★★★★ (4.4 of 5)

• Full Title: The Left Hand Of Darkness
• Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
• Year: 1969 (mine was 2019 50th Anniversary edition)
• Pages: 304*
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Ace
• ISBN 978-0-441-00731-8 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

* Not including introduction, author’s note, afterword.

 

Summary

Winner of the 1970 Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel (notably defeating Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in both contests), this book is the fourth novel set in Le Guin’s “Hainish Cycle” universe. In 1975, it was voted third-best science fiction novel of “all time” by readers of Locus — just behind Dune and Childhood’s End, and just ahead of Heinlein’s most well-known novel, Stranger In A Strange Land. Twelve years later, Locus promoted this book to second place, still behind Dune.

Written as a series of first-person narratives, mostly from the perspective of Genly Ai but also other characters, the story is about Ai’s experiences on the planet Gethen, to which he has been sent as an envoy from the Ekumen in an attempt to convince Gethenians to join. On Gethen, people are neither male nor female (though Le Guin uses “he” to describe them all), only becoming one sex or another during the once-a-month hormonal surge — the only time Gethenians are interested in sexual matters. (Individuals can’t control which sex they become during this mating period, and usually experience both throughout their lifetimes, both siring and giving birth to children.) As one might expect, this curious aspect of their physiology has drastic effects on society and is difficult for humans like Ai to fully grasp. Ai grapples with international intrigues in the still-developing nation-states and has epic adventures along the way.

 

Praise

By many measures, this is an impressive and amazing book. The story is immersive, overly fond of neither backtracking for exposition nor witty-but-distracting dialog. There is a satisfying conclusion. Though part of a series, it easily stands alone. Characters are well-rounded. Dozens of tiny but lively details are included. There is strong evidence of massive world-building without bulky and boring explanatory sections. It stands the test of time.

Many passages are quotable; I’ve reproduced a handful below:

“The king was pregnant.”

—page 99

“...primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.”

—page 101

“How does one hate a country, or love one? ... I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession...”

—page 212

 

Points Off For...

My only substantial complaint about the book is the no-warning switches between first-person narrators. The author saw it as necessary because parts of the story couldn’t have been told from the main character’s perspective. In these cases, as a reader, I would strongly prefer either an “I learned later from [name]” or changing the entire narrative to third-person semi-omniscient. If a chapter begins with “I”, the reader will naturally assume it’s the same “I” that told the previous chapter, and it’s confusing to find out several paragraphs later that it’s a different narrator.

Other complaints are minor and easily explained. For example, the sometimes plodding pace is frustrating in the modern age of expecting instant gratification, but was fairly common in other novels I’ve read from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Another thing: many characters have multiple names, which is frustrating for readers (like me) who already have a difficult time keeping track of many characters. It reminded me of several Russian novels I tried to read, in which I’m introduced to a character as Name A, and then later Name B is mentioned so I assume it’s yet another character, only to find out it’s the same person as Name A. This, I understand, is a way of showing the type of culture that exists on the planet in question, but the explanation makes it no less difficult to read.

Early on, I planned to complain about the book’s insistent misogyny, which seems odd in a book written by a feminist woman. Genly Ai regularly uses stereotypical and denigrating descriptions of “womanliness”, being impressed with the ambisexual Gethenians when they most resemble “men” but disappointed when they resemble “women”. Additionally, he is very stuck on the idea of the essentialism of binary gender — that it’s forced by nature. Eventually, I began to suspect that these views were not Le Guin’s, that she carefully and meticulously built a first-person narrator who does not share the author’s views. While this was never made entirely clear, I was convinced of it by the end. Thus, this part morphed into praise rather than complaint.

 

Conclusion

Having read many of the leading sci-fi stories of the 1960s, I think this one stands up very well, easily eclipsing most of the others in my memory. In terms of scope, style, world-building, character development, and plot, The Left Hand Of Darkness is easily recognizable as a classic. For example, I think it easily eclipses the more famous Slaughterhouse-Five and Silverberg’s Nightwings, both from the same year. Only a handful of 1960s stories from Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein are in the same class as this book.

I’m now looking for other Hainish Cycle novels and stories.

 

 

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