The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Summary
Genly Ai is an envoy from a federation of worlds, sent alone to the planet Gethen to invite it to join. Gethen is in an ice age, its politics are feudal and paranoid, and its people are ambisexual: for most of the month a Gethenian is neither male nor female, and during kemmer they become one or the other, unpredictably, so that anyone may father children and anyone may bear them.
Genly cannot get past it. He reads the prime minister Estraven as effeminate and untrustworthy, misjudges every social signal, and is manoeuvred out of the court of Karhide and into the neighbouring bureaucratic state of Orgoreyn, where he is quietly disappeared into a labour camp.
Estraven, disgraced and exiled, breaks him out, and the last third is the two of them hauling a sledge eight hundred miles across a glacier in winter, alone, with insufficient food. That journey, in which each finally understands what the other is, is one of the great sequences in science fiction.
Le Guin builds the world through folk tales, field reports and myths inserted between chapters, so Gethen arrives as a culture rather than a premise.
The famous line, that light is the left hand of darkness, comes from a Gethenian lay of the Handdara tradition, and the book keeps returning to the idea that opposites are one thing seen twice.
Around three hundred pages, cold, slow to start, and worth every page of the patience. The politics of the first half are genuinely confusing on a first read, deliberately, since Genly is confused too and is a poor reader of the people around him.
Best for readers who want an anthropological novel that happens to be set on another planet, and one of the few science fiction books regularly taught outside the genre.
Historical Context & Significance
The Left Hand of Darkness won the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 1969 Nebula Award, and is usually named among the founding works of feminist science fiction.
Its most argued about feature is a decision Ursula K. Le Guin later regretted in part. She used masculine pronouns for the Gethenians, defending it in the 1976 essay Is Gender Necessary on the grounds that she refused to mangle English by inventing one, and revisited that defence years later, acknowledging that the choice made Gethen read as a world of men. She also rewrote a short story with feminine pronouns to test the difference.
It belongs to the Hainish Cycle, as does The Dispossessed, which won both awards again five years later. Le Guin was named a Grand Master in 2003 and died in 2018.