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

I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did but the way Le Guin delves into spiny and complicated topics so casually is truly mesmerizing.
The various POVs only clarify the world building tangentially which makes you feel like you too are seeing a culture from afar, and in turn this gives the similarities and critiques of our own culture a bigger "punch". The language and slang however can be confusing especially if you're (like me) not used to sci-fi, but honestly once I realized there's no way I'm going to get every single reference on my first reading and just plowed on, my experience improved by 100x. Some books are meant to be read more than once to truly get them and this is one of them.

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moonytoast's review against another edition

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3.0

I still am unsure of how I feel about this book.

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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jessthanthree's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective 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

5.0

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frogsreadfantasy's review against another edition

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adventurous slow-paced

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

3.5

I was pretty bored for the former half, the latter was more engaging. I had trouble connecting with the main characters, so all of the interactions started to feel very wooden. For how much praise this book gets for exploring gender/sex before it was a mainstream political conversation, it has very little influence on the events of the story. I wish there was less politicking and more of the gender discussion. The most interesting parts were when Estraven and Ai encountered conflict over their cultural differences. I just felt like there was a lot of untapped potential.

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abbyeck's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad slow-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

4.5

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pastelkerstin's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense

Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book took a while to get interesting, but once it did, I found it hard to put down.

At its core there are some pretty good radical ideas in here about favouring community over patriotism. Genly speaks of a world based on cooperation and without law enforcement out among the stars. What a vision.

Gender and sex is also obviously a big topic in this book. I think it shows the arbitrariness of gender roles well, even though Genly and the other Envoys struggle with understanding this, as they come from a binarist society. Genly often makes sexist comments about manly or womanly qualities he sees in the Gethenians, people who are neither men nor women (or who are both, depending how you want to see it). But I don't think that means that the reader is supposed to agree with Genly. Seeing whatever a main character says as correct is a misguided way of reading fiction, in my opinion.
That's also why when Genly's interior monologue says that sexual desire/attraction is people's driving force (a very Freudian idea) and a requirement for being human, and therefore the Gethenians with their sexual cycle seem strange and inhuman to him, I think we're not supposed to think he's right. After all,

Genly learns to see Therem fully, as not fitting into Genly's ideas of sexuality and gender, but as a full human being, despite these differences.

There is the implication here that asexuality either doesn't exist on the other planets or that Genly isn't aware of it. So I would put an aphobia warning on this just in case, because reading "no sexual attraction = inhuman" stings even if you know that Genly struggles to see past his own experience of the world.

I think Genly and Therem's relationship is the most interesting part of this book. And it feels very queer to me, even though

they are never officially together

and Gethen doesn't seem to have a concept of queerness (unlike Genly's homeworld).

Overall, I liked this book, even though it has some elements that are a bit squicky or hard to read for me, like the way incest is tolerated on Gethen under certain circumstances and how this is part of one the main characters' backstories, or the aforementioned sexism and (almost certainly unintentional) asexual erasure from Genly.

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miriamana's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

4.75

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