Donaldson, Stephen

(US, 1947– )

Stephen Donaldson is the most original of the successors and emulators of Tolkien. His two trilogies, The First and Second Chronicle of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, are set in a magic land like Tolkien's Middle-earth, but their hero, Thomas Covenant, is both a modern American and a leper. His own health is intimately bound up with the health of the land to which he is transported; in the end he has to sacrifice himself for its healing. The sequence began with Lord Foul's Bane (1977). More recently Donaldson has switched to science fiction, with the Gap sequence of three novels begun by The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story (1990).

Tim Powers, Michael Swanwick. See FANTASY  TS