The Earthsea Trilogy (2003)
I think Le Guin radically reinterpreted her own work in the two followups to the trilogy.<p>Spoilers, obviously.<p>The original trilogy has interesting gender roles. One one hand it&#x27;s very rigid in its ideas of gender, as you&#x27;d expect from someone into Taoism. On the other, those roles were far from one-dimensional. I&#x27;d say that it presents an unconventional, but surprisingly positive view of the masculine gender role in the wizards of Roke, and a grim but original and compelling view of death. Both men and women can be cruel, but even at their worst you don&#x27;t necessarily lose sympathy for them.<p>In Tehanu, that&#x27;s all rolled back. There the men are evil, and the women are victims, period. And Ged kills a guy (which he didn&#x27;t in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a &quot;what the hell, author?&quot; moment. And the grim afterlife is apparently the fault of those patriarchal wizards. It seems Le Guin was embarrassed at her earlier work that it wasn&#x27;t feminist enough, or that it wasn&#x27;t feminist in the right way. And maybe it wasn&#x27;t Taoist enough either (I for one could never understand how she could combine those two).<p>She&#x27;s still a great storyteller, of course, so it&#x27;s certainly possible to appreciate those books, just know that they&#x27;re written 20 years later when the author had a completely different view of many things.