Usurpation is a very different book than the two that preceded it. Itâs set entirely on Earth, for one thing, and for another it deals with people and violence on a much larger scale. The human colony on Pax is too small to afford people killing each other, but the opening scene here has a bystander getting brutally caught up in a murder. Interference had a slow-motion war between two plant ecosystems. Usurpation has international wars in which cities are firebombed off the map.
And there are multiple sentient bamboo groves, each with her own personality, not just one.
A century has passed since the epilogue, and humans have incorporated rainbow bamboo and fippokats into their cities, gardens and greenbelts worldwide, though they still havenât quite tumbled to how intelligent either are. Nature is healing from the injuries that prompted the colonists to leave for Pax in the first place, and humanity is rebounding from the global fascist state that sent the follow-up expedition. NVA hasnât quite been forgotten, though, as some people honor âEnviaâ as the goddess of suffering. And some nations are freer than others.
Even more than the previous books itâs about who counts as a person, and what happens on the far side of where you draw the line, as seen from human, cetacean, bamboo, robot and even fippokat perspectives. Two Bamboo groves try to get fippokats to fight a proxy war. A group of fippokats uses a squirrel as bait. Robots prefer the humans who will let them perform their functions over the humans who wonât. And of course we already know humans will try to manipulate those they consider inferior.
The second half of the book is primarily a plague story, focusing on a disease that infects both humans and bamboo, hijacking their nervous systems like the fungus that takes over ants. It adds another wrinkle to the âwhoâs really a person?â question, when you have something interfering with the link between who you are and what you do at such a fundamental level.
The plague story itself is less satisfying than the stories that weave into and out of it. I disagree with the low ratings Iâve seen on Bookwyrm, though. Iâd only rate it slightly below Interference, rounding them both to four stars.
I recently discovered that SeaMonkey is still around! Itâs the continuation of the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite, itself the successor to Netscape Communicator.
It really feels like a throwback to the early 2000s. Partly because itâs an all-in-one suite combining a web browser, email, news reader (with both Usenet and RSS/Atom support), calendar, IRC chat, and even an HTML page editor. (The only modern suite I can think of is Vivaldi.) But also because they havenât changed the look of the program since then. It still has gradient toolbars, 3D icons, stippled toolbar handles on some platforms, a bookmarks sidebarâŠwait, those are back now. And I could swear the Preview icon in the editor goes back to Communicator.
Compatibility
Thereâs no official ARM version for any platform as near as I can tell, just x86_64. It runs fine on ARM-based Macs and Windows using emulation. They arenât signed, though, so on macOS you have to jump through hoops to get the system to let you run it the first time. (Itâs still included in Fedoraâs standard repo, though!)
I keep running into trouble with web apps. Gmail and Roundcube-based webmail sites seem to work, but Outlook breaks after login. Nextcloud canât even show the login form. OpenStreetMap works, but its online editor doesnât. GitHub sort of works. WordPress dashboards seem OK so far.
But it canât even display Bluesky or Mastodon posts (theyâre JS;DR). Elk and Phanpy donât run. The only Fediverse client Iâve found that works at all is Enafore, and then only partially.
Another problem is websites that mistake it for a scraper and actively block it. Anubis seems to tag it more often than it ought to. Annoyingly, this includes the SeaMonkey forums at MozillaZine . It usually works as long as you go directly to the HTTPS version, but if you follow an old link to plain HTTP, Anubis is convinced youâve turned off cookie support and rejects you.
Mail & Newsgroups
The email component is sort of like a really old Thunderbird in the sense that the browser is sort of like a really old Firefox.
When setting up an email account, it doesnât even try to look up the settings based on your address. You have to add them all manually. Worse, it doesnât offer secure transports during setup (or alternative authentication methods like OAuth2) That means you have to set up a placeholder first, then fill in the settings. Or if your mail server still supports unsecured connections, itâll try to set them up insecurely first, which IMO is irresponsible in this day and age.
I was able to connect it to Gmail, though! Presumably the same approach should work for Outlook, Yahoo, or other providers that use OAuth2.
Calendar and address book are hidden away inside the mail app, though they seem to work entirely locally. No two-way sync as far as I can see, and only one-way subscription to remote calendars.
The RSS/Atom feed reader appears in Mail & News when you add a âBlogs & News Feedsâ account.
And it still seems able to connect to Usenet! If you know of an NNTP server, you might actually be able to use it!
HTML Editor / Composer
These days, when hardly anyone writes their own web pages, those who do often use a templating system, and most mainstream platforms either have built-in WYSIWYG editors or only accept plain text anyway, the idea of an editor that generates HTML feels kind of obsolete.
And to be honest, the code it generates is obsolete too. Late 1990s-era HTML, color specified using font tags, no support for CSS styling (so you canât make something that adjusts to light/dark color schemes) or scripting.
But the code it generates is also compact and efficient. No scripting support means the page isnât going to load half a megabyte of dependencies to show you a page of text. No CSS support means itâs not going to import a gigantic stylesheet that clears and reimplements the basic styling it can do.
It supports tables, and embedding images and links, and the basic HTML styles of lists, quotes, bold and italic. If you want to learn HTML by example, building a page in SeaMonkey and then looking at the code is a much better choice than picking a random real-world website to start with. Or worse, exporting from Word.
The Publish button really is obsolete, though, since it doesnât support FTPS or SFTP, only FTP. (It also supports some kind of HTTP publishing, but it doesnât seem to be WebDAV. I havenât figured it out, and havenât gotten a clear answer either.)
Bottom Line
I want to like SeaMonkey. But the fact is that web tech has moved on. If I want to use modern web applications, I need to use something with up-to-date capabilities like Waterfox or LibreWolf, or at least Falkon. If I want to just view pages and Iâm not concerned about being totally up to date, Iâd rather use something small like Dillo or NetSurf.
The first book is a coming-of-age story: How a goatherd boy discovered his aptitude for magic, how his pride and arrogance led him astray, how he learned to master his abilities and seek out a way to make up for the terrible evil he unleashed through his recklessness. (Modern readers will probably compare the âboy at a wizard schoolâ aspect to Harry Potter, but that only takes up a couple of chapters.)
The World
Itâs also to some extent a travelogue of a world with no known continents, only islands, where magic consists of naming someoneâs or somethingâs true essence, and (more or less) renaming it so as to change it. Thereâs a reason spells are made of words. And itâs woven through every part of life, scaling from the simple charms a poor village sorcerer or witch might cast to protect a house from fire, or binding charms to reinforce the joins and seals of a small boat, all the way up to the grand deeds of wizards.
Earthsea feels lived-in, not just a few castles and a bunch of ISO standard medieval villages scattered through the wilderness.
Le Guin never shies away from showing the lives of ordinary people in this world. Thereâs a meme going around about how in Lord of the Rings, Sam is the only member of the Fellowship who isnât at least landed gentry if not aristocracy or royalty (not to mention a literal angel). As mentioned above, Ged starts out as a poor boy (from a poor family), son of a smith who spends his days working the bellows and herding goats. As he travels, he meets sailors, tradesmen and -women, pays for passage on a ship by rowing, and settles for a time in an ordinary fishing village. To be fair, the fishing village does have a dragon problem.
Characters
The story and characters hold up well.
Iâd forgotten just how much of a jerk Sparrowhawk starts out as, before his harsh lesson in humility sets him on the path to becoming the thoughtful wizard seen in the rest of the series. His school rival Jasper isnât that much worse than he is, and I can read between the lines now as to how they actually get along as friends, especially with Vetch as peacemaker between the two. That he unleashes his shadow while trying to outdo his mirror seems especially appropriate to the story that unfolds.
Part of the purpose of the Roke school is to drum ethics into the heads of people who can literally change reality with a word, along with giving them the knowledge of how to do it effectively. It doesnât always work, and only of a fraction of those with magic ability make it into the school, and some students, like Sparrowhawk, have to learn the lesson the hard way.
Iâd also forgotten how briefly Ogion actually appears in the novel. He makes a powerful impression, both on his own terms and as a key figure in Gedâs life, despite only appearing for one early chapter and in one scene later on. (We see more of him later on in Tehanu and in the short story âThe Bones of the Earth.â)
Regarding Names
When I finally started reading the rest of Le Guinâs work, I looked on her website for a recommended Hainish Cycle reading order (turns out itâs very flexible). I also found her pronunciation guide and discovered that while Iâd gotten most of the Earthsea names right, Iâd been pronouncing Ged and Ogion wrong for decades:
You have to take your chances with G, but usually itâs G as in get, not G as in gem. So Ged is Ged not Jed, Ogion rhymes with âbogey on.â
Oops! Could be worse, it could be the name of a giraffics file format.
Anyway, while she says âDonât worry about it,â Iâve made a conscious effort to mentally pronounce both names with a hard âGâ this time through!
âŠAs Womenâs Magic
The main flaw in the original trilogy is the misogyny running through Earthseaâs culture. Le Guin comes back in Tehanu and the later books and examines how it got there and what effect it has on Earthseaâs women (and men). Knowing that it eventually gets challenged mitigates it somewhat, but also makes it stand out more starkly in the books where itâs presented at face value.
In the 1960s, the fantasy genre still made certain demographic assumptions, and Le Guin, early in her career, was already pushing things by making the main characters, and most of the population, not be white.
I do appreciate Yarrow, Vetchâs sister, who treats the great mage Sparrowhawk so casually because of how well she and her wizard brother get along. Something I noticed on this summerâs re-read of The Farthest Shore is that sheâs one of the handful of people to whom Ged eventually entrusts his true name.
Another Kind of Epic
Gedâs quest at first is to flee his curse, then to make up for it, and finally to pursue it. What he needs to do isnât what you might expect from high fantasy of the 1960s, though it might be exactly what you expect from reading more Le Guin as she continued to explore themes of duality, balance and responsibility throughout her body of work.
The Earthsea books are epic like The Odyssey, not epic like Lord of the Rings. There are dragons, and monsters, and swordsmen and pirate raids, and the occasional wizardâs duel. But the big problems arenât solved with great battles. To paraphrase Lorien in Babylon 5, theyâre the kind of thing you have to understand your way out of.
Itâs a âcitizen scienceâ project that asks regular people to look for and report observations of wildlife (and wild plants, fungi, etc), submitting photo, sound or video evidence, wherever you happen to be: Out in the woods, on a farm, on an urban street, in your kitchen where you spot a spider under the sink. The idea is to get people looking everywhere, not just where expected, and crowd-source a map of where a species shows up over time.
For identifying what youâre looking at, thereâs image-recognition software that can usually help narrow it down, and other users who might have more expertise than you at telling hummingbirds apart can look at your photo and say, âOh, thatâs definitely an Annaâs hummingbird.â
I got into it before the Covid-19 lockdowns, but ramped up my activity during 2020, when there wasnât anywhere to go except walking around outside.
Mobile App
The Android app streamlines the basic use case of posting an observation from your phone, and it uses the image-recognition AI to help you narrow it down.
I havenât used the iPhone app, but I assume itâs similar.
Iâve tried a number of phone-based image editors for cropping and enhancing photos before uploading them, but the only one Iâve found that doesnât mangle location or time metadata is Image Toolbox.
Perspective
Before iNaturalist: âWow, that yard is completely overrun with weeds!â (See also: âplant blindness.â)
After iNaturalist: âWow, that yard is completely overrun with storkâs-bills and mallows! And a bunch of barley over there by the edgeâŠOoh, what are those tiny yellow flowersâŠ?â
Iâve also gotten a lot better at recognizing the differences among local birds, too. I used to classify them as:
pigeon
seagull
crow
duck. or maybe goose?
um, small bird?
Now I can tell pigeons from doves, several types of sparrows from each other and finches, ducks from geese from coots from wigeons, starlings from blackbirds, and more.
Southern California has several well-established feral populations of parakeets descended from escaped pets! Iâve seen at least two different types of plumage (yellow faces on the peninsula, red faces in the South Bay), and the ones a few miles further inland sound different from the ones near the coast.
Starlings were deliberately introduced to North America in New York by fans of Shakespeare who wanted to bring every bird the Bard ever mentioned across the Atlantic.
Every once in a while Iâm reminded of SyFyâs notoriously bad TV adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and I think, maybe I should watch it just once, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, to see not just how bad it is but how itâs bad. And then I remember I have better things to do, like washing the dishes or sorting my socks.
So this isnât a review, because I still havenât watched it after 20 years, so much as itâs a placeholder indicating why, despite having read and re-read the books so many times, I havenât.
By the time they announced casting, Boyens was no longer attached, and they were only going to adapt the first two books. And there were some oddities in casting, like making Sparrowhawk white (Shawn Ashmore). I wrote on my blog at the time that Danny Glover would be perfect for Ogion. And when I saw that Isabella Rosselini was playing Thar, she seemed a good choice as well. But my interest had dropped from enthusiasm to the line between cautiously optimistic and cynical.
When it aired on what was then the Sci-Fi Channel, it was clear that âadaptedâ wasâŠan extremely loose description. In addition to whitewashing the entire population of the archipelago except for Ogion, they seemed to have cosmically missed the point, and the heart, of the stories, which are fundamentally about knowing yourself and seeking balance in the world.
Le Guin wrote a scathing article in which she described in meticulous detail why the people of Earthsea are mostly copper-red or black, with white people in the north and northeast, how it was a deliberate choice to set it apart from the genre conventions established by Northern European fantasy tradition. (Whoever captioned the photo as âa pale imitation of Le Guinâs protagonist,â I salute them.) She further described the miniseriesâ story as a âgeneric McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.â and noted that she felt âvery sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard.â Other reviews were similarly unimpressed.
So I never got around to watching it, not even when it was released on home video and I could borrow or rent it. There didnât seem much point. Eventually I read the summary on Wikipedia, which soundsâŠwell, like a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on violence.
Iâm currently about halfway through my latest re-read of the series. I paused after The Farthest Shore to read the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, and a bunch of current books. And while I sort of want to re-watch the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea (also a mishmash, this time of books three and four â but an earnest one at least), every time I contemplate watching this, the idea just slides off of my brain and lands in the âNah, why bother?â bucket.
