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

It’s a very dense, slow sci-fi with long “travelogue” sequences that help to build a richly complex and vivid world while also examining the nature of Gethenian ‘ambisexual’ anatomy. Right off the bat, The Left Hand of Darkness has a dense but lush sense of world-building — similar to Frank Herbert’s Dune,* but with a much preferred writing style.

The narrative is reserved to a primarily first-person perspective that switches between both our Envoy, Genly Ai, and his advocate and eventual traitor-turned-travel-companion, Estraven, with the occasional break in order to provide the reader with certain folklore and stories from the world of Winter. In doing so, it avoids what I would call the Frustrating Omnipotence™ of Frank Herbert, whose writing style tends to lean a bit heavy on telling the reader exactly what each character is thinking in every moment as though we are inside their head and experiencing those thoughts as the character.

That being said: if you’re coming into this story for character work or a more extensive interrogation of how mankind can build connections across different sociological perspectives, then you may be slightly disappointed. Genly Ai and Estraven have an interesting relationship dynamic which morphs throughout the course of the story, but on their own they aren’t the most compelling characters. If you’re not prepared for a VERY, VERY slow burn of a sci-fi book, then you will probably hate this.

Personally, I think I might have to give this a reread in order to have a more definite take on this book, but I am glad that this introduced me to the subgenre of speculative fiction referred to as queernorm, which includes such entries as Sing the Four Quarters by Tanya Huff and Avalon by Mary J. Jones.

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katconig's review

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I can't help but feel like this book would be eaten alive by much of the online book community if it were published today. It uses he as a gender neutral pronoun in a book deconstructing gender socialization and one of the two POV characters is a misogynist who cannot fathom associating "feminine" with anything valuable. This alone seems enough for many to write it off completely. And yet it is the exploration of the nuances of these imperfections that make the book so incredible. Genly's misogyny is precisely what foils him from making progress in his mission, and ultimately puts not only his mission but life at risk. The book uses he as the gender neutral because Genly is the one translating.

Reading this book made me wonder what other valuable explorations we might miss out on in favor of demanding perfection.

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keeganrb's review

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mysterious medium-paced

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

3.0

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ghostcities's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective tense 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? Yes

5.0

I can’t believe this book came out in 1969! What a journey. Charlie Jane Anders writes in the afterword about being “startled by the warmth and generosity of The Left Hand of Darkness, considering how bleak and brutal the story actually is”. I absolutely agree. There’s a curious, delicate love for humanity in all its good and bad that stays consistent even as Le Guin lays bare the worst of humankind’s impulses and choices.

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