The Left Hand of Darkness
1969 • 320 pages
Ratings207
Average rating4
15
Ratings207
Average rating4
[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
> One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how clearly it demonstrates that science fiction can have not only the usual virtues and pleasures of the novel, but also the startling and transformative power of the thought experiment.
> In this case, the thought experiment is quickly revealed: "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on, and after that we learn more and more about this planet named Winter, stuck in an ice age, where the humans are most of the time neither male nor female, but with the potential to become either. The man from Earth investigating this situation has a lot to learn, and so do we; and we learn it in the course of a thrilling adventure story, including a great "crossing of the ice". Le Guin's language is clear and clean, and has within it both the anthropological mindset of her father Alfred Kroeber, and the poetry of stories as magical things that her mother Theodora Kroeber found in native American tales. This worldly wisdom applied to the romance of other planets, and to human nature at its deepest, is Le Guin's particular gift to us, and something science fiction will always be proud of. Try it and see – you will never think about people in quite the same way again.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
Series
8 primary books12 released booksHainish Cycle is a 13-book series with 9 primary works first released in 1966 with contributions by Ursula K. Le Guin, Katarzyna Staniewska, and Agnieszka Sylwanowicz.
Reviews with the most likes.
A fascinating exploration of the issue of gender while simultaneously evoking a whole different world in a convincing and believable way. On top of this, a moving and unsentimental love story. Le Guin is a master.
Tales of Earthsea mystified and delighted me when I was in primary school, but I didn't think I'd find The Left Hand of Darkness equally engaging at 31.
The politics, relationship/s, gender commentary, and pacing were all chef's kiss, and the interspersed folk tales/legends were lovely little treats.
I'm giving Le Guin the benefit of the doubt with regards to the narrator's frequent anthropologically-flavoured misogynistic remarks. Genly Ai is a representative of a (our) patriarchal culture; it's precisely these biases that the ambisexual Gethians provide a foil for (in spite of the persistent use of male pronouns).
This book was excellent, but not my taste.
Very interesting concepts and fascinating political maneuvering, but written in a largely inaccessible style for a significant part of the book. Le Guin introduces Gethenian concepts and doesn't explain them right away, leaving me very confused a lot of the time.
Cool concept, execution wasn't for me.
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