The verdict
A cold, patient novel that carries more weight in its last hundred pages than most books manage in full.
Quick facts
- First published
- 1969
- Publisher
- Ace Books
- Series
- Hainish Cycle (stands alone)
- Awards
- Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel
- Best for
- Science fiction about people rather than hardware, and patience with a cold, slow world
- Skip it if
- You read for action, or invented myth between chapters sounds like homework
Author Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel about a man sent to persuade a frozen world to join a wider civilisation, and about how badly he misunderstands it. Genly Ai is the envoy, the first human most Gethenians have ever met, and his mission depends on reading a culture whose people have no fixed sex. The book is famous for that idea. It is worth reading for the relationship at its centre.
The idea behind it
Le Guin takes one change to human biology and follows it all the way through. On Gethen the people are ambisexual: most of the time neither male nor female, and only briefly one or the other during a monthly cycle. Everything else follows from that. There are no fixed gender roles, so there are no assumptions about who leads, who fights or who raises children, and the politics of the planet are shaped by climate and clan instead.
Genly comes from a society much like ours, and he spends the first half of the novel making mistakes because he keeps looking for men and women where there are none. The novel is less about the aliens than about the limits of his sympathy, which is the part that has aged best.
The story, spoiler-light
Genly arrives on Gethen to invite its nations into the Ekumen, a loose federation of worlds. Two rival powers dominate the planet, and his diplomatic problem is quickly simpler than he expected: one of them is using him. He is imprisoned, and his escape across a glacier with the one person who has consistently mistrusted him takes up the last third of the book.
That journey is the reason to read it. The politics are a machine for getting two people onto the ice, and the novel knows it. Le Guin alternates their story with Gethenian myths and field notes, which sounds like a distraction and is not: the myths tell you what the characters cannot say to each other.
What makes it science fiction
The science is anthropology. This is one of the Hainish novels, a loose series about worlds that were seeded from the same stock long ago, which gives Le Guin a licence to invent a society and inspect it without a spaceship in sight. The technology is deliberately thin. The one piece of it that matters is the ansible, a device for sending messages between stars, and it exists so that the story can happen at all.
What it is not is a book about gender as a puzzle to be solved. Le Guin wrote it partly as a thought experiment and later said the pronoun problem defeated her, which is honest and worth knowing before you go looking for a thesis.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
Read it if you want science fiction that takes people seriously, and if you are willing to spend a hundred pages in a cold, slow, unfamiliar place before the plot arrives. The ice crossing is among the best things in the genre and it earns its length.
Give it a miss if you read for action, or if invented myth and field notes between chapters sound like homework. Nothing here moves quickly, and the famous idea is a setting rather than a twist.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here or with The Dispossessed. Both stand alone inside the Hainish Cycle, and neither requires the other, though together they are the two best arguments for Le Guin’s reputation. If you want the political thought experiment first, read The Dispossessed; if you want the one about people, read this.
After either of them, The Word for World Is Forest is the shortest way into the same concerns, and Solaris is the closest thing in the genre to a hostile, unreadable world that refuses to explain itself.
The verdict
A cold, patient novel that carries more weight in its last hundred pages than most books manage in full. Read it for the crossing and for the argument about what a person is.
Frequently asked questions
Does The Left Hand of Darkness need to be read in a series?
No. It belongs to the Hainish Cycle, but the connections are loose and it stands alone. You can read it first.
Did it win any awards?
Yes. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula award for best novel, which makes it one of the most decorated science fiction novels of its decade.
Is it difficult to follow?
The plot is straightforward. The difficulty is that Le Guin explains very little about Gethen, and the interpolated myths take some patience. Most readers find the second half much faster than the first.
What is the Ekumen?
A loose federation of human worlds that sends envoys to make contact with planets that have lost touch with their origins. Genly Ai is one of those envoys, which is why he arrives alone and has to talk his way in.
Where can I buy it?
It is available in paperback and as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.