When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature last week, my first thought was: What a victory for science fiction!

In 1979, three decades after her first novel, "The Grass Is Singing," and 17 years after the release of her landmark "The Golden Notebook," Lessing published "Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta." It was the first book in a five-volume outer-space fantasy, "Canopus in Argos: Archives," that aggressively broke with naturalism.

Today, such a novel would be no big deal; literature is full of time travel, gender ambiguity and that nifty catch-all "magical realism." But in the 1970s, mainstream fiction took pains to set itself apart -- and above -- genres like science fiction. "Shikasta" was met with jeers.

"At best, Lessing's prose is stolid and slow and a bit flat-footed," Gore Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books. Writing three years later about the fourth novel in the sequence, "The Making of the Representative for Planet 8," the New York Times' John Leonard was blunter. "Why does Doris Lessing -- one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century -- insist on propagating books that confound and dismay her loyal readers? The answer: She intends to confound and dismay."

*****

Science fiction was messy. It tackled big themes: What makes us human? Are we alone in the universe? Does God exist, and if so, might she be vicious? It aspired to be epic, and an epic, as midcentury novelist Marguerite Young has aptly observed, must have "a vast undertow of music and momentum and theology." "Shikasta" had all these things, and they contributed, I suspect, to the Nobel committee's recognition of Lessing as an "epicist of the female experience." The book was a reworking of the Bible -- casting the forces of good and evil as warring aliens.

The planet Shikasta, where the action took place, bore similarities to Earth. In "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five," the second volume in the series, Lessing used this mythic structure to revisit ground she had broken in her earlier, realistic novels: the tumultuous relationship between men and women.