Nate

Repetitive writing over top-tier worldbuilding.

Hyboria is an amazing setting filled with incredible locations, interesting (albeit kinda racist) cultures, and badass characters. It's a shame Howard plays everything so safely. He quickly locks into a repeatable structure, and never gives it up.

His minority and female characters go from being capable, strong, and interesting in earlier stories, to being relegated to trope-y garbage by the end. He was writing for mainstream appeal and not feeding his inner-auteur and it shows.

There is so much unachieved potential here, and it's super depressing it was never fulfilled.

One of the best fictional universes ever created. Shit stories though.

Standouts include “The Hour of the Dragon” (best story), “Red Nails” (setting is too fucking cool. Definitely stealing for a DnD campaign. Could do without Conan being so rapey in this one. Also racism.), “The Tower of the Elephant” (Lovecraftian as fuck, probably the best overall, and first I'd recommend), and “The Slithering Shadow” (Drugged out city of sleeping sorcerers worshipping a timeless tentacle god? Coolest shit ever. Story? Pretty bad).

Probably more like a 3? 3.5? The first half was super solid. The interstitials were perfect. The prose was top tier and what really drove me to the end. The part with the turtle is the best (worst?) part of the book. Loved it.

Very very VERY predictable though. After the initial shock wears off and the meat of the story gets going in full force it all plays out exactly how you would imagine.

Easy read though, drags near the end, especially after you realize that yes, it is just going through the motions now and is done doing anything novel.

Terrific prose. As a story-teller you can definitely find better, but on the level of pure word-craft? Maybe one of the best in the field.

Came into this one with the mindset of like, “oh this book got super popular and people are hating on it because it's offensive, it must be doing some cool modern transgressive shit that people don't understand”. I was hoping I'd like it and be one of the cool kids in my pretentious ‘you guys just don't understand art' club.

Nope.

It's not really that offensive and mostly just kinda reads like incel fanfiction. There's nothing transgressive about being a successful toxic white guy who treats women bad and is secretly kinda sad and lonely. Tucker Max ran this well dry like 15 years ago.

Guy mostly just has a bad personality and thinks he's cooler than he is. It's got big unreliable narrator vibes but not in the fun way where it makes you question the deeper elements at play, but in an annoying eye-roll way that makes you wanna pat the guy on the shoulder and say “ok champ, good luck with that”. It feels like you're being lied to by some sad incel dipshit who thinks he's some Machiavellian mastermind.

Got a bit better near the end where it seemed like he was actually being the tiniest bit vulnerable, but by then I was completely checked out.

Holy shit this was good.

The Tombs of Atuan mirrors A Wizard of Earthsea in the absolute best ways possible. Both are coming of age stories. Whereas A Wizard of Earthsea was an epic globe-trotting journey of a boy owning up to his errors on the path to manhood, The Tombs of Atuan is a much more personal and intimate story about the loss of innocence and the choice between hiding in safety and naivety or embracing bravery and facing the unknown. Tenar is flawed and relatable, and her character development is heartfelt and beautiful. The metaphor of her exploration of the perpetually dark labyrinth contrasting her imprisonment, guilt, and loss of faith is next fucking level.

This book is a goddamn masterpiece.

This book really makes me think Le Guin was a secret pulp fiction fan, of Robert E. Howard in particular. The parallels between this novel and many of the Conan stories are too close to be ignored. Drugs and dreaming, dark dangerous magicians, high seas adventure, and interesting fully realized cultures are staples of REH.

I think this novel may have even been a rebuttal to Howard's dark world view.

Where Howard espouses a philosophy wherein civilization is an island of relative stability doomed to constantly sink back into barbarism, Le Guin counters with relentless optimism. She argues a core of good in people, and the desire to be better. While she doesn't shy away from dark motifs, there's an overarching theme of hope in her writing that, while I don't fully agree with, I find refreshing and charming.

Le Guin's writing style is wispy and beautiful. Her prose magical. I'm constantly bombarded with imagery in the style of Amano Yoshitaka and french impressionism. I've never had writing evoke that kind of response from me. It's kinda cool.

Also. Can I please just fucking live on a flotilla with the Raft People? I love theeeeeem.