ABSTRACT
In a much-quoted passage from her essay, 'A citizen of Mondath', Ursula Le Guin notes that there is 'little real criticism' for a science fiction writer, and that despite enthusiastic responses from fans serious comment on the quality of a writer's work is hard to find. She makes this point in a general polemic on the particular problems facing a writer of science fiction who wants to write well and yet has no clear measure of how her work is judged in aesthetic terms. Although written in the early 1970s, Le Guin's remarks are still valid; science fiction remains a marginalised literary activity, outside the mainstream, and although critical appraisals have increased in the postmodernist climate of the 1980s, there is still not very much criticism around that a writer might constructively use.
