The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

• Author: Slattery, Dennis Patrick

This impressive collection of speeches and essays is enough to make even a hard-nosed realist turn to science fiction (SF) with greater respect and curiosity. Ursula K. LeGuin has brought this genre out of hiding and into the mainstream of literature. She has taken a strong stand, in part to oppose the kind of thinking expressed by the librarian who, when asked where the SF section in the library was, replied: "Oh, we don't allow children to read escapist literature."

LeGuin makes a formidable case through these witty, insightful, and mythic declarations about literature as entertainment and art, trash literature that promises to sell well in the plastic marketplace and then is forgotten, and literature that seeks to discover and know the truth while still entertaining the reader. As an author who has won seven national awards, LeGuin is qualified to write that, in SF, as in more traditional literature, the myths that guide a people are being made up all the time.

The term "fantasy" also preoccupies several of her pieces. In "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" she analyzes distrust of fantasy as a consequence of the Puritan work ethic, profit-mindedness, and, most distressingly, the American male's fundamental distrust of imagination itself. So, fiction reading is not profitable. The great American male's fiction, she maintains, is the stock market report and sports page. In "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," she ends by claiming that "as all great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion...