[Le Guin is] perhaps the most successful and critically admired writer ever to produce a substantial body of work within the genre limits of science fiction. In terms of critical recognition, only Vonnegut and Bradbury come close, but Vonnegut's novels were published as literary, not genre, works, and the short stories that made Bradbury famous in the 1940s and 1950s appeared in mass circulation magazines. And neither has won a National Book Award as did Le Guin for juvenile literature…. (p. 5)
Le Guin's focus, from the outset, has been detailed and anthropological…. [The Left Hand of Darkness] in its careful documentation of a society whose mores superseded the individual choice of its members, was perhaps the most distinguished example since Hal Clement's A Mission of Gravity, in which the background became the main character of a science fiction novel. In … Lathe of Heaven Le Guin backed off momentarily from these concerns into a kind of psychological, solipsistic subtext …, but in 1974 The Dispossessed, considered a work even more successful than LHD, shifted into a novelistic modus operandi where not only was cultural background novel-foreground, but the nominal protagonist was merely a vessel through which the real conflict of the novel, that between cultures, could be enacted. It may be argued that DIS [The Dispossessed] is a metaphor; a kind of climactic East/West novel of the future or even a two-culture Vietnam novel, but I think that argument would be specious; DIS … is about merely what it is about … two invented, imaginary subcultures. It is a novel which could not have been done in any way other than as science fiction; it needs those devices in order to work and this, surely, is the central definition of a "good" science fiction novel. (p. 6)
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