Reviews with content warning for Torture - The Left Hand of Darkness

There’s a lot to unpack in this book. LeGuin tackles politics, discrimination, and the gender binary throughout the novel. All of the alien Gethenians in the book are addressed with he/him pronouns, but I don’t actually see that as a huge issue considering this book was written in 1969. I think if it was published today, the Gethenians would have been referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. It was funny to read “The king was pregnant.” The book is beautifully written and the descriptions of scenery make this fictional world feel real and even cozy at times, but there’s also a lot of other things that are missing. What I found strange was the way families in Gethen were handled. There was not that much about what Gethenian kids are like, and the parents in the only established family in the book were estranged. I also feel like the author threw in

incest as an acceptable part of Gethenian society, even between siblings

for extra squick. It seemed so unnecessary to me. The relationship

between Genly and Estraven was kind of reductive, since Estraven presented as a woman when Genly realized his feelings

but I guess it was a good way to have Genly deal with his biases. I’m still not over that ending.

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monim6's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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aoifefthomas's review against another edition

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challenging reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

I was excited to read this book after hearing about the premise (a human comes into contact with an alien race of androgynous beings) and in knowing it was a well-regarded sci-fi novel (I'm wanting to read more of this genre). Unfortunately, I didn't love the book.

Firstly, the book is very dry, serious, and cerebrial in tone. The second half was a lot more readable, I will say, as the stakes were raised: it became more about life-or-death survival and Ursula decided to finally focus on the relationship between two of the characters.

Storygraph asks if the book is more character or plot driven and, more than anything, it's world/concept- driven. Ursula is big into her world-building in this novel, throwing unknown terms at you left, right, and centre from the first few pages. It didn't really feel like I had time to build an internal glossary or map of the world/culture although I'm sure this wasn't helped by the long breaks I took from the book during the first half. The main character and narrator has a detached, cerebral narrative style, himself. I have no idea what truly motivates him personally to have undertaken his mission or what his background is like. (Nor did I truly understand or appreciate the politics of Gethen, but perhaps this is merely a failure of comprehension on my part.)

Despite discussing the concept of gender, the book didn't cause me, as the reader, to think or question my ideas about gender. Nor did the main character's ideas about gender seem to substantially or concretely change/evolve (he just became more familiar and accustomed to the differences, and, in a general kind of way, less defensive and superior in tone). He doesn't end up questioning gender norms on earth by the end of the book, for example. So, does the character really grow or develop that much? Only in relation to his feelings toward one character. For a book that seems to care a lot about ideas, the main character rarely concretely discusses any of his own. He merely observes, like an anthropologist, and may hint at general aversion or attraction. The why is left out of it.

In this way, the main character, and all the characters, lacked depth, for me. I wasn't emotionally invested.

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booitsnathalie's review against another edition

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Happy to have finally read something by Le Guin. I enjoyed the pseudo-epistolary structure and concept of a fully gender fluid civilization, but the book's age really shows through in the limits of how far this queerness can go (all relationships "become" heterosexual, for instance, because reproduction I guess).

I think I'm missing some important context for when this was written, as it has both a lot of vaguely anti-communist sentiment and also seems to be pulling from Catholic mission trips to East Asian countries, but I can't quite pinpoint a through line. A bubbling pot of challenging political ideas that are not so much unexplored as they are too large for a 300-page scifi novel. Very curious to check out some of Le Guin's later work, but this seems as good a place as any of, like me, you've been meaning to check her out.

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