The Beginning Place. Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper & Row, $8.95). Fireflood and Other Stories. Vonda N. McIntyre (Houghton Mifflin, $10.95). Yesterday's Children. David Gerrold (Fawcett Popular Library, $1.95). The Demon of Scattery. Poul Anderson and Mildred Downey Broxon (Ace, $4.95)

In The Beginning Place Ursula K. Le Guin has returned to the intrapsychic landscape of her earlier fantasies (such as the Earthsea triology) and has had her characters reject it as a permanent habitation. Two modern young people, Hugh and Irena, discover a strange, fantastic realm, which Irena calls “the ain countree,” and which they enter, are changed by and finally leave behind as they return to the real world.

In the essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” (Pendragon Press, 1973; also included in The Language of the Night) Le Guin distinguished the genuine, risky Inner Lands (“Elfland”) from the banal imitation which is really the outside world in disguise (“Poughkeepsie”). In The Beginning Place she brings Elfland into violent contiguity, as it were, with Poughkeepsie, both places rendered in a gray, gritty, realistic style which may annoy fans of the author's more colorful fantasies but which strikes me as an impressive Le Guinian advance.

About the inner landscape (which takes up most of the book) I think there can be no question: Le Guin is past-mistress here, from the too-simple wish-fulfillment of the beginning to the seeming lack of explanations to the sophisticated, conscious use of the Hero-Kills-Dragon myth to the final fading away of the protagonists' earlier loves as they enter a dream-perfect union and finally rejoin the real world. But back in Poughkeepsie the author has created a world so socially and politically abominable that to it the Inner Lands' classic, fairy-tale progression (from family of origin to reproductive family, a pattern that made sense in a stable, feudal society built on such progressions) is simply irrelevant.

In short, Elfland and Poughkeepsie are badly out of gear here, a situation which forces the author into inadvertent lies about the latter…