Disch's attacks on such deserving targets as L. Ron Hubbard are characterized by excellent scholarship. His history of the UFO-abduction crowd follows the paper trail meticulously, showing how abduction literature has walked the fence between fact and fiction, and his account of Robert Heinlein's early political life is fascinating. The level of scholarship seems to fall precipitously in his chapter on women in SF, however. While LeGuin should certainly not be immune from criticism, and while her work does contain much to criticize-- for example, while she is very good at showing an individual character's growth or change, she is less adaept at showing societal change, except as an aggregate of individuals all undergoing the same epiphany; political ideals are strongly present in her work but mechanisms are notably absent. But Disch makes none of these points, and fails to present any coherent picture of LeGuin's works, and their faults, and instead vents his spleen in phrases like "One does not read LeGuin for pleasure", a statement no more useful to criticism than it is true. The attention to the paper trail is also absent; he not only ascribes motives and meanings to LeGuin's works without apparently having read her own comments about them, but also, judging from his statements about the plots of her novels, he does not seem to have reread any of them prior to writing this book. The entire chapter is filled with this sort of casual misinformation-- for example, he lists C.L. Moore among women SF writers who were brought to the field through their husbands, when Moore had been writing solo for 4 years before her marriage to Henry Kuttner. I would recommend this book, but with the caveat that the reader interested in LeGuin and women SF writers in general should supplement it with a history of women in SF and perhaps some of LeGuin's own essays.
