Science fiction author Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.  The 87-year-old writer is only the eleventh woman to win the prize.  The academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

In an interview with the BBC, Lessing said, "I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice."  She related that back in the '60s, "they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn't like me at the Nobel Prize and I would never get it.  So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?"

Lessing's best-known works are The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.  Her best-known genre work is the Canopus in Argos series, which focuses on forced evolution of less-developed civilizations.  In an interview with the Boston Book Review, Lessing said, "[I]n science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time."

In much-more reported news, former United Stated Vice President Albert Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  So that's good, too.