Le Guin has explicitly said that she worte the later Earthsea books as a riposte to the (unconsciously) massively sexist original trilogy.

I know, but they still irk.

ION, I just finished The Geographer's Library. Not bad for a first novel. The author shifts voice quite well. As a mystery, it had a couple problems, and just as a novel it had a couple problems, but overall I can recommend it.

I do think it's a bit sad that when someone mentions Menelik and/or Axum, I know we're going to be talking about the Ark of the Covenant.

Tolkein seems to take a lot of abuse for writing unrealistic female characters, but I actually think he made a conscious choice, knowing he wrote male POV better than female, to avoid female characters.

I get a similar vibe off of much of Neal Stephenson's work.

I find Le Guin's riposte revisionism at times irksome, at times invisible.

Considering that the particular patch of earth those women were close to in The Tombs of Atuan was inhabited by primordial powers of darkness, I'm not sure I'd take the evilness as a commentary on the gender as a whole.

Oh, I would. Just the whole "Oh, you're powerful women? Well the power you worship is EVIL! Neener!" aspect of the story -- it wasn't the most conscious application of gener-parsimony. Jim rightly points out that Le Guin just kinda didn't get that, when she first wrote it 35 years ago.

I've also read crit to the effect that, while it's nice that all the characters in the first book are black, the drift of the second and third novels is toward white protagonists, and whether that's a form of unconscious whitewashing. (I think that is consciously worked-at in the short story collection and last novel as well, just in less prominent fashion.)

the drift of the second and third novels is toward white protagonists

Tenar, OK, but Arren isn't white, IIRC.

Tepper and later LeGuin have already been mentioned as writing horribly agenda-driven genders.

I actually quite like Tepper, even her most blatantly gender-based books. I don't know why.

I actually quite like Tepper

Me, too. I don't know if I'll ever re-read "Gate to Women's Country" again, but the series of Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow have some interesting things to say about cultural evolution and religion. In Grass, at least, the sexism is inherent in the religious structure she set up, and when Marjorie starts questioning that, she starts to blossom. And there are male characters who respect Marjorie for who she is.

I particularly like Grass -- it's really one of the more original worlds I've seen. And A Plague of Angels had, I thought, some interesting ideas about language and the way it's used -- oh, and I kind of enjoyed the puzzle of The Family Tree. But yeah, Gate to Women's Country, Gibbon's Decline and Fall... not so much.

Le Guin has explicitly said that she worte the later Earthsea books as a riposte to the (unconsciously) massively sexist original trilogy.

She achieved her aim, in that they're at least as consciously sexist in favor of women as the earlier ones were unconsciously in favor of men. I think my ego's resilient enough to have liked them if only they had also turned out to be actually as good as the first three.

But Le Guin isn't alone in writing what I think of as a genius work of art early on only to revisit it with diminishingly good results later. In almost every instance of a great fantasy or sci-fi series I've read, each additional book lowers the bar. (Brust and Zelazny are the only notable exceptions I can think of, and even with them it's more a case of me not liking the first book so much and then really falling for the second. Quality still plummets in books 6, 7, 8, ∞...)

but Arren isn't white, IIRC.

Yes, he is. Anyway, quite a bit paler than Ged and almost everybody else from the islands. It's a point in the first chapters, that the royal family he comes from is atypically pale (a visual marker of how they're specialer than ordinary folks).