Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a novel (that will be released this month) about an old couple seeking their lost son while fighting off both ordinary and supernatural threats, is “...the weirdest, riskiest, and most ambitious thing he’s published in his celebrated 33-year career... (it) signals a stark departure from his spare, emotionally understated novels,” wrote Alexander Alter in The New York Times.

But Ursula K. Le Guin, who writes realistic fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, is not impressed.

To Ishiguro’s anxiety that readers could be “prejudiced against the surface elements” (“Are they going to say this is fantasy?”) Le Guin wrote in a blog post: “It appears that the author takes the word (fantasy) for an insult... it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.”

“Familiar folktale and legendary ‘surface elements’ in Mr. Ishiguro’s novel are too obvious to blink away, but since he is a very famous novelist, I am sure reviewers who share his prejudice will never suggest that he has polluted his authorial gravitas with the childish whims of fantasy,” she continued. “...[F]or me, it didn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre—far less its profound capacities—for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it.”

“It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going to say I’m a tight-rope walker?””

Responding to Le Guin’s comments, Ishiguro said to the Guardian at an event held at the Royal Institution in London, that she was “a little bit hasty in nominating me as the latest enemy for her own agenda.”

“If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies,” he said. “[Le Guin]’s entitled to like my book or not like my book, but as far as I am concerned, she’s got the wrong person. I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons.”

Read up on the different points of view on Ishiguro’s book and Le Guin’s comments on Electric Lit and Flavorwire.