Word: leguin
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Martin isn't the best known of America's straight-up fantasy writers. That honor would probably go to upstart Christopher Paolini (Eragon), or Robert Jordan (the endlessly turning Wheel of Time series), or better yet to ageless grandmistress Ursula K. LeGuin (A Wizard of Earthsea). But of those who work in the grand epic-fantasy tradition, Martin is by far the best. In fact, with his newest book, A Feast for Crows (Bantam; 784 pages), currently descending on bookstores and ascending best-seller lists, this is as good a time as any to proclaim him the American Tolkien...
...Philip Pullman's critically acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, about the journey of an adolescent girl and boy through alternative worlds inhabited by witches, angels and armored polar bears. Late next year the Sci-Fi Channel plans to air a lavish production of two of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. The movie of C.S. Lewis' beloved Chronicles of Narnia is in development with Andrew Adamson, who co-directed the animated hit Shrek, a more comic medieval fantasy. Miramax will shortly begin work on a movie version of the best...
Verne and Vonnegut, Borges and Burgess, Lessing and LeGuin--they all wrote science fiction that was taken seriously during their lives. Philip K. Dick's work, no less serious or searching, was confined to the ghetto of SF (that's the short form, folks--never, ever sci-fi). He stalked through earthly life, through five wives, a drug addiction and a nervous breakdown, seeing his SF novels published in tatty Ace paperbacks, his other fiction regularly rejected. When he died, in 1982, at 53, mainstream readers didn't know Phil Dick...
...LeGuin, however, has no regrets about beginning her career with science fiction...
...Writers, too," I respond more thoughtfully. "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the other Adamses (Charles, Francis and Henry), T .S. Eliot, John Reed, Wallace Stevens, Ursula LeGuin, Walter Lippman, John Updike and Erich Segal...