There was something lacking - in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.
He forced himself to work, but even there he found no certainty. He seemed to have lost the flair which, in his own estimation of himself, he counted as his main advantage over most other physicists, the sense for where the really important problem lay, the clue that led inward to the centre. Here, he seemed to have no sense of direction. He worked at the Light Research Laboraties, read a great deal, and wrote three papers that summer and autumn: a productive half year, by normal standards. But he knew that in fact he had done nothing real.
Enjoyable but in a cold, theoretical sense. Seldom was I moved even a little bit by the characters or what happened to them. In retrospect, I wonder how I felt about Earthsea, whether it was the idea of the story that appealed more to me than its characters.
