Niel Hancock (January 8, 1941 – May 7, 2011) was an American fantasy writer most famous for authoring the Circle of Light series and creating the fictional universe of Atlanton Earth. After being out of print for several years, his novels were reprinted by Tor Books. Hancock's fantasy books are grouped into three sets of four books each. A stand-alone novel, Dragon Winter, is set in the same fictional universe, but not explicitly part of the larger storyline. Hancock wrote high fantasy marketed for adults, but his works contain straightforward plots and tropes such as anthropomorphic animals more traditionally found in children's literature. For this reason, his works enjoy a great degree of popularity among younger readers as well. Containing spiritual overtones similar to Ursula K. Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, Hancock's books emphasize Buddhism and Eastern religious motifs. His books were released at a time when interest in high fantasy was at a peak, and very little writing in that genre existed. Straddling the gap between young adult and adult fantasy, Hancock's books have remained popular well after their original publication. As the genre expanded in the 1970s, however, contemporary interest in his books waned and they came to be regarded as "commodified fantasy" employing the quest template from Richard Adams' Watership Down. Like Lewis' Narnia series, the Atlanton Earth novels were not published in the chronological order of the events in the fantasy world itself. The first set, Circle of Light, is the last to occur in the chronology. The second set, The Wilderness of Four, is the earliest. The final set, The Windemeir Circle, is in the middle. Dragon Winter is set some time after the second set, although it is the most ambiguous of the novels because it does not belong to a set. As an early contributor to the mass-market fantasy genre, Hancock's fate is similar to his contemporary Elizabeth H. Boyer in that his books required the reader to be interested in a specialized area of study (in this case, Buddhist philosophy) in order to fully appreciate the books, and thus he did not find the sort of wide acceptance which would have given him a more prominent place as a pioneer in the genre. He died in Deming, New Mexico. Source: Wikipedia (en)