In the wake of J R R Tolkien’s extraordinary The Lord of the Rings, epic fantasy has become a major genre. Much has been open (and inferior) imitation of Tolkien, but among the more original voices three female American writers of fantasy stand out for the seriousness of their concerns.
Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy (1968-72), later expanded into a quartet and then a six-book cycle, is an extended meditation on dragons, death, and feminism, and the most significant influence after Tolkien on subsequent Young Adult fantasy. The later works revision the earlier, reflecting Le Guin’s changing understanding of feminism, and her subsequent fantasy trilogy, Gifts, Voices, and Powers (2004-07), starkly confronts perversions of power and creativity.
The younger Tamora Pierce is also a self-revisioner, and her Protector of the Small quartet (1999-2002) reworks her first fantasy quartet, Song of the Lioness (1983-88). Profoundly concerned with gender roles and the proper uses of violence, Pierce also pushed Young Adult fantasy into new territory with themes far tougher than much realist adult writing, including paedophile abuse and the costs of war, especially for children.
Lois McMaster Bujold was already an acclaimed Science Fiction novelist when she turned to fantasy as a means of confronting theological issues. Her ‘World of the 5 Gods’ trilogy (2001-05) challenges Christian dualism as well as giving fantasy a new kind of landscape, and her remarkable four-decker novel The Sharing Knife (2006-09), though at first seeming a simple travelogue, is the most profound and subtle response to Tolkien yet published. It also reunites epic with romance, in every sense, and deeply reworks major motifs of American literature.
The course on British fantasists identifies them as using the mode to confront psychology, post-war disillusionment, and history. These three great American fantasists have used it to examine gender, violence, and theology, as well as the legacy of Tolkien, and each adds to our understanding of why fantasy matters so much to so many people, and should matter to us all.
