Kinda like a great Star Trek episode
3 stars
An unexpected tour of a planet and it's people. Beautifully written but with an uneven plot and inconsistent characters.
Audio cassette
Published April 1, 1987 by Books on Tape, Inc..
The Left Hand Of Darkness
4 stars
(7 reviews)
[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 …
[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]: www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
graphoid reviewed The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
It didn't click with me.
3 stars
I stopped reading it.
Arunsr1ni reviewed The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Review of 'The Left Hand of Darkness' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Beautiful beautiful work and I'm happy to have discovered le Guin. The work squeezed my heart, made me read deep into the night.
A dense story that explores a relationship between an androgynous species and a man sent to make them join a larger confederation of planets. The book is special in that it reads as though it was real, as though the author lived with them. Deep account of nuances of humankind iced with the history and culture of a species that can change sex every 23 days.
This isn't expanse or Rama books., It is slow, dense, deep, dark, philosophical and ultimately rewarding and I feel better off reading it.
