The Left Hand of Darkness
1969
- ciencia-ficción
- hugo award winner
- award:hugo_award=1970
- award:hugo_award=novel
- human nature
- gender
- space travel
- ice age
- science fiction
- american literature
The story
[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) > One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how clearly it demonstrates that science fiction can have not only the usual virtues and pleasures of the novel, but also the startling and transformative power of the thought experiment. > In this case, the thought experiment is quickly revealed: "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on, and after that we learn more and more about this planet named Winter, stuck in an ice age, where the humans are most of the time neither male nor female, but with the potential to become either. The man from Earth investigating this situation has a lot to learn, and so do we; and we learn it in the course of a thrilling adventure story, including a great "crossing of the ice". Le Guin's language is clear and clean, and has within it both the anthropological mindset of her father Alfred Kroeber, and the poetry of stories as magical things that her mother Theodora Kroeber found in native American tales. This worldly wisdom applied to the romance of other planets, and to human nature at its deepest, is Le Guin's particular gift to us, and something science fiction will always be proud of. Try it and see – you will never think about people in quite the same way again. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
What it’s like
Clean, unhurried prose with an anthropologist's patience: the voice reads like field notes turned into a travelogue, measured and precise, with long passages of quiet observation on the frozen world of Winter, where snow light, wind across ice, and the warmth of hearth-rooms and shared meals carry as much weight as the dialogue. The mood is contemplative and faintly melancholy, tempered by wonder, and its pacing shifts from slow, reflective stretches to a punishing journey across a glacier that feels physical in the cold, the sled-dogs, and the exhaustion. Its emotional arc follows an outsider slowly learning to see a stranger's world on its own terms, and a friendship forged through hardship and mutual respect. The intensity is low: there is a little peril and some political menace, with brief, non-graphic violence and no gore, and the sexuality is handled with thoughtful restraint rather than explicit detail. It suits a rainy Sunday, a slow late-night read, or anyone who wants a thoughtful, humane science fiction story that rewards patience and lingers long after the last page.
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