I won't be devoting a whole column to the trilogy for months yet. But in terms of her breadth and a
of her ccomplishment as a prose stylist, and of the range of thematic arguments working out across her work, I think, if Bear enjoys the same length of a writing life, the comparison may eventually be justified.

Bear is ...less kind a writer than LeGuin, I think: both less accessible on the level of prose and more drawn to painful endings. (And of course her writing career begun in a time when it is much less likely that any single work will have a broad impact on the genre as a whole; when the conversation is much wider.) But they strike me, personally, as having a similar kind of artistic... well, genius, in their work. Inasmuch as genius, being an ineffable quality, can be comparable. *g*

This is me coming off the serious high that was Steles of the Sky, though.