[In the following review, Mitchison gives approbative evaluations of The Language of the Night and Dancing at the Edge of the World.]

In the light of George Bush’s new space programme, it is perhaps appropriate that science fiction is slowly being subsumed into the canon of English literature. Ursula K Le Guin, one of America’s most talented fantasy writers, claims that in the United States the professors have set up camp on Aldebaran. Gloobian Slime Monsters and Antipastomater Denudifiers are becoming acceptable objective correlatives. She points to “that face looking out of the fifth-storey window of the Ivory Tower, that’s the Little Green Man”.

Many of the essays in these two anthologies started life as university lectures and so are a direct result of science fiction’s new-found and still uncertain respectability. Like Le Guin’s novels, her essays and reviews reveal the workings of an erudite, elegant, fantastical mind. And as befits a creator of strange and wonderful worlds, even her non-fictional writing shares something of the Little Green Man’s fifth-floor view down on earth. These essays are not whimsical but they approach subjects with vast, surprising sidesteps.

Le Guin begins a lecture to a family planning conference by recounting a fairy tale. She can make a drive down the A34 seem quite otherworldy: “great, long, pale Wiltshire distances…a bare-armed boy in a black singlet, herding calves by a haystack, his red-gold hair, white skin—the white is strange… Brown and yellow ploughlands paling into chalk streaks…” Even the Le Guin subject cataloguing system—small arrows beside the title of the essay means “travel”, squares are for “literature”, circles indicate “social responsibility”—demonstrates a certain idiosyncracy.

The Language of the Night is aimed largely at fantasy and science fiction writers. Though the collection is sprawling and clumsily edited, it includes some fine critical appraisals of the grand old masters: Lord Dunsany, E R Eddison, J R R Tolkein and Zamyatin. Fantasy, Le Guin claims, is “the language of the inner self… it tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence… it must be totally artificial but never fake”. However, the genre is under threat from modern writers producing pot boilers with an overlay of funny names, phoney archaic English and “Ichors”. “You know Ichor. It oozes out of several tentacles, and beslimes tessellated pavements, and bespatters bejeweled courtiers, and bores the bejesus out of everybody.”

Many of the most interesting and incisive pieces in Dancing at the Edge of the World are marked with a small feminist symbol. Some essays take up Virginia Woolf’s concerns over the aesthetic and practical problems facing women writers. Le Guin also re-examines the sexual politics of her own fiction and of her own “thought experiments”—such as the invention of “kemmer”. In The Left Hand of Darkness the planet Gethen is inhabited by androgynes who, most of the time, are sexually inactive and impotent. But they also undergo periods of kemmer when the sexual impulse becomes enormously strong and takes over the personality. They find a partner, assume a male or female role （no Gethenian is predisposed either way） and disappear into the kemmerhouse.

Kemmer turns out to have drastic consequences for Gethenian society, which Le Guin says that she is now not so sure that she interpreted and worked out correctly. But the very idea is typical of Le Guin at her best: genial, subversive and oddly probable. And of course it provided the opportunity to include the inestimable line: “The King was pregnant.”