Science fiction is only one way of marking off that distance; it is not the only ordering device Le Guin has utilized nor even the first she turned to when she began writing. It is, however, a device familiar to a large group of readers, and it was by turning to science fiction that Le Guin found a publisher and an audience.
Le Guin is the daughter of a writer, Theodora Kroeber, and a pioneering anthropologist, Alfred Louis Kroeber. She seems to have acquired from her family background a double orientation, both scholarly and humanistic, that shows in all of her writings. The Kroeber household was a stimulating environment to grow up in: Theodora Kroeber, in her book Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (1970), describes their summer home in the Napa Valley as a gathering place for scientists, students, writers, and California Indians. This was the milieu in which Le Guin began to write, and it may help explain the number of scientists in her stories, who are nearly always humane men deeply concerned about the effect and value of their research. Though she makes no claims to being a scientist herself, she understands what it is to pursue a scientific goal, and the philosophy that underlies anthropological thought, in particular, informs all of her work.
