More books like the Earthsea Cycle?

October 19, 2021 2:51 AM

I've just got through a re-read of the whole Earthsea Cycle (thanks Earthsea club for the inspiration!) and its gentle melancholy in an SFF setting has really hit the spot for me. What should I read next?

Should I read more Le Guin? I haven't read much else (The Left Hand of Darkness), if so where should I start? What other authors/books have a similar ... vibe?

posted by threecheesetrees to Writing & Language (17 answers total)

I think The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette (as Katherine Addison) has a similar calm, thoughtful tone in a fantasy setting, although perhaps not as melancholic.
posted by RichardP at 3:00 AM on October 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

I devoured the rest of the Hainish cycle after starting with The Left Hand of Darkness like you did. Rocannon's World and The Word For World Is Forest are two that really stood out for me, if you want some suggestions of where to start.
posted by greycap at 3:07 AM on October 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

I'd say that her short stories from the seventies/eighties have...well, they are not Earthsea-ish fantasy, but they have a similar melancholy vibe - The Compass Rose and The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Her late collection, The Birthday of the World, feels a lot more like her early stuff than it does her middle/late work. Changing Planes is....well, if Ursula Le Guin could be said to do dad humor, it's dad humor with melancholy and I like it a lot.

Le Guin translated Kalpa Imperial, which is a really terrific book.

Have you read early Isabelle Allende? Her stories have magic realist elements and a quiet melancholy - The Stories of Eva Luna, Eva Luna and The House of the Spirits.

I know that I always recommend The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe because it's such a terrific book and everyone should read it, but it definitely has a calm and melancholy feel.

I really enjoy what I think of as "chamber fantasy", smaller, odder books that tend not to be part of a contemporary-style trilogy with a really coherent, book-spanning plot - so for instance, you can read any of the Earthsea books as a stand-alone, but it's a bit more difficult to pick up, eg, the middle books of Game of Thrones. So anyway, books I recommend a lot tend to be gently melancholy anyway...so these are books I do recommend a bit.

The Stone Boatmen is a Very Odd Book. Apparently, Le Guin thought highly of it.

Have you read any of Catherine M. Valente's books? She is very prolific and IMO a bit hit and miss, but when she's on, she's on - The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship of Her Own Making is YA/children's fiction and most of Valente's work is not, but it is virtually perfect children's fiction. On that note, have you read The Neverending Story and Ende's Momo?

The Last Unicorn is another virtually perfect fantasy novel of gentle melancholy. For that matter, Beagle's underrated follow-up, The Folk of the Air is also pretty good on the fantasy with gentle melancholy, although it's set in our world.
posted by Frowner at 6:06 AM on October 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

For a sense of gentle melancholy in a sci-fi adjacent setting, I highly recommend the manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Yokohama Shopping Log), usually referred to as YKK (Wikipedia description, MAL description).

From the MAL description: "In a post-apocalyptic world where an environmental disaster led to the eruption of Mt. Fuji and the inundation of Yokohama, the age of humans is in its twilight. Alpha Hatsuseno is an android and the namesake of a small cafe outside Yokohama. As her owner is away on a trip indefinitely, she has been left responsible for running the cafe. Although she rarely gets any customers, Alpha remains outgoing and cheerful.

While Alpha awaits her owner's homecoming, she explores the vicinity with her scooter and camera. Throughout her journeys, she meets new people and other androids, making memories along the way.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is a beautiful, laid-back story centered around Alpha's daily activities, emphasizing the passing of time in everyday life."
posted by ralan at 6:31 AM on October 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Diana Wynne Jones! The Dalemark Quartet is certainly suffused with gentle melancholy. The Spellcoats blows my mind every time I reread it--it's heroic and literary and very strange. (Though IMO the 4th book, Crown of Dalemark, is a bit of a mess.) The Chrestomanci books have livelier magic and more humor on the surface, but like the Dalemark & Earthsea books, they're beautifully told stories of kids growing into new powers (magical and not) with uneven degrees of grace and confusion.
posted by miles per flower at 7:40 AM on October 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Seconding Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn is a fabulous book. I also really like The Folk of the Air, mostly because I think of it as an interesting alternate history - it was published in 1977 and set in a recognizable Berkeley, where the Society for Creative Anachronism overlaps with actual gods and magic. I like to think of Berkeley before the Bay Area got so crowded.

Ursula Le Guin is really her own genre in my library, you should definitely read the Hainish books. You might really like The Telling, which is a late Hainish novel that touches on some things that her earlier books didn't necessarily (her early books were a little more... worried? about what she could get published).

Rachel Fellman's The Breath of the Sun was also great! I have recommended it here several times.

Contemplative and melancholy... perhaps also read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. There is a kind of placid surface to the narrative voice in that one.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:11 AM on October 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I just finished reading The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard, which has the kind of feeling you're looking for. People are mostly kind and mean well, and the plot (such as it is) is about a talented bureaucrat helping an empire respond to catastrophe by implementing utopian social measures like UBI. It's quite soothing.

As for Le Guin, I can also recommend The Telling, which is just gorgeous, and the less-known YA series "Annals of the Western Shore", which is a trilogy about oppression, power, and history. That sounds horrifying, but I thought it was very good, and of course the prose itself is excellent.
posted by suelac at 11:04 AM on October 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have some more, I guess, oblique recommendations:
Graphic novel: On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Book: The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Anime: Haibane Renmei, link to Funimation, but you can, ah, "alternately source" it if you want. It's fantasyyyy....eesh... and I think the atmosphere, if not an exact match, is a close sibling of what you're asking for.
posted by snerson at 11:32 AM on October 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

People keep on recommending Beagle, and I will too. He's got another two books -- The Innkeeper's Song and Giant Bones -- set in the same fantasy world as each other, and I think they have an Earthsea-ish feeling about them. Giant Bones, which is a set of short stories, all in the same world, more than The Innkeeper's Song, which is a novel and is a little less wistful.
posted by LizardBreath at 1:27 PM on October 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

With the caveat that I couldn't call it gentle (cw: sexual violence, slavery), Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine (Jo Walton review) has a lot of resonances with Le Guin for me.

Patricia McKillip is quite different but might work.

Thomas Burnett Swann (description) would be interesting to read alongside The Last Unicorn.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:34 PM on October 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

By far my favorite LeGuin is Always Coming Home. It's very much in the "gentle melancholy in an SFF setting" mode, and it's an incredible work of art.

There's a central story told in 3 or 4 parts broken up throughout the book, and in between the parts you will find anthropological notes on the culture, poetry, short stories, plays, histories as told by people living in the world portrayed. Read as much or as little of those as you want, but they all add to the whole. You could just read the novella-length main story by itself. Some of the short stories are really good though.
posted by umber vowel at 3:39 PM on October 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'll put in a vote here for Lloyd Alexander's "Chronicles of Prydain", which develop a markedly melancholy tone in the last half of the series, although it's generally regarded as children's lit. On the other hand...so were the Earthsea books.
posted by Ipsifendus at 4:14 PM on October 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Piranesi struck me as very much like a part of Earthsea.
posted by joeyh at 4:29 PM on October 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Seconding Piranesi by Susanna Clarke -- fantastic story, about a young man who lives in a world of endless marble halls and statues and crashing waves and is one of the 17 people ever known to have lived. Only himself and "the Other" are living now -- but then the Other tells him there is a third person. So good! You'd probably also like The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories by the same author.

Also check out The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. It was recommended to me in my AskMe: Can anyone imagine a world where women are not oppressed? It has a gentle vibe and is a terrific fantasy/SciFi story.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 6:20 PM on October 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Another vote for Patricia Mckillip, try Alphabet of thorn
posted by dhruva at 7:46 PM on October 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I asked a similar question years ago. Two possibles for you that came out of that were (more) Ray Bradbury and John Crowley (among others).

I also think Sean Stewart's Resurrection Man series and Mockingbird fit this style.
posted by sevenless at 8:39 AM on October 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, so many great suggestions! These are pretty much all new to me, so I’m excited to discover and explore.
posted by threecheesetrees at 2:36 PM on October 20, 2021