The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Left Hand of Darkness ended up as one of my favorite novels of the past few years and kicked off a love of Le Guin's work. It's a unique, groundbreaking, character-driven science fiction novel that ages extraordinarily well -- even 50+ years after its original publish date in 1969. This review has some spoilers, so if you haven't read the novel I'd recommend you do that first. Please let me know if you do as I'd love to hear your thoughts!
See below for my slightly rambling and excited goodreads review from December 11th, 2024
Realized I totally don’t mark spoilers in my reviews oops. This one might (totally will) have some.
Wow I really grew to love this novel. I was making my way through it a bit at a time, but then I was absolutely absorbed into the crazy journey across the ice. Stayed up to finish reading it this past Sunday night and it was totally worth it. Le Guin’s “social science fiction” is super interesting and I love the deep focus on our two core characters.
Exploring cultural and physiological changes and how that could affect interpersonal interactions shines as a spin on science fiction that is perhaps more timeless than more technologically focused scifi. Speaking of timelessness, this novel is from 1969 and it holds up extraordinarily well for being over 50 years old. I think for me the most telling sign of its age was some of the viewpoints of Genly Ai (our main PoV) that seemed to reflect a little bit different style of internalized misogyny than one would likely write today. Also, perhaps most directly, the usage of he/him pronouns to refer to the Gethenians rather than they/them (which were not commonly considered as singular pronouns at the time of publishing like they are now) certainly changes some of the mental processing. HOWEVER, I actually think, as a modern reader, you could rationalize these inconsistencies as an aspect of the narrator (Genly), rather than a reflection of the novel. If taking this path, then the viewpoints and the pronoun usage are a reflection of Genly’s own inability to overcome the explicit and implicit biases associated with his somewhat fragile masculinity. It’s not so hard to believe someone could still come up with a similar perspective to his today (see the backlash against pronoun usage from some people). Nevertheless, beyond Genly’s flaws, we also see so much of his humanity and the deep personal relationship that he forms with Estraven. The progression of this relationship builds so beautifully over the course of the entire novel, starting from the just about the first page to the very last paragraph.
ALSO the glacier journey and the whole fricken planet of Gergen is such a fascinating and well built out winter environment. As a snow enthusiast, I absolutely loved reading about the glaciers and the blizzards and the mountains and all the details of life that they shape for the Gethenians. The descriptions of winter travel felt pretty reasonable based on my experience and I was so happy getting to read about the nuances and variance in varieties of frozen water and how they can affect traveling on said medium. +1 point for use of the word “sastrugi”. Also the glacier vocab too. I would be totally lying if I didn’t say that this boosted the novel in my eyes as I felt like I had (atl some) of the lived experience and interest in winter environments to really visualize what was going on. Now I don’t know that I’d want to live permanently on Gethen BUT it would be such A SICK PLACE to go on a ski expedition too I bet they have some absolutely crazy ski infrastructure in place.
Cutting short my gleeful rambling about snow, I’ll close off with a reference back to some of the core themes of the novel, by adding a few follow-ups that I really enjoyed reading. The 1976 foreword to the novel and this additional essay on gender (1976 with revisions/comments from 1988) from Le Guin are really interesting additions to go through after the novel. It’s cool to see the author's own perspective on her work and to see her own ideas and opinions evolve over time (especially present in the comments on the essay).
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Overall very highly recommend! Regardless of if you enjoy scifi normally, I think this is just a great all around novel to read if you’re a human.