 'Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write. What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I'd like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling's writing style UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the

aug 31, 2025, 7:51 am • 4 0 • view