The Left Hand of Darkness 1969
- Ciencia-ficción, Hugo Award Winner, human nature, gender
[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
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Character
Earnest, grave, contemporary and meticulous.
- earnestironic
- gravecomic
- contemporarynostalgic
- rawmeticulous
- classical in formformally daring
Who loves it, who doesn't
12 profiled raters. Loved most by The Provocateurs.
Where do you stand?
Answer first; then see how everyone, and your circle, split.
“Is this Ursula K. Le Guin's best work?”
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“Would The Left Hand of Darkness hit harder if it came out today rather than in 1969?”
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“Is it the best ciencia-ficción book of its decade?”
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A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
We read them all: the case for is yuki.reads's. Marked below.
- yuki.readsThe case forThe Empath★★★★★
Le Guin builds a planet to ask one question about gender and then lets the question melt into a friendship. The trek across the ice is the best fifty pages in science fiction.
- kofi_kThe Cartographer★★★★★
Le Guin does the thing science fiction is for: change one rule and watch what people become. The friendship on the ice is the best relationship in the genre.
About the book
- Author
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- First published
- 1969
- Pages
- 304
- Publisher
- Raig Verd, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, ace books
- Editions
- 91
- Language
- Spanish, French, English, heb
- ISBN
- 9780441478026
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 108 have read it and 559 want to.
“I'LL MAKE my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (née Kroeber; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist". Source: [Wikiped
Pairings
Companions we picked from the closest works, and how to take them.
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