Thus: Nineteenth-century utopian writings and lost-race sagas notwithstanding, anthropological science fiction is generally considered a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, best exemplified by the work of writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, Joanna Russ, Ian Watson, and Chad Oliver.
This is objectionable ...; writers like Chad Oliver and Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, bring to their writing a background in anthropology that makes their extrapolated aliens and future societies every bit as fascinating and intellectually involving as the technological marvels and strange planets of hard science fiction.
"[14]: 317 Anthropological science fiction is best exemplified by the work of writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, Joanna Russ, Ian Watson, and Chad Oliver.
Of this pantheon, Oliver is alone in being also a professional anthropologist, author of academic tomes such as Ecology and Cultural Continuity as Contributing Factors in the Social Organization of the Plains Indians (1962) and The Discovery of Anthropology (1981) in addition to his anthropologically-inflected science fiction.
[20] One respondent declared that "Oliver's anthropological SF is the precursor of more recent novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and others";[citation needed] another that "Chad Oliver was developing quiet, superbly crafted anthropological fictions long before anyone had heard of Le Guin; maybe his slight output and unassuming plots (and being out of print) have caused people to overlook the carefully thought-out ideas behind his fiction".
[citation needed] In the novel Shadows in the Sun the protagonist, Paul Ellery, is an anthropologist doing field work in the town of Jefferson Springs, Texas—a place where he discovers extraterrestrial aliens.
The aliens of Jefferson Springs "had learned, long ago, that it was the cultural core that counted-the deep and underlying spirit and belief and knowledge, the tone and essence of living.
For Ellery, the aliens are not "supermen" (a favorite Campbellian conceit): despite their fantastic technologies, they are ultimately ordinary people with the expected array of weaknesses – laziness, factionalism, arrogance – whose cultural life is as predictable as any Earth society's.
In the United States, qualms about the Vietnam war, together with evidence that anthropologists had been employed as spies and propagandists by the US government, prompted critiques of anthropology's role in systems of national and global power.
Various strains of what came to be known as dependency theory disrupted the self-congratulatory evolutionism of modernization models, evoking and critiquing a world system whose political economy structurally mandated unequal development.
Less narrowly academic works such as Vine Deloria, Jr.'s, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), combined with the efforts of civil-rights groups like the American Indian Movement, skewered anthropology's paternalist pretensions.
[23]Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness[25] has been called "the most sophisticated and technically plausible work of anthropological science fiction, insofar as the relationship of culture and biology is concerned",[26]: 472 and also rated as "perhaps her most notable book".
[27]: 244 This novel forms part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle (so termed because it develops as a whole "a vast story about diverse planets seeded with life by the ancient inhabitants of Hain").
"[29]: 183 Le Guin employs the SF trope of inter-stellar travel which allows for fictional human colonies on other worlds developing widely differing social systems.
[30]However, Fredric Jameson says of The Left Hand of Darkness that the novel is "constructed from a heterogeneous group of narratives modes ...", and that: ... we find here intermingled: the travel narrative (with anthropological data), the pastiche myth, the political novel (in the restricted sense of the drama of court intrigue), straight SF (the Hainish colonization, the spaceship in orbit around Gethen's sun), Orwellian dystopia ..., adventure story ..., and finally even, something like a multiracial love story (the drama of communication between the two cultures and species).
In them, Le Guin articulates the theme of exchange by employing contrary images – heat and cold, dark and light, home and exile, name and namelessness, life and death, murder and sex – so as finally to reconcile their contrariety.