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A review by deimosremus
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
5.0
I’ve been a fan of Le Guin’s for a few years now, as I’ve dived into the Earthsea series and a couple of her standalone sci-fi novels— The Lathe of Heaven particularly.
The Left Hand of Darkness, like Le Guin’s other works (and much like Frank Herbert, Gene Wolfe or Dan Simmons), displays my absolute favorite style of worldbuilding— heavy use of foreign terminology and concepts, but the context and their repetition is what gives the reader clues as to their meaning, rather than an outright explanation or expository dump of information. The story (also like Dune) is a deliberately slow one, taking its time to build toward something very meaningful, using many scenes of nuanced character interaction to build a believable world and scenario. It also shows that a seemingly utopian society (or at least one that functions significantly different than what's considered the "norm") can definitely have faults and that’s the hardest thing about coming up with a conflict in a story like this— the conflicts are much more subtle than immediate disasters like War or Sickness, which are common plot-impetuses in the genre. By having the main source of conflict come from political maneuvering, issues of identity and of cultural barriers, makes it immersive and exciting, but not in a remotely typical fashion. Le Guin’s thoughtfulness when it comes to developing fictional cultures is absolutely top-notch, and for Science Fiction, these are the exact kinds of qualities I look for.
The Left Hand of Darkness, like Le Guin’s other works (and much like Frank Herbert, Gene Wolfe or Dan Simmons), displays my absolute favorite style of worldbuilding— heavy use of foreign terminology and concepts, but the context and their repetition is what gives the reader clues as to their meaning, rather than an outright explanation or expository dump of information. The story (also like Dune) is a deliberately slow one, taking its time to build toward something very meaningful, using many scenes of nuanced character interaction to build a believable world and scenario. It also shows that a seemingly utopian society (or at least one that functions significantly different than what's considered the "norm") can definitely have faults and that’s the hardest thing about coming up with a conflict in a story like this— the conflicts are much more subtle than immediate disasters like War or Sickness, which are common plot-impetuses in the genre. By having the main source of conflict come from political maneuvering, issues of identity and of cultural barriers, makes it immersive and exciting, but not in a remotely typical fashion. Le Guin’s thoughtfulness when it comes to developing fictional cultures is absolutely top-notch, and for Science Fiction, these are the exact kinds of qualities I look for.