Ursula K. Le Guin is a well-known author of serious fantasy fiction for young adults and for adults. She is perhaps best known for the Wizard of Earthsea trillogy (1968-73). In addition, she has won the Hugo and Nebula awards many times. In the foreword to her 2001 collection of short fiction, Tales of Earthsea, Le Guin asserts the importance of serious fantasy by offering a critique of commercial ("commodified") fantasy:
Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.
What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life--of a sort, for a while.
Comparably stern judgments have been rendered by the philosopher, critic, and science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. In a set of essays collected in 1984 as Microworlds, Lem examines science fiction from a (literary) critical perspective. His opinions can be found in chapter titles such as "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case--with Exceptions" and "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans." Other exceptions include Jorge Luis Borges, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
