The most beguiling promise of fantasy fiction is that of self-knowledge. At some point the protagonist discovers, with the force of a calling from God, that he is no mere mortal, but a wizard, a dragonslayer, a king. It is an irresistible idea for adolescents particularly, who are in the midst of discovering themselves and trying on different identities. How much easier everything would be if the choice were essentially made for you! And how amazing it would be to find that you were, as you might have secretly hoped, special, that you could speak to animals or move objects with your mind. It puts the “fantasy” in fantasy, and is one reason this genre is often associated with young adult fiction.

The Earthsea cycle by Ursula Le Guin, who died in January at the age of 88, excels at these tropes. A boy discovers that he possesses great magical power. A girl in a forgotten corner of the world learns that she has a critical part to play in that world’s fate. Another boy, after an arduous trial, realizes that all his effort has been a prelude to him meeting a historic destiny. These are familiar fantasy plotlines, clichés even. Although rooted in our oldest legends, they hold less appeal to adults in the twenty-first century than Le Guin’s more critically celebrated works—her visionary novels exploring the mutability of gender and the glittering nightmare of market capitalism. (These, unlike the Earthsea books, were marketed to mature readers.) As Le Guin has written, “Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.”

In our age, movies and television have taken over the enchantment business. From Star Wars to Game of Thrones, the themes are familiar from our news feeds—terrorism, class war, the anthropocene—and the audience’s sense of wonder is evoked with computer-generated giants and battle scenes. The Harry Potter series is a model of the new type. It not only reflects the Hollywood mainstreaming of fantasy fiction, but also combines the basic fantasy set-up (normal boy is spirited away to a parallel world of magic and adventure) with the leaden, self-serious spectacle of the modern fantasy epic (army of good guys fights evil racist despot and his minions).

To return to Earthsea today is to encounter a different kind of fantasy work, where knowing oneself is a painstaking, ceaseless endeavor. It is an end in itself, not a means for characters to engage in bigger, supposedly more consequential issues. It is what the story is about, and the wonders Earthsea offers are scaled accordingly, to the sublime horizons of a life.

The first three books in the cycle—A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972)—came in quick succession. Each represents a different approach to the coming-of-age story, and together they form a trilogy unto themselves. The fourth book, Tehanu, was published some 18 years later, in 1990, and features two of the cycle’s main characters, Ged and Tenar, in their senescence. The original subtitle for Tehanu was “The Last Book of Earthsea,” but Le Guin couldn’t resist returning once more, publishing a fifth and final book, The Other Wind, in 2000, which resolves some of the lingering mysteries of Earthsea’s mythology. Scattered between the novels are short stories that fill out Le Guin’s archipelagic world like small, previously unmapped islands.