Those connections are certainly lurking, if one wants to see them, in, for instance, the magician Ged’s epic battle with a world-destroying evil he has unwittingly unleashed on the archipelago of Earthsea through hubristic meddling with a dark and powerful magic he does not yet understand, or in the hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-control, and morally ambiguous power attributed to magic more generally in SFF of this period. Nor did my adolescent self, lost in the imagined worlds of Le Guin’s, McKillip’s, or Walton’s fantasies, make any connection at all to the Cold War world in which I was reading them. It wasn’t until researching a book on Cold War culture in the 1960s and 1980s that I discovered that these were only the tip of an extraordinary corpus of woman-authored works that I now recognize as the emergence of a major force in science fiction and fantasy (SFF) from the mid-70s through the 80s that has since become, quite simply, a-if not the-mainstream of the genre, period. But I never really paid much attention to who had written them or what that might mean about why I liked them so much. McKillip’s Riddlemaster trilogy (1976-79), and Evangeline Walton’s Welsh-myth-remix Mabinogion tetralogy (1970-74). Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy (1968-72), Patricia A. A late baby-boomer, I spent my tweens and adolescence in the 1970s under the Tolkien-woven spell of heroic fantasy, immersed in the imagined worlds of Ursula K.
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