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A review by mixigod
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
adventurous
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
An incredible philosophical science fiction for anyone looking to explore the social themes of science fiction that is often so easily overlooked in favour of lasers and space wars. Often, science fiction imparts our world's views, beliefs, and values onto alien societies but in The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin challenges this. We follow an envoy, Genly Ai, who is sent from a planetary union to appeal to a human-like planet - Winter, to join the union for benefits of cultural and economical trade. The planet is inhabited by ambisexual people, meaning that there is no set "man" or "woman", only sexual phases where one may be birthing or during children - either at random or willed with hormone replacement. This means their constructs of gender are completely, well, alien to Ai who must learn to navigate a society without gender constraints and unlearn his own beliefs coming from a society where gender is relatively fixed.
Le Guin's world building is robust and you believe that this planet truly exists, down to it's politics, ideas of love and sex, and the importance of certain values in the absence of fixed genders. We follow Ai as he attempts to navigate an alien world and learn to involve himself within its culture. There are critiques that the book may have benefited from gender neutral pronouns and that there's an absence of truly female characters but I believe that ties into the point discovered by Ai that he assumes masculinity of those he encounters, being a human male.
That's all I'll spoil of it, it's an incredible read and deeply moving. Great for those who want to ponder beyond science fiction in it's essential sense and think of what it means to be an alien society and how that challenges our own conventional norms.
Le Guin's world building is robust and you believe that this planet truly exists, down to it's politics, ideas of love and sex, and the importance of certain values in the absence of fixed genders. We follow Ai as he attempts to navigate an alien world and learn to involve himself within its culture. There are critiques that the book may have benefited from gender neutral pronouns and that there's an absence of truly female characters but I believe that ties into the point discovered by Ai that he assumes masculinity of those he encounters, being a human male.
That's all I'll spoil of it, it's an incredible read and deeply moving. Great for those who want to ponder beyond science fiction in it's essential sense and think of what it means to be an alien society and how that challenges our own conventional norms.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Forced institutionalization