Le Guin's later work in the Earthsea cycle — Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind — is undervalued because most people stop after the original trilogy. This is understandable: the first three books form a complete arc, and Tehanu in particular is a deliberately difficult book to sit with after the relative clarity of the originals.

But Tehanu is where Le Guin is doing her most serious thinking. She is revisiting the world she built in her thirties from the perspective of someone in her sixties, with different questions. The magic system, which felt like a source of wonder in the first three books, becomes a source of ambivalence. Power that requires isolation and selfhood-erasure looks different when you're examining it through the story of a woman and a damaged child.

The entire later Earthsea is Le Guin in dialogue with herself, asking what she got wrong the first time. I find that braver than the original trilogy, as good as the original trilogy is.