The Left Hand of Darkness
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION--WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS Ursula K. Le Guin's groundbreaking work of science fiction--winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants' gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters... Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.
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Community Reviews
This is how speculative fiction should be written. There’s clearly an immense amount of worldbuilding behind it, but it’s employed in the service of the story. And while the story itself actually has massive, intergalactic implications, it’s told very much at the level of individual characters.
My one issue is the length of the time spent traversing the ice. Even as a fairly patient reader, I did find myself wondering just what fraction of the novel was going to be spent there. But honestly, it served to develop the story and, especially, the characters.
I'd heard so much about this book and that it was a much read for sci-fi fans, but honestly I felt like I had to drag myself through it, it just felt very slow pace to me and almost boring at times. Some of the concepts in this book were undeniably fascinating, but I just couldn't really get into it.
Written in 1969, Le Guin's imagination was incredibly prescient as far as predicting the gender dynamics in 2024. As I find myself navigating the increasingly complex gender politics in 2024, I can find analogy to encountering an alien society or whole different species. Le Guin managed to capture the distrust and skepticism when communicating with foreign society and shows what it take to break through the distrust and communicate.
I like this book because it totally immerses you in a strange world as an alien trying to understand- but not completely understanding everything. That strikes me as particularly realistic because it takes a really long time to understand a foreign culture, and probably you never fully get it.
I also like the way the main character develops a complicated friendship with a person of such a dissimilar culture, becoming deeply bonded while still not fully understanding each other.
Finally, the whole exploration of a gender-neutral society so far in advance of the gender nonconformity movement we are currently living through is really interesting, and particularly strange as seen through the eyes of a vaguely sexist but still open-minded main character.
I also like the way the main character develops a complicated friendship with a person of such a dissimilar culture, becoming deeply bonded while still not fully understanding each other.
Finally, the whole exploration of a gender-neutral society so far in advance of the gender nonconformity movement we are currently living through is really interesting, and particularly strange as seen through the eyes of a vaguely sexist but still open-minded main character.
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