[hungryhobbit]

Le Guin is a master of fiction, period. While she's very different from modern sci-fi/fantasy, her work is almost as foundational as Tolkien, Lewis, or Asimov.

Take her Earthsea series (which was very loosely adapted as a Studio Ghibli movie). It's much slower paced than modern fantasy. Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here), and it almost reads more like an extended fairy tale.

But when you start reading it you can see how it influenced so much modern stuff (eg. she was telling stories about going off to wizard school decades before Harry Potter existed) and both the story and the writing itself are both so well crafted that (in many ways) no one who's come after has managed to surpass it.

If you like either sci-fi or fantasy, do yourself a favor and read some of the amazing writing this titan of an author created.

[xg15]

> Barely anyone dies (no Red Weddings here)

Can I make a side-rant how since Game of Thrones, it seems to have become an expectation that characters must be killed off? Apparently readers are (expected to) be so desensitized that nothing below "the main party that is the main reason you're reading this story can die at any moment" registers anymore.

In fact, even that is just the bare minimum. To really make an impact, we need some mass casualties like the Red Wedding or Thanos' "snap" in the Avenger movies.

Can we go back on all of that?

[watwut]

It is backslash against years and years of shows where you are 100% certain characters will be unharmed. Cumulatively, shows lost tension for many of us - there were no stakes whatsoever. You have massive fight, but there is no excitement about the fight, because it is basically just an elaborate dance part. There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.

Game of Thrones broke the spell, bad things suddenly could happen, substories could be ended badly. Writers learned there are two possible formulas not just one. Suddenly there was a tension and drama.

[xg15]

Yeah, that was basically the Disney/Spielberg formula, which got overdone.

> There are good and bad and good must always win and if bad thing happening is always punishment for moral failure forced formula got overfed.

I mean, maybe there are different moral horizons behind this. I would expect some basic "doing good is in the end more successful than doing evil" morality in shows.

The alternate message seems to be an uncaring universe where it plays absolutely no role if you're an asshole or try to help people, because deaths happen randomly anyway.

Which would be an omen of how our world developed in the following years for real...

(GoT never went completely nihilist though, which I appreciate. Even the most random deaths had at least long-term consequences for the rest of the story, and a lot of characters kept their morality through all the carnage)

[psunavy03]

It's to the point where grimdark fiction, for me anyway, is gauche and a cliche. At this point it's countercultural and transgressive for characters to go through hell and high water, but then have a happy ending.

Too many modern writers would have ended The Shawshank Redemption by having Andy Dufresne get shot by a prison sniper the minute he got free.

[ModernMech]

I think that all started with The Walking Dead

[GolfPopper]

Glen Cook was killing off major characters back in the 1980s.

[gumby]

A side point: when you say “Lewis” I assume you mean Charles Staple Lewis, not Sinclair Lewis. I find it hard to consider the former “foundational”. It was and is popular (much to the annoyance of his buddy Tolkien), but hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth).

As for Asimov, well, one can argue about his long term influence but who can avoid calling it foundation-al?

Agree completely on Le Guin

[majormajor]

> hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth)

Harry Potter and its own spawn bears fairly distinct influences, less "direct plot copies" (Narnia itself borrowing heavily there from the Christian Bible, of course) but more mechanically and "YA fantasy vibes."

His Dark Materials is basically a deliberate Narnia rebuttal/counter-argument. I think I've heard of a couple other "intentionally darker/twisted Narnia" inspirations in series, but am blanking on them.

Terry Pratchett made a few direct references pointing that assumed a high level of ubiquity.

IMO certainly as enduringly foundational as Asimov.

Dick would belong there too at the same level of a Lewis or Asimov.

[Robotbeat]

CS Lewis was pretty influential on the YA fiction, Harry Potter type of literature. And his other works also have broad influence beyond fiction.

[vova_hn2]

If I haven't read any of her books, which book or series would you recommend as a starting point?