“A Wizard of Earthsea”

Ursula K. Le Guin

I know this is one of the classic fantasy novels, but I must admit, it just didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m coming to it too late—too many of the things it did have become norms, part of the standard lexicon of fantasy novels. It did have two things about it that stuck with me, though:

The protagonist, and most of the characters, aren’t white. It’s sorta snuck in—benefits of being a completely different world, if there isn’t a history of racism being A Thing, then people just… don’t think about it as much.

This fantasy novel from 1968 has a magical Roko’s Basilisk in it. It’s not described that way, but it’s an extremely powerful entity trapped in a box, which has suborned its captors and is trying to use them to in turn suborn more powerful entities.