AT THE END OF THE fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu, the story had arrived at what I felt to be now. And, just as in the now of the so-called real world, I didn't know what would happen next. I could guess, foretell1, fear, hope, but I didn't know.
Unable to continue Tehanu's story (because it hadn't happened yet) and foolishly assuming that the story of Ged and Tenar had reached its happily-ever-after, I gave the book a subtitle2: "The Last Book of Earthsea."
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time, now isn't then.
Seven or eight years after Tehanu was published, I was asked to write a story set in Earthsea. A mere3 glimpse at the place told me that things had been happening there while I wasn't looking. It was high time to go back and find out what was going on now.
I also wanted information on various things that had happened back then, before Ged and Tenar were born. A good deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke Island, about dragons, had begun to puzzle me. In order to understand current events, I needed to do some historical research, to spend some time in the Archives of the Archipelago.
The way one does research into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn't very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it-can we even remember it-until we can tell it as a story? And for events in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely4 up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer5 of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring the past along with us through time in the hold-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking6; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons7.
When you construct or reconstruct a world that never existed, a wholly fictional8 history, the research is of a somewhat different order, but the basic impulse and techniques are much the same. You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that the story will have weight and make sense.
The five tales in this book explore or extend the world established by the first four Earthsea novels. Each is a story in its own right, but they will profit by being read after, not before, the novels.
"The Finder" takes place about three hundred years before the time of the novels, in a dark and troubled time; its story casts light on how some of the customs and institutions of the Archipelago came to be. "The Bones of the Earth" is about the wizards who taught the wizard who first taught Ged, and shows that it takes more than one mage to stop an earthquake. "Darkrose and Diamond" might take place at any time during the last couple of hundred years in Earthsea; after all, a love story can happen at any time, anywhere. "On the High Marsh9" is a story from the brief but eventful six years that Ged was Archmage of Earthsea. And the last story, "Dragonfly," which takes place a few years after the end of Tehanu, is the bridge between that book and the next one, The Other Wind (to be published soon). A dragon bridge.
So that my mind could move about among the years and centuries without getting things all out of order, and to keep contradictions and discrepancies10 at a minimum while I was writing these stories, I became (somewhat) more systematic11 and methodical, and put my knowledge of the peoples and their history together into "A Description of Earthsea." Its function is like that of the first big map I drew of all the Archipelago and the Reaches, when I began to work on A Wizard of Earthsea over thirty years ago: I needed to know where things are, and how to get from here to there-in time as well as in space.
Because this kind of fictional fact, like maps of imaginary realms, is of real interest to some readers, I include the description after the stories. I also redrew the geographical12 maps for this book, and while doing so, happily discovered a very old one in the Archives in Havnor.
In the years since I began to write about Earthsea I've changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation13. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities14 get complicated, chaos15 becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker16 of electronics, we also long for the unalterable.
We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go "there and back again," and "there" is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable17 simplicities.
And the mills of capitalism18 provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.
Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical19 complexity20, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth- telling to sentimental21 platitude22. Heroes brandish23 their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately24 conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped25, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.
What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life-of a sort, for a while.
Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts26 the empires. The conquerors27 may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable28, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic29 atlases30, and some are more enduring.
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment31 alters with age, and with the age.
We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbos lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la meme chose, plus fa change.
It's been a joy to me to go back to Earthsea and find it still there, entirely familiar, and yet changed and still changing. What I thought was going to happen isn't what's happening, people aren't who-or what-I thought they were, and I lose my way on islands I thought I knew by heart.
So these are reports of my explorations and discoveries: tales from Earthsea for those who have liked or think they might like the place, and who are willing to accept these hypotheses: things change: authors and wizards are not always to be trusted: nobody can explain a dragon.
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foretell
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| v.预言，预告，预示 | |
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subtitle
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| n.副题（书本中的），说明对白的字幕 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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wagons
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| n.四轮的运货马车( wagon的名词复数 )；铁路货车；小手推车 | |
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fictional
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| adj.小说的，虚构的 | |
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marsh
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| n.沼泽，湿地 | |
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discrepancies
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| n.差异，不符合（之处），不一致（之处）( discrepancy的名词复数 ) | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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geographical
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| adj.地理的；地区(性)的 | |
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transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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simplicities
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| n.简单，朴素，率直( simplicity的名词复数 ) | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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flicker
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| vi./n.闪烁，摇曳，闪现 | |
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immutable
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| adj.不可改变的，永恒的 | |
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capitalism
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| n.资本主义 | |
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ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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platitude
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| n.老生常谈，陈词滥调 | |
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brandish
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| v.挥舞，挥动；n.挥动，挥舞 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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stereotyped
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| adj.(指形象、思想、人物等)模式化的 | |
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outlasts
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| v.比…长久，比…活得长( outlast的第三人称单数 ) | |
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conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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unstable
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| adj.不稳定的，易变的 | |
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kaleidoscopic
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| adj.千变万化的 | |
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atlases
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| 地图集( atlas的名词复数 ) | |
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enchantment
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| n.迷惑，妖术，魅力 | |
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