[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 [The Left Hand of Darkness] in its careful documentation of a society whose mores superseded the individual choice of its members, was perhaps the most distinguished example since Hal Clement's A Mission of Gravity, in which the background became the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...