The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction–winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Recommendations from our site
“In one of the introductions that it has been published with, she specifically describes it as a thought experiment. It’s a simple idea: what if there was no gender? What if people were neutral in their gender, and only took on gender characteristics for sexual reproduction? If anybody could take on either masculine or feminine characteristics, and if throughout your lifetime you might be both, then what would it mean? We have a world thoroughly saturated with gender difference and patriarchal worldviews, and Le Guin makes us realize how true this is by the contrast.” Read more...
“The setting of The Left Hand of Darkness is a world where the inhabitants are humans, or very closely related to humans, with the exception that they don’t have a gender most of the time . . . This is a setting that makes us challenge and question some of the things that most of us consider pretty fundamental to our human identity.” Read more...
“Ursula Le Guin may be the writer I most admire. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, may be her best novel….The Left Hand of Darkness is often discussed, and indeed taught, as a machine for thinking about gender, and it performs that function admirably. But there is much more to it than that. There is a rather dangerous gender-essentialism in the assumption that Le Guin, being female, must have subordinated her aesthetic project to feminist proselytising. Le Guin’s writing is always much more balanced than that. Indeed, that balance as such forms one of her major concerns.” Read more...
Adam Roberts, Novelist
“The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin doesn’t deal with technology but Le Guin uses fiction to perform a thought experiment. Hers is to say what the world would look like if gender was not an issue. She imagines a world where a state of gender fluidity means that people could transfer from male to female and back again…..She imagines a world where a state of gender fluidity means that people could transfer from male to female and back again.” Read more...
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