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Comment by onei | Hacker News Reader

I read a Wizard of Earthsea as a kid, and looking back 2 things stood out to me.

First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people, although I recall some TV/film adaptions were not particularly faithful to that much to Le Guin's disappointment.

The other is a phrase that I still use to this day: "tired is stupid". Particularly when I've been debugging something for many hours, late into the evening, I find that some rest and coming back to it later is almost always the solution to my problem. Turns out PEBKAC does not just apply to lusers.

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Le Guin really used it as a moment to drive home her views on diversity in "A Whitewashed Earthsea - How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books" here [1] (I've seen the Earthsea adaptation, and while I'm not as critical about it as she is, it really is a very different story, and best watched as a story inspired by Earthsea).

She's always been very vocal about this aspect, and how the diversity in her work was very deliberate and "snuck past" publishers and readers defences (at the time first published) by first mentioning it a bit in, and how publishers and cover artists at various point tried making the characters white:

> My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?

[1] https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv...

"First is the diversity of the characters. It's not all white people"

I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11, and didn't even notice the race of the characters. I don't think much of it is made in the book. It's just a passing description.

Much, much later, as an adult I heard someone mention it, and I went back and checked and sure enough they were right. But the characters' race had absolutely nothing to do with why I loved the book.

The characters could have been blue, or purple, or glowing orange for all I cared. The book was not about that.

Same here. Race seems such a small subject, relatively speaking.

The notable white people are the Kargish bad guys.

True, but their race is barely even noticeable in the book, and they only even appear in maybe the first 20 pages.

The book is really not about race, and racial issues are pretty much non-existent in the book.

Le Guin herself said she didn't make a big thing of it, but that the traditional genre skin-colour stereotypes are deliberately flipped. I certainly didn't notice until it was pointed out to me.

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